Morton Bahr of Communications Workers Retires: Competed With IBEW for Telephone Workers as Regional Bells Changed

Union. Family. Proud
Bahr Leadership Era Marked by Growth and Transformation

By Jeff Miller  August 2005

"We are poised for the future because CWA is the union of the future," Morton Bahr declared in his acceptance speech after his election as just CWA's third president, in 1985.

"From this day forth, we are dedicating ourselves to building a stronger CWA and stronger labor movement¦ CWA will turn today's challenges into the opportunities of tomorrow," he told the convention delegates gathered in San Francisco.

Two decades later, as Bahr prepares to step into retirement, CWA is a much different union ”different because it adapted to the need for new approaches to organizing and growth, along with unique strategies to create those "opportunities for tomorrow" within a turbulent environment.

The Bahr leadership era has seen more dramatic changes in the union than either of the two previous ones, largely because outside forces, telecom deregulation, a technological explosion, globalization buffeted CWA as never before.

CWA's top leadership transitions have been smooth and have taken place at natural turning points for the union. Founding President Joseph Beirne spent his career fighting a guerrilla war with the giant AT&T Bell System to win national bargaining at one table, rather than separate talks with 22 Bell operating companies and units of AT&T's Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary. Beirne lived to see the achievement of his goal in 1972 but died in 1974, the year of the first national AT&T negotiation.

Glenn Watts, Beirne's successor, helped CWA reap the fruits of national bargaining, winning a succession of pace-setting agreements over a decade that raised standards throughout telecom and other industries. In Bahr's words, "he did a magnificent job of shepherding us through what I always refer to as our golden years."

Bahr took the helm a year after the government-mandated breakup of the Bell System suddenly transformed a stable industry marked by regulation and a sanctioned monopoly into one of cut-throat competition, mega-mergers, and turmoil for workers.

'We Live by the Triangle'
In confronting howling winds of change, CWA's new president in 1985 nonetheless was guided by time-proven traditions. "We live by what we refer to as the CWA Triangle: collective bargaining, political action and organizing," Bahr said in a reflective moment recently. "That triangle was what Joe Beirne coined as the 'triple threat'"-- mutually reinforcing key programs.

"We just took his language and made it graphic. This union lives by that," Bahr said.

The CWA Triangle offers a good pattern for tracing CWA's evolution during the Bahr presidency.

First, organizing. On becoming president, Bahr quickly made aggressive membership growth a priority by elevating the job of organizing director to the status of assistant to the president. For the post he named Larry Cohen, who was a lead organizer and New Jersey area director when Bahr previously headed CWA District 1, covering New York, New Jersey and New England. Cohen was assistant to the vice president of the district when Bahr recruited him to Washington in 1986.

This was a natural move for a man who made his mark in CWA as an organizer himself. Bahr, who served as a radio operator on Merchant Marine ships during World War II, went to work for Mackay Radio & Telegraph after his discharge. Mackay had decertified its union in 1948 but Bahr helped his co-workers fight back.

He joined CWA in 1951 as Mackay's in-plant organizer and led the unit through a hard-fought campaign and two elections, finally winning CWA recognition in 1954. He went on to win the first of many elections to union office, as president of new CWA Local 1172 and leader of the first unit outside the telephone industry.

Bahr's first assignment when he joined the CWA staff in 1957 was the huge task of organizing 24,000 plant workers at New York Telephone. Victory came in 1961.

Years later, after he was elected district vice president in 1969, Bahr ignited a new surge of growth, including CWA's first foray into the public sector. Unionization of municipal workers in New York City was followed by a successful campaign among 37,000 New Jersey state workers and then a breakthrough among nurses in Buffalo.

As CWA expanded in these areas, there was still much of the traditional phone industry to organize when Bahr assumed CWA's leadership in 1985. Several Bell System units had remained independent for years. With the AT&T breakup, however, they realized they could no longer remain isolated. CWA and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) competed to offer them a home.

In 1985, CWA successfully campaigned to bring in 6,000 downstate New York operators through merger, followed by 10,000 service reps in the commercial department. New York accounting workers and others would follow suit.

Under Bahr's leadership, the strength of all three sides of the CWA Triangle would often be seen in a single strategy, such as in "bargaining to organize." One of the best examples was the use of workplace mobilization tactics, along with outreach to community and local political leaders, to pressure SBC Communications into agreeing to neutrality and card-check recognition.

A sustained campaign by District 6 locals over several years finally persuaded SBC to agree. And as a result, CWA would break through in the emerging wireless communications field, organizing all of SBC and Bell South-owned Cingular Wireless' union-eligible workers nationwide in just a few years.

