April 24, 2014

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Status Report: What's Happening With TPP?

No Fast Track, No TPP

Fair Trade Rally: May 7

Standing Up for Retiree Health Care

What Are The Rights Of Employees In A Global Economy?

This Is What Fast Means

Bargaining Update

Capital in the 21st Century: An Eye-Opening Take on Wage Inequality

People To Follow

Make Your Voice Heard On April 28

Status Report: What's Happening With TPP?

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No developments lately on "fast track," although trade negotiators continue to meet and try topush the deal forward.

That's why it's so important for us to keep pushing our members of Congress to stand withU.S. working families, consumers and communities, to make sure we can truly shut downfast track and a bad TPP deal.

In this fight, you never know where your allies will come from.

For example, corporations are traditionally the most vocal supporters of international tradedeals. But some corporate leaders are speaking out, in opposition to TPP. In an interviewwith The Huffington Post, Steve Biegun, head of Ford's international lobbying operations,said, "When I came here, we supported every trade agreement, and not a single one workedfor us. I don't know how you ask somebody who puts in a hard day at an automotive plant tosupport a free trade agreement that allows another country to cheat them. Because that'swhat it is. It's cheating."

Biegun also picked up on the point CWA has been making for months.

"You'll see the foreign policy community always applauding free trade agreements," Biegunsaid. "That should be a hint, it's not about trade. The foreign policy community is about givinggifts to other countries, helping friends and allies."

No Fast Track, No TPP

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CWA Local 1103 and Westchester, N.Y., grassroots community groups organized a terrific"People's Town Hall: Why You Should Care about TPP" meeting. The goal was to put ahuman face on what TPP really means, and was a big success, said 1103 Secretary-Treasurer Joe Mayhew.

Activists from grassroots groups in Westchester County, N.Y., hold a"People's Town Hall" and discuss how to fight back against fast track and theTPP.

Below: Members of CWA Local 9421 join allies at a town hall in Elk Grove,Calif.

U.S. Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) and NYS Assembly members Shelley Mayer, David Buchwaldand Tom Abinanti were among the elected officials who joined community activists to call foraction to stop fast track authorization of the Trans Pacific Partnership.

A community panel, featuring members of Concerned Families of Westchester, Food andWater Watch, the Hudson River Presbytery, Lower Hudson Valley Chapter of the SierraClub, Westchester Putnam Central Labor Body and WESPAC discussed the impact of theTPP on local jobs, our environment, food safety, healthcare and democracy.

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CWA Local 9421 and community partners organized a TPP community forum in Elk Grove,Calif., that brought out 40 people to hear why TPP is a bad deal for workers, theenvironment, consumers and our communities.

Allies in this fight are CWA, Citizens Trade Campaign, Sierra Club's Mother Lode Chapter,Global Exchange, SEIU Local 1000 Environmental Committee, Food and Water Watch,Sacramento Central Labor Council AFL-CIO, and the Democratic Party of SacramentoCounty.

Fair Trade Rally: May 7

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On May 7 at 1:30 p.m., thousands of activists will rally at Upper Senate Park on the groundsof the U.S. Capitol. We're saying no to "fast track" legislation that would speed the Trans-Pacific Partnership through Congress with little debate and zero opportunities foramendments. We'll be showing lawmakers that the entire progressive movement is united inthe fight for 21st century global trade policies that work for everyone.

Will you join us? RSVP here.

Standing Up for Retiree Health Care

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Ray Kramer, president of the D6 Retired Members Council, leads the call forfairness for retirees.

Below: CWAers from throughout D6 join the Dallas rally.

More than 700 CWA and other retiree activists took a stand for retiree health care benefits ata demonstration outside AT&T headquarters in Dallas.

In the U.S., retired workers face a crisis in health care coverage. Almost no U.S. companiesprovide any level of retiree health care benefits. That means workers who retire before age65 are basically on their own when it comes to continuing health care coverage forthemselves and their families. Starting at age 65, Americans enroll in Medicare but still facecosts and out-of-pocket payments.

Retirees from companies with union representation are better off but legally companies arenot required to bargain over retiree health care. That's why it's critical that retired unionactivists, like CWA's retired members at AT&T, are speaking up and taking a stand for healthcare for all.

