By Doug Cunningham

GM IUE-CWA retirees will be getting a belated Christmas bonus, thanks to pressure from the union and the retirees. GM withheld that bonus because a new contract had not yet been resolved. IUE-CWA President Jim Clark says retirees should not be held hostage to the collective bargaining process for active workers. The $700 bonuses will be paid by March 17th.

By Doug Cunningham

The CWA is running a Washington, D.C. ad campaign accusing the Washington Post of being unfair to mailroom employees. The CWA is trying to restart contract talks after five years. The ad campaign is drawing more attention than most PR efforts and is aimed at getting the Post to drop demands the union says are unreasonable, like having workers leave the union pension plan.

While much of the attention in New Hampshire has been focused on today’s presidential primary and the horse race surrounding it, another historic event occurred there recently. Jesse Russell reports:

600 workers may not sound like a lot in the scheme of it all, but for a small state like New Hampshire when that many workers join a union at one time, it is historic. The last major one-time successful organizing campaign in New Hampshire was in 1966 when 950 workers organized at the Granite Rubber Company. Today, that honor belongs to workers at an AT&T call center in Dover, New Hampshire. The workers joined Communications Workers of America Local 1298. During the recent Democratic debates in New Hampshire, Senator John Edwards singled out AT&T as a company that acts as a good corporate citizen by allowing workers to organize and by providing good health care coverage. According to AT&T, more than 60 percent of the company’s workers across the country are in a union and the CWA represents some 180,000 of them.

By Doug Cunningham

The Communications Workers of America and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to provide for a full review process of the comments made to proposed revisions to the newspaper-broadcast ownership rule, changes proposed by Chairman Kevin Martin. The unions want an open process including a 90-day comment period to help resolve issues of localism and women and minority ownership of broadcast media.

By Doug Cunningham

The Communications Workers of America this week released their report on U.S. internet speed. Called “Speed Matters”, the report shows the U.S. trailing at least 16 other industrialized nations in broadband download and upload speed. The CWA wants to reverse America’s decline in internet speed because it will have negative impact on our economy and productivity if it’s allowed to continue. The average download speed in the U.S. is a paltry 1.9 megabits per second. In Japan, it’s 60.

By Doug Cunningham

Two of GE’s largest unions – IUE-CWA and UE – say they’ve reached tentative labor contract agreements with General Electric. Each union has negotiating committees that must approve the tentative agreements before they can be voted on for final ratification by the members of the unions. The agreements were reached Sunday, June 17th. The old contracts were set to expire at midnight Sunday.
No specific details have been released, but the presidents of the two unions say it’s they are good contract agreements and they recommend that rank and file members of the unions approve the new contracts. If the union negotiating committees approve the new deals, the membership will vote on the tentative agreements June 28th.

By Doug Cunningham

In the midst of new contract negotiations with the IUE-CWA, GE is temporarily laying off eight to nine hundred workers represented by the union at a Louisville, Kentucky appliances factory. The workers on the dishwasher assembly line will make seventy percent of their wages and keep full benefits during the layoff thanks to their union contract. The dishwashers are used by home builders and construction companies that build apartment complexes and GE says there’s been a slowing of demand for them.

By Doug Cunningham

Contract talks are underway between GE and the IUE-CWA. GE is complaining about health care costs and says in the new contact health care cost increases have to be “competitive”. But the company’s own data shows that the costs of retiree health care at GE are below that of inflation. Between 2002 and 2006 retiree health care costs at GE rose 11 percent, well below inflation during that period. And because GE got a government subsidy through Medicare’s drug program, prescription drug costs for GE employees and retirees actually went down in 2006.

By Doug Cunningham

On the first day of contract talks between the IUE-CWA and GE, CWA President Larry Cohen said the middle class is rising up and putting forward a new vision for America – and he asked which side of that line will GE be on? Cohen challenged GE to show leadership on health care and workers rights. Thirteen unions representing 23,000 at GE have formed the Coordinated Bargaining Committee to negotiate with the highly profitable multinational corporation. On the day talks started GE announced the sale of its plastics division to the Saudi Arabian company SABIC for $11.6 billion. GE employs more than 10,000 workers in its plastics division. GE says the Saudi Arabian company has a history of investing in its acquired companies and in the people who work there. SABIC says it plans no job cuts and plans to grow the business globally. GE’s plastics division grew directly from Thomas Edison’s experiments with plastic filaments for light bulbs.

By Jesse Russell

A majority of Verizon workers in New England have voted for union representation and political leaders are pressuring the company to give the union recognition. The workers in Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut are seeking representation by the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Sen. John Kerry, Reps. Stephen Lynch and John Tierney, and Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray have all verified the union authorization forms.

