Dan DiMaggio

Wireless Workers Vote Up Deal at AT&T Mobility

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Dan DiMaggio

AT&T Mobility workers in 36 states, who struck for three days last May, finally have a new contract. They had been without one for eight months.

These 21,000 union members work for AT&T’s wireless division in retail stores and call centers and as technicians. They first unionized with the Communications Workers (CWA) in 2005, under a neutrality agreement when the company was known as Cingular.

NYC Building Trades Make a Stand at Biggest Project since Rockefeller Center

New York City building trades unions are in a fight that hits at the very core of their jurisdiction: big commercial office buildings.

At $4 billion and 2.9 million square feet, 50 Hudson Yards will be the city’s most expensive and fourth-largest office building. And it’s just one of 16 skyscrapers slated for Hudson Yards, the largest private real estate development in U.S. history. This sprawling redevelopment of a former railyard is reshaping a section of Manhattan’s West Side, while employing an estimated 23,000 construction workers over the course of a decade.

Health Care Splits Rail Crafts

After nearly three years of bargaining with the nation’s top freight carriers, railroad unions are at odds over a contract settlement that will set the pattern for 135,000 rail workers.

Time for Labor to Up Our Game on Racism

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Dan DiMaggio

The most important actions by union members this fall are happening on, of all places, the football field.

If other unions are smart, they'll take advantage of this moment. They'll use the fact that every single member knows about NFL players' protests for racial justice, and start conversations in their own locals.

Some might be tempted to shy away from this discussion, worrying it’ll divide us even further along racial or political lines, or that they’ll lose their seat in the next election.

Painters Union Fights to Free Member from Immigration Jail

Imagine being arrested and detained for months just for showing up to work.

That’s what happened to construction workers Hugo Mejia and Rodrigo Nuñez on May 3, when their company sent them to work on a hospital inside Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California. A military official at the base held them and called Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the two men showed their driver’s licenses but were unable to provide valid Social Security numbers.

Call Center Unions Build International Connections

One big issue in May’s three-day strike by 38,000 AT&T workers was the company’s offshoring of jobs. To shine a spotlight on the issue and strengthen international solidarity, a group of union members visited the Dominican Republic a couple of weeks before the strike to meet the call center workers on the other end of that offshoring.

According to the Communications Workers (CWA), AT&T has closed 30 U.S. call centers and downsized dozens of others since 2011, eliminating 12,000 jobs—nearly one-third of all its call center employees.

Striking Wireless Workers Make Their Voices Heard

“Retail workers are basically told their entire lives that they’re never going to have any power in any way, in any facet of their lives,” says Will Blum, who works at an AT&T Mobility store in Boston.

But tens of thousands of cell-phone retail workers proved otherwise in May when they walked out on strike for three days, fighting for new contracts with the tenth-largest company in the U.S.

Addicted to Profits: Workers Locked Out at New Jersey Drug Treatment Facility

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Dan DiMaggio

One hundred ten addiction treatment beds are empty, and 120 employees without a paycheck, after for-profit American Addiction Centers locked workers out of its Lafayette, New Jersey, facility.

The day before workers planned to kick off a three-day strike, the company changed the locks on the building and put patients on planes to its other facilities around the country.

'Together and Unified,' AT&T Workers Launch Three-Day Strike

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Dan DiMaggio

Forty thousand AT&T workers in 36 states launched a three-day strike on Friday afternoon, as they continue their push for new contracts with the telecom giant, the tenth largest company in the U.S.

It’s the first strike ever for 21,000 retail and call center workers and technicians in the company's wireless division, Mobility. They're joined by 17,000 AT&T wireline workers in California, Nevada, and Connecticut, as well as DirecTV technicians in California and Nevada. All are members of the Communications Workers (CWA).

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