69th Annual Meeting of the Communications Workers of America

Some notes from Jerry Ziegler at the 69th Annual Convention of the Communications Workers of America on Monday, July 16.

-- David Miller, mayor of the host city of Toronto, reminded delegates that “every day is labor day.” Miller is very pro-labor. The phrase was his slogan during his most recent mayoral campaign and he offered it to the 1,800 people attending 69th annual CWA convention to remind them that people in the labor movement need to work for fairness and equality and workers’ rights all the time.
-- Next up was the Rev. James Evans, a minister with the United Church of Canada, who gave the invocation for the opening day of the convention. More interesting that his invocation was his current pursuit: He’s organizing a labor union for clergy. He said the idea, based on a similar union organized in England, is to protect ministers from everything from abusive parishioners to unwarranted removal from a posting. He also had the best quote of the day: “No matter how almighty a boss may be, he’s not as strong as a union.”
-- Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labor Council, noted that Canada has the highest percentage of labor union membership in the G8, the international group of representatives of the eight nations that have about 65% of the world’s economy. About one in three Canadians belongs to a labor union. Compare that to the U.S., where only 7% of Americans belong to unions, lower than when collective bargaining was officially protected by the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
Georgetti was the first but far from the last during the day to extol the Canadian universal health care system and he encouraged the U.S. labor movement to keep pushing for a similar plan.
He also told convention attendees that a recently passed law in Canada prevents anyone, even a judge, from throwing out a collective bargaining agreement if a company enters bankruptcy.
-- CWA President Larry Cohen followed up on Georgetti’s comments, saying a major challenge to the U.S. labor movement is to try to bring membership back up to and beyond the 35% level of the 1950s.
Cohen said he fight for universal health care will be an important effort for the U.S. labor movement.
He also said it is crucial to push for passage of the employee free choice act, which made it through the U.S. House but fell nine votes short in the Senate recently.
-- Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America, said he wants his grandson to have the same chances in life as he did. But he said that can’t happen without a strong labor movement.
His take on the U.S. health care system was ominous. Unless something is done by the next U.S. president, health care costs in the U.S. will consume 20% of the Gross Domestic Product.
-- CWA Executive Vice President Jeff Rechenbach said the survival of the middle class is dependant on the labor movement. He spoke of a new move to use CWA members as political activists.
Rechenbach also visited the health care issue. “We missed an opportunity to deal with health care in the early ‘90s. Well shame on us if we don’t deal with it this time.”
In afternoon sessions, delegates by voice vote passed five resolutions. The most important and controversial was to add four seats to the CWA executive board to increase diversity. The other resolutions included creating an exclusively Canadian region (currently, some CWA members are attached to U.S. regions); calling for a rollback of increased postal rates for small and medium periodicals; a call for the U.S. and Canadian governments to use sanctions to attempt to end conflict in Darfur; and a measure to increase the pace of political activity aimed at electing candidates favorable to labor issues.