Comcast Caught Flat-Footed As Workers Rally to IBEW Campaign

March 20, 2008

If at first you don’t succeed, try something different. While hundreds of workers over the last several years were expressing dissatisfaction with their jobs and benefits to union organizers, Comcast, the giant cable company, was hiring anti-union consultants and hosting captive audience meetings designed to intimidate workers.

What would happen, the workers asked, if the IBEW visited hundreds of Comcast sites and communicated with tens of thousands of workers on the same day, so that it would be harder for managers to focus their union busting on individual locations?

On March 12, Comcast was caught off-guard by demonstrations and informational leafleting at hundreds of work locations from coast to coast. Almost 2,000 workers were contacted in Washington and Oregon alone with flyers announcing a Web site, www.comcastworkers.com .  Within the next 24 hours, the site received 700 hits as workers at the company poured out their problems and hopes for change.       

“Now the hard work starts,” says Gerry Leary, assistant business manager, Boston Local 2222, who helped coordinate efforts to reach out to Comcast workers at shops in Massachusetts.  Workers in Beverly, Lawrence, Needham and Weymouth were very receptive to IBEW’s message that respect on the job was worth organizing for. A volunteer organizing committee of Comcast technicians in Winchester, Mass., outside of Boston, had already formed before the national actions, but Leary says interest picked up at more locations the next day.  Managers tried to refute the union by “telling workers how much they were respected and it backfired,” says Leary. 

The time is ripe to win elections and negotiate first contracts, say organizers, since Comcast is facing more competition from Verizon and other companies for voice, data and video services and can’t afford the bad publicity they have generated opposing unions in the past.

“Almost 50 volunteers from 12 locals hit every Comcast site from the Canadian border half-way down to Oregon and from the Washington coast to Spokane,” says Matt Carroll, president of Seattle Local 89.  Organizers also reached out to locations of Comcast’s subcontractors.

At one site, where the IBEW already had established a volunteer organizing committee, says Carroll, the company had stepped up the pressure on union supporters telling them to be careful who they talk to.  “They had targets on their back,” says Carroll, until management found out that they were part of a nationwide effort.  “We hit so many places; Comcast doesn’t know what to do.”

“I was so glad to see the IBEW back out front today,” says a posting on a forum sponsored by www.comcastworkers.com.  “I had been worried that they weren’t coming back and I had gotten my hopes up for no reason but there they were thank God.  Really this place needs something better than what we have now.  I have not seen so much hope for something better in my two years here.  Let’s give the union a chance to help us.  GO IBEW.  SIGN THOSE CARDS.”

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