In a huge vote, CWA members at Verizon West ratified a three-year contract that increases wages by 8.25 percent and holds the line against health care cost-shifting for 5,500 workers in California.

CWA District 9 Vice President Jim Weitkamp said that a very high percentage of members returned ballots; members voted by a margin of 20-1 to approve the contract. He commended the bargaining team and mobilization by locals and members for their hard work that resulted in a quality contract.

The contract establishes a preferred provider health care option for employees, ensures that a sales incentive plan for customer service representatives will remain voluntary and includes an agreement by the company to meet with the union to discuss ways to reduce subcontracting.

It was an eye-opening experience for T-Mobile USA workers to see firsthand how differently their company treats workers in Germany.

During the 10 days that T-Mobile USA workers spent in Germany for the Deutsche Telekom annual meeting and other events, meetings with their German colleagues strengthened their commitment to continue the fight for a union in the United States.

“While there were many differences on issues like pay and due process, the most recurring issue was respect,” said CWA District 6 staff representative Judy Graves who was part of the CWA delegation. When a German worker was asked how bathroom breaks are handled, she simply responded, “I go. She was taken aback to learn that it’s not that simple for T-Mobile workers,” said Graves.

When discussing measures used to evaluate workers’ performance, T-Mobile USA workers discovered a huge difference in how management uses the data. In Germany, scores are used to encourage workers to improve performance. In the U.S., low scores mean warnings or discipline.

German management uses GPS technology to improve dispatching, the US workers learned. In the United States, management uses GPS positioning technology to punish workers for being in the wrong place.

“After the meeting, a ver.di member came up to me and apologized for our treatment,” one of the T-Mobile USA workers wrote in a blog at www.LoweringTheBarForUs.org. “She had no reason to apologize. We stand together and fight for the same rights and respect. It’s the greedy corporations who need to stop stuffing their pockets and taking advantage of the lack of global regulations.”

Ver.di members at T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom encouraged the T-Mobile USA workers to keep fighting, not only for their own sake but to stop DT from trying to take away the gains that ver.di members have made.

Protecting workers’ rights and building out high-speed broadband to every community will spur the economic growth our country needs and create quality, union, green jobs, CWA President Larry Cohen told participants at the Good Jobs Green Jobs Conference.

Cohen said access to high-speed broadband networks is critical to the economic survival and growth of rural communities and towns across the country, just as water rights and highways were in years past. “Without access, those communities will disappear.”

Some 3,000 labor and environmental activists, business leaders, elected officials and others attended the Washington D.C. forum that focused on ideas to help build a new, green economy that creates good jobs, reduces global warming and preserves America’s economic and environmental security. CWA is a member of the Blue Green Alliance, which sponsors the forum.

Attending the forum were CWA and IUE-CWA members already doing some of the nation’s greenest jobs: building out high speed broadband, and manufacturing zero-emission buses in St. Cloud, Minn., hybrid car batteries in Springfield, Ohio, low-voltage wind transformers in Washington, Mo., and clean jet engines in Lynn, Mass.

IUE-CWA President Jim Clark said that green, clean energy jobs will mean growth for American workers and our economy. We must ensure that “going green in the U.S. doesn’t become another excuse for companies to outsource jobs overseas.”

Also attending the forum’s first day were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, Sierra Club Executive Chairman Carl Pope and others.

Communications Workers of America Proposes “Middle Ground” To Protect an Open Internet

Washington, D.C. – The Communications Workers of America today mapped out a middle course for the Federal Communications Commission to follow in crafting rules to protect an open and free internet.

In reply comments submitted to the FCC’s Open Internet Proceeding, the CWA noted that the FCC’s National Broadband Plan sets ambitious broadband deployment goals to bring our nation’s infrastructure to global standards, which will be financed mostly with private capital. Therefore, as the Commission crafts open Internet rules, it can, and should, chart a middle course by adopting rules that will maintain a free and open Internet while preserving adequate incentives to promote job-creating investment in innovative broadband networks.

CWA pointed out that network providers made capital investments of more than 11 times that of application providers in 2008 and 2009, and employed almost ten times more Americans in good-paying family supporting jobs than the application providers.

CWA also said network providers must have the flexibility they need to manage and innovate over their networks. In turn, consumers should be protected from “unjust and unreasonable” discrimination on the Internet. Such a standard would protect consumers’ ability to access all legal content on the Internet without foreclosing their ability to experience the specialized quality of service needed for telemedicine, distance learning, public safety, entertainment and other purposes.

CWA noted that while the recent Comcast decision may affect the FCC’s legal reasoning in this proceeding, the court’s decision does not affect the soundness of the policies the Commission must employ to adopt the proposed rules. In the meantime, the CWA is urging industry to agree voluntarily to the FCC’s existing four Internet Principles, as well as a fifth regarding transparency that would require providers to report the actual speeds, reliability, contract terms, privacy policies, service limits and traffic management policies.

F.C.C. Push to Regulate Broadband Is Expected 
NY Times: By Edward Wyatt
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission will try to regulate broadband Internet service despite a recent court ruling that the commission had limited powers to do so……..