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CWA Charges Sprint With Illegal Action
``` TELECOM Digest Thu, 22 Jul 94 00:13:30 CDT Volume 14 : Issue 329
Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson
[much omitted]
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Date: Wed, 20 Jul 1994 13:30:05 -0500 From: phil@rochgte.fidonet.org (Phillip Dampier) Subject: CWA Charges Sprint With Illegal Action
CWA CHARGES SPRINT WITH ILLEGALLY SHUTTING LATINO SUBSIDIARY A WEEK BEFORE UNION VOTE
Sprint Long Distance illegally shut down a San Francisco subsidiary that markets services to the Spanish-speaking community just one week before the 177 workers were set to vote on unionizing in a National Labor Relations Board election, the Communications Workers of America declared in charges filed with the NLRB.
CWA is requesting that the NLRB seek an injunction to re-open the office under Section 10(j) of the National Labor Relations Act, and also is calling for the labor board to proceed with a representative election. The unfair practice charges were formally filed against Sprint late yesterday in San Francisco.
The union charged that Sprint abruptly closed the office on July 14 to retaliate against the workers for seeking to organize -- approximately 70% had petitioned for an election -- and to block what portended to be the first successful unionization campaign so far at the aggressively anti-union long distance company.
CWA also charged that the action was intended to intimidate employees at other Sprint facilities who have been seeking to organize despite fierce management opposition as laid out in Sprint's "Union-Free Management Guide."
Sprint bought La Conexion Familiar ("The Family Connection") in 1992 after contracting with the company for several years to sell Sprint long distance service and provide Spanish language customer service to the Latino community throughout the west and mid-west. La Conexion's total workforce numbers 235, mostly women of Latin American origin.
La Conexion's business represents about seven percent of the Latino market niche in long distance nationwide, which is growing 2 1/2 times the rate of the market overall.
In what CWA President Morton Bahr described as "a brutal mass execution," Sprint management suddenly secured the La Conexion offices the afternoon of July 14, and told the workers to collect their belongings and leave the facility after first submitting to body searches by the security force.
"Workers burst into tears, at least one woman fainted, and paramedics were summoned," the San Francisco Examiner reported of the scene. Captain Philip Harvey, who led the paramedic team, said: "There was a point where we were going to offer the services of a psychological counseling team because we feared they might start calling 911 and overwhelm the system." One female worker was taken to the hospital for further treatment for what was described as a "psycho-social crisis."
Shortly after the closing took place on July 14, a top Sprint official who was briefing several CWA officials on the action disparaged La Conexion workers as mainly "illegal immigrants" who spoke "Hispanic" and who had "bought" their $7 an hour jobs with bribes.
While Sprint claimed that it closed the operation for economic reasons, in fact this past March the company general manager told the {San Francisco Chronicle} that La Conexion had been growing as much as 20% a month for the past two years and that he projected a tripling of annual revenues by 1996. As recently as last month, a Sprint national newsletter featured La Conexion as a unique and "very successful" marketing enterprise.
"They told us that the reason they're closing is they were losing money but that's a lie," said one of the fired workers Argelia Ardon. "They closed us because we were organizing."
Threats that Sprint would pull the plug on La Conexion if the workers voted to unionize had been widely rumored, drawing letters of concern from telecommunication union leaders in Germany and France, where Sprint is seeking a partnership with the national phone companies.
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[remainder of issue omitted] ```
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