By Doug Cunningham

Northwest Airlines flight attendants represented by the CWA are looking for relief from $192 million a year in concessions forced upon them by the airline and the bankruptcy court. On Thursday the union will be in court arguing for a reduction in the concessions and on the picket lines at airports. The pickets are informational – to let the public know that Northwest took 40 percent of flight attendants’ compensation when the union contracts were thrown out. And now that Northwest is making more money faster than it told the court it expected, the airline doesn’t need to take as much from the workers. Association of Flight Attendants-CWA spokesman Ricky Thornton.

By Doug Cunningham

The Communications Workers of America efforts to organize Verizon Wireless is gaining some traction. In late January the CWA demonstrated at Verizon's New York headquarters, circulating a petition singed by more than 3,000 Verizon workers supporting the union. The CWA says Verizon's anti-union campaign could be backfiring. The union says Verizon workers have been signing up for union representation at a faster pace since the January demonstration, including 150 technicians from Verizon Business who recently signed an open letter to the company saying they want a union. On

By Doug Cunningham

It would hard to find stranger bedfellows than Wal-Mart and the SEIU, but they've joined the Communications Workers of America, AT&T and other Fortune 500 companies in Better Health Care Together. It's an alliance to fundamentally reform health care to achieve universal health care in the U.S., but without agreement on a specific health care coverage reform plan. SEIU spokesperson Sara Howard.

[Howard 1]: "This problem is ever going to be solved until the business community gets involved. So it's very exciting that business is stepping up to the plate. It's a matter of harnessing the political will to get this done. And what's exciting about today is that we took a big step closer in that direction of getting things done."

By Jesse Russell

After months of news of lay-offs in the telecommunications field, Milwaukee has received some good news. The Communication Workers of America have announced that a new initiative by AT&T to launch a service called U-verse, will add 200 jobs to the area.

By Doug Cunningham

Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers of America says it’s vital for the United States to have a focused public policy to build out the technological infrastructure for a 21st century internet. Cohen says it’s key to being economically competitive, but the U.S., he says, is seriously lagging many industrialized democracies in high speed internet.

[Cohen]: “Currently we have no public policy at all in the United States, and all the other large and now smaller economic democracies do have public policy in this area.”

The CWA has a web site - speedmatters,org It detailing its campaign to make dramatic gains in high-speed internet by 2010.

Red Cross workers are off the job over failed contract negotiations in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Jesse Russell has more.

The workers walked off the job at midnight on Sunday after failed attempts to negotiate a fair contract with the Red Cross. Marge Krueger, administrative assistant to Communications Workers of America District 13 Vice President, said the Red Cross has failed to provide information on health care the union needs to "bargain intelligently." Nearly 160 workers who staff bloodmobiles and blood banks in the Johnstown, Pennsylvania region have walked off the job. Red Cross officials have said they were prepared for the strike and blood supplies have been sent in from other parts of the country.

By Doug Cunningham

The Communications Workers of America say “Speed Matters” when it comes to internet access. And not just for entertainment. CWA President Larry Cohen says the U.S. has fallen woefully behind the rest of the world when it comes to widespread low-cost access to truly high-speed internet. So CWA has launched a campaign called “Speed Matters” to encourage development of a public policy to improve high-speed internet access in the U.S. Among the goals by 2010 are to help America catch up to the 21st century internet economy: a speed of at least 10 megabits per second download and 1 meg upload. CWA says an open internet must also be maintained for all. CWA also says infrastructure buildout of high speed capacity is critical if the U.S. is to catch up to nations like Japan and the twenty or so other nations that are ahead of the U.S. in internet speed.

By Doug Cunningham

Organizing is ultimately about empowering rank and file workers, like Kelvin Banks, a CWA member who works at Cingular Wireless in Jackson, Mississippi where nearly forty thousand workers have joined the union in the past couple of years.

[Kelvin Banks]: "“With the climate of corporate America today, the only thing a workin’ man really has is his union.”

By Doug Cunningham

Newspaper workers at the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News are prepared to strike if necessary Thursday as they fight to defend their pensions, their seniority system under threats of layoffs and their sick leave benefits. Henry Holcomb , president of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia, says defending defined benefit pension benefits is the key issue.

[Henry Holcomb]: “They would like to shift the risk from the employee – from the people who are fortunate enough to own a company. And that is a huge risk for working people to take on. If you happen to retire at the beginning of a bear market, instead of living off the interest of your retirement savings you have to go into the savings itself then you’ve diminished your well-being for the whole rest of your retirement.”

By Doug Cunningham

A health study by the Boston University School of Public Health’s Dr. Richard Clapp confirms that overall cancer rates are considerably higher among IMB production workers than among the general population. The study is published in the Environmental Health Journal. It includes data from IBM’s own “Corporate Mortality File”. Alliance at IBM, a Communications Workers of America labor organizing group active at IBM, says this study confirms that IBM manufacturing processes are creating serious health issues for workers. The Alliance@IBM wants local, state and federal government officials to do a health surveillance of IBM workers and to require that worker exposure to toxic substances be substantially reduced. The alliance also wants a fund created to help defray medical costs for affected IBM workers and their families.