At the rally, CWAers from St Louis and Kansas City, Mo.; Wichita, Kans.; Tulsa andOklahoma City, Okla.; and Beaumont, Houston, Ft Worth, Austin and San Antonio, Tex.,along with CWA District 6 Vice President Claude Cummings and Texas AFL-CIO PresidentBecky Moeller told AT&T it was time to stop shifting more health care costs to retirees.

Ray Kramer, president of the D6 Retired Members Council, rallied the activists, and stressedthat "we have to fight back" to keep the benefits we won over the years. He reminded thecrowd that "we are not alone, and that in many other places, at this same time, CWAers arestanding up for what's right."

At the end of the rally, Local 4250 retired President Steve Tisza delivered petitions signed bymore than 12,600 retirees to AT&T's Vice President of Labor Relations Mark Royse, callingfor fair treatment of retirees.

What Are The Rights Of Employees In A Global Economy?

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CWA stands with the UAW as the union drops its objections to the NLRB representationelection at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Now the focus will shift to the congressional investigation into the third party anti-unioncampaign by elected officials, Grover Norquist and other outside groups. Reps. George Miller(D-CA) and John Tierney (D-MA), the ranking Democrats on the House Education and theWorkforce Committee, and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee, areinvestigating the interference and the shortcomings of our outdated federal labor laws.

In our increasingly globalized world, large foreign multinational corporations are investing infacilities in the U.S. Some, like Volkswagen, have been greeted by hostile outside campaignsto undermine workers' right to collective bargaining, usually with cooperation by U.S.management. In many cases U.S. management embraces anti-union tactics they shun athome, where unions often have recognition and respect. This case was unique in that VWmanagement in Germany, and at least officially in the U.S., adopted extensive neutralityprovisions which only inflamed outside agitators like Norquist even more. In a similar case,CWA and the large German services union ver.di have been supporting T-Mobile employees'struggle to organize for more than 10 years. Unfortunately the principal owner DeutscheTelekom and U.S. management are anything but neutral.

For all of us the issue remains: What are the rights of employees in a global economy? Willthe U.S. continue to operate at the low end on workers' rights, accepting the fantasy land ofTennessee elected officials like Governor Haslam and U.S. Senator Corker that marketsalone provide a fair outcome? Or will we build a movement and a consensus that Corker,Haslam and Norquist are way out of bounds and that if we don't stop them, there willcontinue to be growing inequality and a falling living standard for most of us in the U.S.?

President Cohen talks about the organized attack on Volkswagen workers with Ed Schultz onMSNBC.

This Is What Fast Means

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AT&T is expanding its ultra-fast fiber network to some 100 cities nationwide.

The fiber network will deliver AT&T's U-verse at broadband speeds of up to 1 Gigabit persecond. Just how fast is that? At that speed, in one second, you could download 25 songs. Inthree seconds, you could download an episode of your favorite TV show. And in 36 seconds,you could download an entire HD movie.

AT&T's network build-out is "world changing, as more communities come on line with fibernetworks that are 100 times faster than what they have today," said CWA President Larry

Cohen.

"This is what fast means. It will be great for our members and overall employment, willaccelerate business and economic development, provide for new and not-yet-realizedservices, make state-of-the-art television and other services available to consumers, andhelp the U.S. regain its place as a leader in true high-speed accessibility," he said.

For more than eight years, CWA's "Speed Matters" campaign has pushed for the expansionof true high-speed fiber networks in the U.S. as necessary for good jobs here and to keeppace with economic growth and global competition. Speed matters on the Internet, and CWAhas been calling for policies to promote faster Internet speeds and higher capacity networks.

AT&T said it also is working with local communities on plans to provide options for public Wi-Fi hotspots, free AT&T U-verse with speeds of 1 Gigabit per second at public sites and otherexpansions of its ultra-fast network.

AT&T's announcement this week is a big step toward enabling U.S. residents to catch upwith citizens in countries like Korea, Japan, Canada and others, where national, affordablehigh-speed broadband is available and accessible.

Bargaining Update

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AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre back row, fourth from left,meets with SuperShuttle drivers in Denver.