Such tactics would come to be a model for other unions in the face of an increasingly dysfunctional and anti-worker National Labor Relations Board.

Reaching Out to Merger Partners
The AT&T divesture and telecom competition had slashed jobs in the industry by the tens of thousands, impacting membership levels and threatening to diminish CWA's strength at the bargaining table.

Augmenting organizing efforts both in telecom and new fields such as education, health care, law enforcement, cable TV and others, Bahr and Cohen looked to bring in merger partners among AFL-CIO unions that were struggling with their own economic and technological challenges.

The 20,000-member International Typographical Union voted to merge with CWA in 1986 after leaders of both unions looked at the converging telecom, print, media and entertainment world and saw a good fit. Success with integrating ITU "America's oldest labor union" as CWA's Printing, Publishing and Media Workers Sector led other unions to consider partnering with CWA.

In 1992, the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians brought its 12,000 members into CWA, followed by The Newspaper Guild in 1995, with 35,000 journalists in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico.

A shared historical heritage and close ties between leaders led the International Union of Electronic Workers, with 110,000 members, to join with CWA in 2000, becoming the union's Industrial Sector.

CWA had moved into the airline industry in 1997, organizing 11,000 customer service representatives at US Airways. Workers responded to the fact that CWA had more members and more experience than any union in the customer service field.

That foothold in airlines made for a natural alliance with the Association of Flight Attendants in 2003 when AFA was looking to join forces with a major union and expand its resources to organize unrepresented cabin crews. AFA-CWA currently represents 46,000 flight attendants.

Under Bahr's leadership, CWA also has pioneered new organizing approaches, such as forming associations for high-tech workers under WashTech, the Seattle-based affiliate for information technology workers, and the Alliance@IBM, which has worked to protect pensions and address other issues at IBM. Members of these groups have access to CWA training and Union Plus benefit programs as they work to transform "virtual unions" into the real thing.

Broadened organizing thrusts and strategic mergers have made CWA one of the few unions that have grown larger in the past 20 years, even as half of all telecom jobs have disappeared since the AT&T breakup.

"If we hadn't taken these directions, today instead of attracting unions to join with us we'd be in the other position - going hat in hand to IBEW or some other union looking for them to take us in," Bahr said.

New Bargaining Strategies
Bahr already had years of bargaining experience when he took over as president. As District 1 vice president, he had led the historic 218-day New York Telephone strike in 1971 that ended pattern bargaining and paved the way for AT&T's agreement, finally, to bargain nationally in 1974. It also produced the first agency shop agreement in the Bell System.

By 1986, however, the Bell System had been shattered. "We went from bargaining at one table for almost half a million people to 56 different bargaining tables in 1986," Bahr recalls.

To set a positive pattern and defeat takeback demands at AT&T, CWA was forced to strike for 26 days in 1986. A breakthrough that year--negotiation of a joint, company-funded training program, the Alliance for Employee Growth and Development--would become a major training model. The bargaining effort, however, was undermined by IBEW, whose members stayed on the job while CWAers walked the picket lines.

Bahr forged an agreement with IBEW to bargain jointly in 1989 and future rounds. And CWA devised a new tactic the "electronic picket line."

"We had to figure out how we could make competition work for us," Bahr said. For the first time, we could transfer customers with whom we have a dispute to another carrier." That was the first time that CWA began collecting carrier shift cards from union families and supporters, threatening to transfer millions of dollars worth of business if necessary.

Bargaining with AT&T that year yielded breakthroughs in family benefits such as liberalized leave and child and elder care, and also the first card-check organizing agreement. But at New York and New England's Baby Bell, Nynex, company demands for health care cost-shifting sparked a bitter 17-week strike. CWA ultimately prevailed.

In the years since, CWA has continued to develop an arsenal of innovative tactics as alternatives to strikes--workplace mobilization activities, corporate and shareholder initiatives, media campaigns to garner public and political support—which have been widely adopted throughout the labor movement.

Political and Community Action
The third side of the CWA Triangle is political and community action. From the days of Joe Beirne's presidency, CWA has always linked political action and influence with the union's presence in the communities where members live and work - and even beyond, to ties with international union allies. Bahr has maintained and built upon that philosophy.

Taking community mobilization a step further, CWA was the catalyst for Jobs with Justice, a workers' rights coalition born in 1987 at CWA's convention in Miami as unions and allies rallied to support the Machinists' struggle at Eastern Airlines.

