The battle over AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile has opened a new front in another, older Washington battle: the one between Sprint Nextel and Big Labor.
The Communications Workers of America, the largest telecom union and a powerful force in Democratic politics, is backing the merger—and attacking what it sees as Sprint’s flawed labor record.
In recent weeks, the fight has gotten ugly.
CWA launched a website and Twitter feed called “Eye on Sprint,” which aim to discredit the company’s arguments against the merger. But the website doesn’t confine itself to the battle over the merger, which the Justice Department is seeking to block on antitrust grounds. It takes aim at Sprint’s record on labor.
“Over the past four years, Sprint cut 20,000 jobs and closed 30 U.S.-based call centers,” the website states, citing a Wall Street Journal article; it tweaks Sprint for allegedly sending work overseas. But CWA also leaves the Washington realm altogether, assessing the results from Sprint’s earnings calls.
Sprint has taken notice.
At a recent fundraising dinner for merger opponent Public Knowledge, Vonya McCann, the company’s senior vice president for government affairs, presented a video of CWA President Larry Cohen with dubbing over his voice that makes him sound ridiculous.
The bit got a big laugh, but it also showed how focused Sprint and CWA have become on one another in this merger fight, despite the myriad other voices weighing in on both sides. That’s because the current bitterness has a lengthy prologue.
CWA dates its tensions with Sprint to the 1980s, when the company had a landline business that employed many unionized workers. As CWA spokeswoman Candice Johnson tells it, management went head-to-head with union organizers during contract negotiations in a way that was more aggressive than in previous typically fraught talks.
“[Workers] really had to prevail against incredible antiunion attacks,” Johnson said. “Overall, there’s just the problem of Sprint’s basic attitude toward workers.”
In 1996, the acrimony led Sprint to court. Federal labor officials charged the company with illegally trying to prevent union organizing when it shut down a Spanish-language telemarketing firm that CWA tried to unionize. Sprint appealed and the courts sided with the phone company, which said it shuttered the firm for business reasons, not as an attack on labor. CWA contends that the appellate court erred in its judgment.
Now the old conflicts are resurfacing in the battle over the AT&T deal. Still, it’s unclear how fractious their relationship will remain in life after the court’s decision on the merger. The public fight, after all, had simmered for months until this issue revitalized it.
Sprint spokesman John Taylor has dismissed the campaign by CWA.
“CWA is seeking to distract attention away from the actual issue at hand—the Department of Justice has filed suit to block AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile because it believes the takeover of T-Mobile, which CWA has embraced, will lead to higher prices, fewer choices, and lower-quality products for mobile wireless services,” Taylor told National Journal Daily by e-mail.
This article appeared in the Monday, October 31, 2011 edition of National Journal Daily.
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