President's Perspective
The Newspaper Guild's Place in CWA, Its 'Parent Union'

(July 17, 2009) It’s been a dozen years since the Newspaper Guild became a sector of the Communications Workers of America, and there are still instances in which we’re not quite sure how we should relate to one another.

That’s OK. Married couples don’t always have everything worked out after a dozen years, either.

The principal place where the rubber hits the road is in the workplace. Your fellow Guild members, your steward, your bargaining unit officers – that’s where the union lives and breathes every day.

The Washington-Baltimore Guild is here to help its bargaining units when they need help, and to sustain units when they’re not in crisis mode. We’ve got a talented group of WBNG members, each of whom has looked beyond the individual bargaining unit with an eye toward strengthening the local. Sometimes they get active in local matters to make sure their unit gets the attention they think it deserves. And that’s fine, too. The more active you are, the stronger your unit tends to be. And that benefits the local.

The local, more often than not, looks first to TNG-CWA headquarters when seeking common cause. TNG has developed quite a knack over the last several years of getting its money’s worth out of its operations. There’s a dedicated corps of workers who know the answers or know where to look for answers – and who have the guts to admit when they don’t have the answer.

The Guild also benefits from wielding considerable influence within the 700,000-member CWA itself. CWA has 19 members on its Executive Board, and Guild members occupy three of those VP slots.

Bernie Lunzer, as the 32,000-member TNG’s president, is automatically a CWA vice president – as is the case with the president of every union that’s merged with CWA and become a CWA sector.

Arnold Amber, leader of CWA/SCA (Syndicat des Communications d’Amérique) in Canada, is another vice president. As part of the TNG-CWA merger agreement, CWA effected a “reverse merger,” putting its Canadian members in TNG’s jurisdiction, as the Guild had more Canadian members than CWA did.

Nestor Soto, president of the Guild local in Puerto Rico, is in the middle of his first full term as a CWA “diversity” vice president. CWA, noting that its Executive Board was rather male and rather pale, avoided getting stale by creating four regional “diversity” VP slots so that women and people of color could serve. They don’t have the salaries or office help that CWA’s other VPs get, but they do have voice and vote – and that’s what counts most.

The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild is, geographically speaking, in CWA District 2, headquartered in Bowie, Md. (We’re the second-largest CWA local in the District.) The District 2 VP is Ron Collins, who supplied invaluable help when WBNG organized Casa de Maryland earlier in the decade. Casa has turned out to be, member for member, one of our strongest and most active bargaining units.

When I went to graduate school for a labor studies degree, one of my classmates was Ralph Maly, a longtime CWA staffer who is now CWA’s vice president for communications and technologies. I have yet to lobby Ralph on any issue before the Executive Board, but I know he would give me a fair hearing.

And someone we ought to consider an honorary Guild member is CWA president Larry Cohen. Larry was CWA’s organizing director when the Guild started shopping for merger partners in 1993. Larry courted TNG assiduously, and the Guild responded to his entreaties with the merger, agreed to in 1995 and formalized two years later. In 1998, Larry was in a closely contested race for CWA executive vice president against a candidate who wanted CWA to remain, well “a telephone union.” But Guild members’ votes at the convention in Chicago helped put Larry over the top, sending him on the path to the CWA presidency he occupies today.

Larry is a relentless advocate of organizing – and also of labor unity, as he has been working hard for reunification of the AFL- CIO and Change to Win, and to bring the unaffiliated National Education Association into the fold.

We’re well positioned within our local and within CWA to do great work. Join us, won’t you?