As its president, Morton Bahr led the 700,000 member Communications Workers of America for 20 years, where he was only the third CWA president since the union’s founding in 1938. He talks with us about his leadership during the breakup of AT&T Bell System in the mid-eighties, which was an extremely turbulent time for the communications industry. He discusses here how he directed the union through an expired contract, a period of re-negotiation, and his exploration for alternatives to striking, a composite of which included many elements of corporate campaigning.

Make Something Happen: Please describe what the CWA was faced with when you came on as president [in 1985].

Morton Bahr: We already had a long history of action in the union up through then and in 1986 our contract was going to expire. Come the minute after midnight, we were going on strike. When we did strike against AT&T, I started to travel the country and I considered and talked about alternatives to the strike. I knew I was reaching a core because whenever I mentioned that we’ll never give up our right to strike, but we can no longer be so predictable, people were responding. We should have several approaches, and striking should be only one. I could tell from the reaction of the members that they were supportive of that idea.

MSH: What about striking was putting people off? Why do you think that [union] members were so receptive to what you were saying?

Bahr: If there’s a possibility of accomplishing your ends without losing a lot of pay, that’s naturally what you want to do. And what I began to see were new ways to make competition work for us. When AT&T was a monopoly, you could strike from hell to high water and the company didn’t really care because there was no other way that calls were going to be made. But then competition came into the long distance market and we wanted to make that work for us.

This was somewhat similar to what the [United Auto Workers] was doing, particularly in their stronger days. They were able to designate one company as the striking company and then the other two [of the three auto makers] would get the market. This was a similar idea. Beginning in 1989, we came up with a sticker that was about three inches long and one inch wide. It said, “Let your fingers walk the line. Support the CWA-IBEW Electronic Ticket Line for Jobs With Justice. Don’t use AT&T when calling outside your area code.” Then it gave another number to dial, because if you remember, when competition first started in the long distance market, you couldn’t dial a competitor directly. You had to use one of these codes to get around AT&T. So we plastered these all over the country. You couldn’t find a pay phone anywhere that didn’t have that sticker on it. We also sent the alternative numbers to all friends of labor so that they, too, could circumvent AT&T. The company was scared shitless; they tried to sue us for putting these stickers everywhere. It indicated to me that we had their attention and I began thinking of how to refine this.

MSH: How did you?

Bahr: 1992 comes along and we started a “switch card” campaign. This went beyond involving just our members. See, the workers at AT&T got their service for free and we wanted them to continue on with that. So what we did was we went to the AFL-CIO and through them, we had 15 million members in the labor movement at that we could reach out to. To that point, AT&T was the preferred carrier because it had been the only one. By this time, though, you could now select MCI or Sprint or a couple of other smaller carriers. Through our involvement with the AFL-CIO and with all of this access to 15 million union families as well as through working with the state federations and central labor councils, we were getting all of these people to sign these switch cards. The cards indicated that the signatory wanted to switch service from AT&T to another carrier of their choice, and this allowed the CWA to move them from AT&T to whatever other company. We targeted financial firms who had related pension funds, and polling companies that did Democratic Party poling and other people like that as well and as a result, we had a real web out there and we had several hundred signed cards that authorized the switch of service.

So I called a press conference at our office in Washington. We had all of these cartons of boxes filled with these switch card authorizations. The press took all of their pictures and got those out there. The response from the company was incredible. They were shocked that the union would take our business to nonunion carriers. It worked.

MSH: And that’s all you needed to do?

Bahr: All that we had to do was to present those cards to AT&T. Of course, if we had to go ahead with the switch, we’d want get customers to switch back after [we got what we needed] — but you tend to lose some customers on the way back. We didn’t want to do any damage. But fortunately we didn’t have to go that far.

We began to look for different tactics after that. Here, cooperation was really important. Working with the AFL-CIO helped because it enabled us to work with so many subscribers.

MSH: Were you able to quantify the potential damage to that would have been done to AT&T?

Bahr: No. We were ready to go through with the switch if that was necessary, but as I said, the short term damage would have been enormous. Multiply 15 million families by 50 dollars a month in subscription fees or whatever it was then. We did that for leverage and we didn’t want to have to actually go through with it.

MSH: Do you think that the situation would have been resolvable without it? What would have happened if you hadn’t used it?

Bahr: We would have had to go on strike. You don’t do this unless there is a serious enough issue to [make it necessary]. The consequences could and up being adverse. As I said, you don’t always get all the customers back. But you don’t want to strike, either.

MSH: Looking at things as they are now in the context of the Internet, have you seen how employees, maybe white collar workers who aren’t unionized for whatever reason, self-organizing by using the web?

Bahr: The Republican National Labor Relations Board has ruled that employers have the right to bar employees from using the company computer for anything but company business. Doing so makes one subject to discharge. That really takes the computer out of self organzation during working hours. That was a setback and that will get changed when we get a new administration and new board.

We’re been using the computer to make steady inroads in organizing “the new work force,” IT people at Microsoft, IBM, and other workers who don’t necessarily have collective bargaining power but do have organization to be able to do a number of things. First, this helps to keep them up with what’s happening around the world in their profession and it helps to give them some voice of unity within the workplace. For example, with Microsoft, we have a local union known as WashTech. It has about 20 thousand members. The case is the same at IBM. What we’ve done is to make the union fit the needs of these kinds of workers. One arena we try to help in is career advancement. People in these kinds of jobs, if they don’t stay up with the changes, can become obsolete in three or four years. The work we’ve done in education attracts them. They keep in touch the best they can through the Net, so that’s helpful.

MSH: Are there things that unions can offer that the Internet can never replace?

Bahr: I still believe that there’s no substitute for mouth-to-ear, face-to-face organization. The Internet is certainly a good second to that, but [pauses] I don’t know. I don’t see any substitute for mouth-to-ear whenever you have that opportunity. Maybe the next generation that grows up–these kids today–maybe they’ll be able to make it work.

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