One of the largest cell phone carriers in America is trying to derail a years-long campaign to organize tens of thousands of workers by creating a fake in-house union, Communication Workers of America (CWA) officials say.
Union leaders are accusing T-Mobile of co-opting worker dissatisfaction through a new internal organization it calls T-Voice. The group functions as “a direct line for Frontline feedback to senior leadership,” according to an internal email obtained by Bloomberg’s Josh Eidelson. But management selects the workers who serve as part of T-Voice, and has allegedly pointed to the group as a reason not to unionize during captive-audience meetings with employees.
A management-created union like T-Voice is illegal under American labor law. Similar internal organizations serve an important function in other countries — Germany’s works councils, for example, have a strong reputation for fostering collaboration and comity inside that country’s manufacturing industry — but they’ve been outlawed in America for 80 years.
When worker and union rights were first codified here in the 1930s, the owners and managers of American companies had been violently crushing unionism for decades. For more squeamish owners, it was easy to undermine unionization by creating in-house institutions that would make workers feel heard without having any real power to press for better pay or hours.
Now, CWA says, a very modern company is doing that same old-fashioned thing. The company unveiled T-Voice to its 45,000 workers at the start of last summer, calling it “another big step to ensure your voice is heard.” The company designates a T-Voice representative from each of its customer service call centers.
The actual union that’s trying to convert T-Mobile’s workforce into members is asking the National Labor Relations Board to crack the whip on T-Voice. CWA’s filing to the board about the group is the latest in a string of NLRB cases union officials have brought. Organizers portray a pattern of labor law violations going back years, and the NLRB has agreed on more than one occasion.
Company spokespeople have told reporters that T-Mobile changed its workplace policies in response to some of those decisions. But Deutsche Telekom, the german parent company that owns T-Mobile, disputes CWA’s broader allegations. The firm says that “supposed violations of U.S. labor law” are unfounded and that “there are no indications to suggest that [T-Mobile] managers would prohibit union activities.”
Over the course of T-Mobile’s long-running tilt with CWA, the company has made huge advances while the American labor movement has declined. T-Mobile is now third on the list of American cell phone service providers after Verizon and ATT in terms of size, and rates first on overall quality according to Consumer Reporters. Some of the tactics that drove its rise from small-time to big fish have gotten it in trouble with the New York Attorney General, the Federal Trade Commission, and various consumer watchdog groups. But business is booming.
For labor, meanwhile, the past few years have seen lots of premature obituaries in the press. Less than one in eight American workers are in a union these days, down from more than one in four in the prosperous post-World War II decades. That sharp and ongoing drop in union density isn’t happening in a vacuum, of course: Right-wing politicians have taken steps to make it harder to organize workers, and less useful to have a union.