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| Newly elected CWA President Claude Cummings, the union’s first African-American president. (Picture & caption source) |
I owe my friends at Solidarity some love--I've been ignoring them too long. And they deserve it by reposting a piece by Steve Early entitled Bosses, Union Officials, Rank-&-Filers Debate Work from Home. Mr. Early is a longtime activist in the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union, specifically its Newsguild affiliate which organizes newspaper employees. It's obvious that Mr. Early is a reporter: he writes well, and he definitely knows his facts! Mr. Early reports on a topic nobody else on my beat has mentioned: Work From Home (WFH).
According to demographer Wendell Cox, within all US metro areas with at least one million population, 21.9% of employees worked from home in 2021, while only 3.8% rode mass transit. At very least, the era of so-called "mass transit" appears to be over.
A recent WSJ article, dated July 11th, leads with this:
Office attendance is slumping again and bosses have a warning: We are a worse company when you stay home.
In buildings across 10 major U.S. cities, office occupancy has fallen back below 50% for the past three weeks, according to Kastle Systems, which tracks security swipes into offices. The drop comes despite new return-to-office mandates that affect more than 600,000 workers and counting.
The bosses cite multiple reasons for wanting their employees back in the office. First, they suspect they're slacking off. Then there is less room for creative conversations and serendipitous discoveries. And finally it's hard to on-board new employees or discover the likeliest candidates for promotion if you never meet them in person.
Also cited is the damage it does to downtowns:
“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home,” said Dean Porter of Houston. “Mayors and governors and too many managers want people back commuting.”
Workers who do a good portion of their job remotely contend they aren’t obligated to prop up the office, or an office-centric economy.
“It is not my responsibility to save downtown by going back to the office,” said Merrik Wright of Miami. “The average worker should not be in charge of something that just costs us time and money.”
Conversely, employees really like working from home, not only because it saves commuting time and expense. It permits a more flexible schedule, within which they can balance childcare and other responsibilities. They hate the "open-office" layout, which inhibits work. And they claim--with some data to back them up--that they're at least as productive at home as in the office.
On the downside, employees miss social contact with workmates, and they're also required to absorb the expense of setting up a home office.
If the bosses and their employees are struggling with WFH, then so too is the CWA. In a recent election for union president, the two candidates in the run-off disagreed on precisely that issue. The winner, newly elected president Claude Cummings, is a fan, arguing
... that CWA would not be well-positioned to help more white-collar workers win bargaining rights and contract language on WFH if top union officials opposed remote work options."
Mr. Cummings had support.
According to Local 7250 President Kieran Knutson, his fellow customer service reps in Minneapolis had discovered that remote work “was safer, saved them money on commuting and childcare, gave them more time for rest and with their families and more control of their work space.”
That’s why Knutson and leaders of other AT&T locals launched a grassroots campaign aimed at keeping Work from Home (WFH) as an option at AT&T, the most heavily unionized telecom company.
The response from the union leadership was lukewarm, at best. Indeed, Mr. Cummings' opponent was CWA Vice-President Ed Mooney. His stated reason for opposing WFH doesn't make too much sense.
... WFH has put “the companies in the driver’s seat because they are aware our members like it so much.”
But Mr. Early delves deeper, and Mr. Mooney's objection is more reasonable.
Mooney defended his role in negotiations with Verizon over WFH last year. During those talks, other CWA bargaining committee members like Local 1400 President Don Trementozzi had to overcome Mooney’s initial opposition—voiced during union caucuses — to extending remote work opportunities for Verizon customer service reps.
Then and now, Mooney’s questioning of WFH resonated not only with east coast Verizon locals, dominated by technicians, but also some rank-and-file radicals who belong to those locals. Echoing Mooney’s concerns, one long-time activist and fellow Labor Notes supporter told me that WFH “takes away our bargaining power, leaves people more atomized, and gives management too much control.”
And that's just it. The union depends on the office just as much as the bosses do. The bosses want to instill a company culture; the union wants to foster solidarity. Both of those are threatened by WFH, and hence the resistance from union officialdom despite the rank and file pressure.
Put in my own words: How do you organize a strike in a WFH shop? Holding a picket line in front of a largely abandoned office building doesn't look effective. Do you picket everybody's front porch? And how do you rat out the people who cross the picket line simply by logging in from their home office?
Mr. Early himself admits to being an early WFH skeptic.
Three decades ago, I was similarly ambivalent. As a national union rep between 1980 and 2007, I had much first-hand familiarity with the workplace culture of telephone company service reps and the different (and more blue-collar) world of inside and outside “plant technicians.” ... Most cable guys loved being able to take their trucks home at night and go directly to customers’ homes the next morning. Union-minded telephone techs wanted their co-workers to report to a central location every day, so they would have more regular contact with shop stewards.
After I helped a group of 1,500 customer service reps in New England get a first contract in the mid-1990s, it wasn’t long before the company now known as Verizon wanted to do a “trial” of work from home. One reason for our resistance to that proposal was the fear that collective action in newly organized call centers would be more difficult, if everyone was isolated at home and not working under the same roof.
But he's since come around--for which he credits new technology.
The availability of now well-tested new tools for communication, coordination, and membership participation — that were not available back then — has convinced me that greater union flexibility on this issue is absolutely essential. ...
According to [Don] Trementozzi, rank-and-file participation in his local actually increased during the pandemic. Because bargaining sessions, committee meetings and general membership gatherings were conducted via Zoom, they attracted people who would not have attended in person, after working all day or all week in their previous work locations.
The union argument against WFH is exactly the same as the bosses. And like the bosses' employees, Mr. Early is arguing that company culture/union solidarity is just as well transmitted during Zoom meetings. Count me just a little bit skeptical. But both the bosses and the union have to deal with huge employee resistance to being marched back into the office--and Mr. Early has given up the fight and chosen to side with the employees. I don't blame him, but I'm not sure how well that will serve the union.
The fact is that the interests of the union (in this case building solidarity) and the interests of the workers (who overwhelmingly like WFH) often diverge. There are many other examples, e.g., gig workers generally prefer their gig status to being full-time, unionized employees. I commented on how hotel workers have interests that don't correspond to their union here.
All that said, Steve Early is a good writer and an honest reporter who really knows something about his topic. He takes on a serious issue with important economic ramifications. His piece is well worth reading.
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