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One (really) big union
By Yoko Kuramoto-Eidsmoe
Local 37082 president
As I was reflecting on the things I might drone
on about in this column, it struck me that one thing a lot
of Guild members might not know is who else is in this gigantic
union called the Communications Workers of America.
The first thing to understand about CWA's structure
is that it's broken down into geographical units called districts.
Because CWA used to be primarily a phone-company union, the
districts are based on the old Bell company divisions. For
a map of the districts, go to: http://www.cwa-union.org/about/district-local-sites.html
District 1 is the northeastern U.S., from New
York/New Jersey through Maine.
Eastern Canada used to be part of this district,
but has just moved into the Canadian Region with the rest
of Canada.
District 2 is the District of Columbia and
the states clustered around it (Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia).
District 3 is the South, more or less: Alabama,
Florida, Georgia, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Tennessee,
Puerto Rico.
District 4 is the upper Midwestern states that
touch the Great Lakes: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan,
and Wisconsin.
There is no District 5. No, I don't know what
they did with it.
District 6 is the Southern Midwest: Arkansas,
Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas.
District 7 is our home district, and it's geographically
huge. It contains most of the sparsely populated, large, square
states: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota,
Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah,
Washington, Wyoming. It used to have Western Canada as well
before the Canada Region was created.
There is no District 8. Off gallivanting with
District 5, I suppose.
District 9 is California, Nevada, and Hawaii.
No Districts 10 to 12, either. It has something
to do with restructuring. Someone explained it to me once,
but I've forgotten.
District 13 is Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Each District has a vice-president, and each
vice-president sits on the union's Executive Board. District
vice-presidents have an office and a staff, and they are generally
directly involved in bargaining and grievances.
Just as in Congress or other bodies that have
geographic representation, regional differences play out in
how different vice-presidents and district delegations fall
on different issues. For example, the Diversity Proposal adopted
at the recent CWA Convention had huge support in District
9, but faced opposition in District 6.
Another way a lot of CWA members define themselves
is by sector. While CWA began its history as a phone-workers
union—and it still represents a large number of people
in that industry, the majority of members today don't work
in telecommunications.
CWA now represents flight attendants; news-industry
workers (newsroom and non-newsroom, print and broadcast);
police (including Seattle's finest); school-bus builders;
public workers; health-care workers, and the Utah ski patrol,
to name but a few.
Some of these workers have been organized directly
into existing CWA locals.
Others, like ours, remain in a separate local.
That's because our old union, The Newspaper Guild, merged
into CWA but retained its own identity.
Those sectors that remain separate under their
merger agreements also have a seat on the board and have officers
and staff. (The Newspaper Guild also has regional representation
on its board, but those are not full-time paid positions.)
Now... how relevant is all this information to your daily
life? Probably not very, but it's all stuff that you might
need to know if you decide you want to make some changes in
the union on a large scale. It's also stuff that it never
occurs to anyone to ask, or to explain, so I thought I'd take
a few minutes to do that.
Got other questions about how the union works?
Let me know: seattleyoko@gmail.com.
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