Reading Rival Union Responses to the Localization of Technical Work in the US Telecommunications Industry

Abstract

Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, state-sponsored deregulation and its market repercussions, combined with technological change, sparked profound changes for employees in the heretofore highly unionized US telecommunications sector. In this paper I examine the responses that this industry-wide restructuring of technical labor has prompted within two unions—the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA). With some success, the CWA has ‘scaled up’, employing innovative national bargaining and organizing tactics in the centralized workplaces of the companies once affiliated with the AT&T Bell System and developing transnational relationships with other countries' telecommunications unions. However, these strategies have not prevented the CWA from losing ground. In contrast, the IBEW's inherent capacity to represent workers on a labor-market or ‘geographic’ scale, and thus to take advantage of the localization of technical work in the industry, has created new opportunities for that union and helped its construction division to reverse a decades-long trend of decline. However, the IBEW has not deliberately ‘constructed scale’ in this environment. Rather, the union has embraced an opportunity presented by a shift in industrial structure which favors its traditional strengths. Thus, the pursuit of the geographic or ‘horizontal’ approach does not align the IBEW with the progressive social movements that many labor geographers associate with localized activism. The case study of the two unions suggests that the existence of distinct traditions in the American labor movement—a craft tradition linked to multiemployer bargaining at the local level and an industrial tradition linked with a strong focus on workplace-based bargaining, national norms, and an active national state—has important implications for the understanding of how labor organizations relate to scale.