SuperShuttle drivers at Denver International Airport have been standing strong for a faircontract. Recently, SuperShuttle, owned by the French firm Veolia Transdev, unilaterallyended bargaining and imposed a new contract that cuts the wages of these drivers by 30percent.

The drivers, members of CWA Local 7777, have been getting lots of support, including arecent meeting with AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre.

Stand up with the SuperShuttle drivers. Click here to send a message to SuperShuttlemanagement.

And like them on Facebook.

Capital in the 21st Century: An Eye-Opening Take on Wage Inequality

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You might have heard the buzz about Thomas Piketty and his book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Piketty is a 42-year-old French economist who just wrote a nearly 700-pagebook on capitalism, wealth and rising inequality. And he's getting rock star treatment.

Piketty "has scared the pants off the American Right," writes AlterNet.

Why? Because he "undermines the hallowed tenets of the capitalist catechism," says JeffFaux in The Nation.

Piketty dispels some of the long-held principles about capitalism, for example, that "a risingtide lifts all boats," or that when workers' productivity rises, so does their economic mobility.

As working people know too well, starting in the 1970s, workers' productivity continued torise, but wages and benefits flattened. Almost all of the gains from the increased productivityof the last three and a half decades went to corporate investors and the 1 percent.

Piketty analyzed data as far back as the 18th century from the largest developed countriesand determined that contrary to the traditional economic belief that economic growthproduced more economic benefit for more people, the opposite actually is true: economicgrowth in these countries resulted in greater inequality. He argues it's not income, but overallwealth that we should be concerned about.

There was just one period in the U.S. when inequality lessened, from the 1930s to 1975.Piketty cites government spending, increased taxes on the very wealthy and estates, and thegovernment's encouragement of and support for workers' bargaining rights as thecontributing factors to several decades of shared economic gains. Clearly workers' ability tobargain provided a means to share in the wealth they had created.

With the effective loss of workers' rights – just 6 percent of U.S. private sector workers todayhave bargaining rights – inequality is greater today than in the gilded age of the 1920s. Andaccording to Piketty, it will get worse.

He writes that the gap between the rich and everyone else will continue to widen, and oneday the future will look a lot like the 19th century, where the very rich inherit their wealthrather than working for it. The danger is that the super rich won't be the CEOs who foundedcompanies, but rather their grandchildren who have simply been handed that money.

Piketty proposes a global tax on wealth, in addition to supporting more traditional progressiveresponses like financial regulation, public investment in education and aid to the poor.

But CWA knows we must do more. The destruction of workers' bargaining rights and twodecades of trade deals that have been negotiated by and for the investor class andmultinationals are the principal drivers of today's income inequality. That also must change.We're working with allies to restore workers' voices in the political process, because asPiketty makes clear, "economic and political changes are inextricably intertwined."

You might be interested in this profile of Piketty.

People To Follow

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Around the country, CWA activists are partnering with community groups to push for socialand economic justice. To keep tabs on what's going on, be sure to follow:

@standupOH@TakeActionMN@Demos_Org@USAction@jwjnational

@CommonCause@citizenstrade.

Make Your Voice Heard On April 28

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In the immortal words of Mother Jones: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

On April 28, CWA and the U.S. labor movement will once again observe Workers' MemorialDay to remember those who have been sickened, injured or killed on the job and to renewour efforts for safe workplaces.

"As we remember those who have become injured, ill, or killed on the job, we will also renewour fight for strong workplace safety and health protections," said CWA President LarryCohen. "Too many job hazards remain unregulated and uncontrolled resulting in thecontinued occurrence of injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. As a result, every year thousands ofworkers are killed and millions are injured or become ill because of their jobs. Therefore, wemust work even harder to ensure employers are providing our members with safe andhealthful working conditions. To be successful, our efforts must involve allied worker centers,as well as environmental, environmental justice, and human and civil rights organizations."

The theme this year is "Safe Jobs Save Lives: Make Your Voice Heard." We're askingCWAers to organize actions highlighting the promise of safe jobs for all Americans. Congresspassed the Occupational Safety and Health Act four decades ago, but each and every day,CWA and our allies continue to fight to curb workplace injuries and illnesses. Our work isn'tdone.

You can find 2014 Workers' Memorial Day materials here.

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