CWA has helped to nurture JwJ into a vibrant national movement with unions, students, clergy, civil rights and other activists fighting for a living wage and fair treatment of workers.

Bahr has continued his predecessors' tradition of strong political and legislative action working with James Booe, who was elected as running mate with Bahr as secretary-treasurer in 1985, and then with Barbara Easterling, who succeeded Booe in 1992.

Bahr is adamant that political action lays the foundation for workers' rights. "On election night in 2004, we got new Republican governors in Indiana, Kentucky and Missouri - and each new governor announced the termination of bargaining rights for tens of thousands of public employees," Bahr said.

In contrast, CWA helped Bill Richardson win the governorship in New Mexico, and: "One of the first things he did was institute a collective bargaining law, and we now have 4,000 new members in that state."

Under Bahr's leadership, CWA has continued and expanded community action and international affairs activities, which translate into public support and help from allies in times of struggle.

"Joe Beirne coined the phrase, 'CWA -the community-minded union,' and locals still use that motto and live by it. I think our people understand that we're all members of the broader community, that we have a responsibility outside the workplace," said Bahr, whose many activities included serving as chairman of the board of the United Way International.

In the global arena, Executive Vice President Larry Cohen heads the worldwide organization of telecom unions, the Telecom Sector of the Union Network International. (For years Bahr led its predecessor, known as PTTI.) Today, CWA is constantly involved in joint organizing and bargaining support programs with counterparts in Mexico, Canada, Europe and Asia.

Legacy of Learning
Among his accomplishments, Bahr is proudest of developing opportunities for members and, in many cases, their families to pursue lifelong training and educational opportunities. Beginning with the Alliance program at AT&T, CWA has gone on to bargain educational benefits at its major employers, with programs for both on-campus and online classes.

The genesis of this focus was the realization in the mid-1980s, according to Bahr, that "with rapidly changing technologies and shifting job patterns, we were going to have to provide members the means of achieving career mobility. Only through continuous education can people be prepared for the next generation of work."

He cites as an example the virtual disappearance of the telephone operator because of technology. "The various joint training programs like the Alliance and Pathways and our own CWA/NETT Academy courses have been especially important to women, allowing them to move into new and higher paying technical jobs."

Bahr's passion for lifelong adult education is personal. His own college education was interrupted by World War II, followed by the need to support a growing family.

In the early 1980's he was persuaded to finish his studies through an adult learning program at Empire State College, studying nights and weekends while also running CWA's largest district. He earned his Bachelor's degree in 1983.

Bahr sums up his satisfaction with CWA's efforts in promoting lifelong education with this anecdote:

"I'll always remember attending the 10th anniversary of the Alliance at a big meeting in Chicago. A woman came up to me and said, 'President Bahr, you have no idea how you've changed my life.' I said, 'Really?' She said, "I got my GED, I got my Bachelors degree and I just got my Masters. Next month, I begin my Ph. D. work all under the Alliance. It's been incredible to hear stories like that over and over."

In recognition of CWA's leadership in this area, President Clinton appointed Bahr to chair the Commission for a Nation of Lifelong Learners, which recommended a national agenda for developing continuing education and skill training programs for American workers.

Union. Family. Proud.
Bahr has always considered unions to be more than institutions, and union work more than a job—rather, a calling. He underscored that philosophy at the end of his 1985 acceptance speech: "We are united, we are family, we are union, and we are damn proud of it!"

Recently he said, "I realize even more today than when I delivered that phrase that indeed, we are one big family. This union has been my extended family. You realize every day, whether you're a shop steward, a local union officer, a staff rep or national officer, that virtually every day you have the ability to impact somebody's life. And as you continue to do this work and realize how many lives you've helped to change, hopefully all for the better, you get that feeling of family. It's extraordinarily rewarding."

Bahr's own family is close-knit and he credits his wife, Florence, with being a valuable helpmate and partner who has shared his values and commitment, and understood the need for so many nights on the road. Having met on a blind date, the two were still teenagers when they married while Bahr was home on shore leave from his Merchant Marine ship.

Their families told them it would never work, Bahr recalls with a chuckle, noting that they just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. The couple has a son, Dan, and daughter, Janice, five granddaughters and two great-grandsons.

Bahr intends to stay active in retirement to say the least. He plans to accept an invitation to be Labor Leader in Residence at the National Labor College, and has agreed to help AFL-CIO President John Sweeney on special assignments. He also plans to work with the Coalition on Health Care in pressing for a national health care program.

On top of all that, "I'm going to be Larry Cohen's unpaid organizer at Verizon Wireless--that's a personal issue with me," he says.