Organizing Against the Odds
When 311 workers at King Teleservices decided to form a union, the idea caught on fast. But shoddy labor law opened the door for management to conduct a campaign of intimidation.

May 2005

By Esther Kaplan

It all started with a phone call. Last fall, Denzil Wallace, who was working the night shift answering 311 calls at King Teleservices, decided that he had complaints of his own: no sick days, few vacation days, chintzy wages, and, above all, disrespect from the managers. He found Local 1180 on the web and called up to say that he and some of his co-workers had decided it was
time for a union.

When the city launched the 311 help line in March 2003, it hired some 200 workers to answer questions and complaints related to heat problems, parking rules, snow days, and more at a city call center on Maiden Lane. Many of them, given the new job title of Associate Call Center Representative, soon affiliated with Local 1180. The city contracted with King to handle the “overflow” calls—and before long King had hired so many employees that its Long Island City facility was fielding half of the escalating volume of calls. And while the city workers started at $30,500 a year with full benefits, workers at King like Wallace were earning only about $11 an hour, with no guaranteed work hours, no health coverage, and no vacation time until after a year. “There was no consistency in how people were treated,” says Claudia Sanchez (not her real name), who works the swing shift at King. “You might get the schedule, and instead of five days, you’d have three. Or you’d be two minutes late and get suspended for a week. There was constant public humiliation, where we’d be treated like children. And there was no recourse—no way for
people to protect themselves.”

The union catches fire

The conditions were so bad that, at first, the idea of a union caught on quickly. At the first meeting in October, four people came; at the next, 14. Then 25 King employees signed a public statement saying that they had formed a union organizing committee, and inviting their colleagues to join them. By Thanksgiving, 67 of the approximately 110 help-line workers at King had signed union authorization cards and Local 1180 filed an election petition with the NLRB. “If we were in Canada,” says Local 1180 organizer Chris Aikin, “that’s where it would have ended. Local 1180 would have immediately been authorized as the bargaining agent, and we could have moved straight to negotiating a contract.

But New York is no Canada.

A campaign of intimidation

In the United States, an employer is not obliged to honor “card check”—when a majority of employees sign union authorization cards. Instead, management can insist on an election and issue legal challenges about whether the workers constitute an “appropriate bargaining unit.” These processes slow down unionization enough to allow management to begin a campaign of intimidation—which is exactly what happened at King.

First, there were the fliers: “We strongly urge you NOT to sign or return any union petition or card provided to you by the CWA or anyone else.” Then, says Aikin, came private one-on-one meetings where management scared workers who supported the union. Pro-management spies showed up at union meetings to identify union ringleaders. Finally, two staunch union supporters were fired, ostensibly over minor infractions. “It was like a script,” says Sanchez. “Everything Chris said they were going to do, they did.”

But the script worked: soon several 311 workers who had signed union cards showed up at Local 1180 and demanded to get their cards back. The writing was on the wall when King hired some 25 to 30 trainees, who were kept isolated from the floor—and from any information about the union. Their role, according to Aikin, was to dilute the pro-union vote come election time. By December 22, the union supporters at King were so demoralized and outnumbered that 1180 withdrew the NLRB petition, and the organizing drive was over. “The employer did what companies usually do, which is hire a union-busting law firm” says Atul Talwar, an attorney for CWA District 1, which includes Local 1180. “These highly paid consultants run a campaign of fear and inducement, based on private information about employees.”

If a manager knows that one worker has a son with a medical problem, explains Talwar, all he has to do is put his arm around that employee and say, “You don’t want to jeopardize your health benefits, do you?” and that’s the end of that worker supporting the union. And free speech wasn’t as free for the 311 workers as it was for King management. Employers can hold a “captive audience” meeting, where management can fire workers for not attending—and use that meeting to spread anti-union propaganda. Unions, on the other hand, don’t even have the guaranteed right to distribute union literature on the premises or get a list of employees to call outside of work hours.

Talwar says conducting a union election in this kind of high-pressure environment would be like telling a political candidate that her election will be held in her opponent’s office, that her opponent can call mandatory meetings
with all of the voters and she can’t, and that only her opponent has access to all the names and numbers of the voters until just before the vote. “It’s not what we’d call a free and fair election,” says Talwar.

Few rights worth respecting

The 1935 National Labor Relations Act guarantees “full freedom of association,” including the right to join a union and to bargain collectively.
The law also makes it illegal for employers to “interfere with, restrain, or coerce” workers as they try to exercise these rights. But the penalties for violating this law are so weak that most employers consider them a routine cost of doing business. If the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) finds that a company has intimidated workers trying to organize, the company
is only required to post a notice stating that it violated the law and explaining workers’ right to organize. “That’s it,” says Talwar. “No fines, no penalties.” And if a worker is fired for his or her union activities, it can take up to three
years for an NLRB verdict, and then all a company has to do is pay the worker back pay—minus whatever that worker has earned from
other sources in the meantime.

Because of these minimal consequences for violating the law, workers who try to form unions in the United States are often spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, or even deported in reprisal, according to
a 2000 report from Human Rights Watch. NLRB data shows that at least 23,320 workers were victims of these anti-union tactics in 2003. The Human Rights Watch report concluded that “workers’ freedom of association is under sustained attack in the United States, and the government is often failing in its responsibility [to] protect workers’ rights.” Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO’s director of organizing, calls this state of affairs “a moral outrage.”

Despite his company’s campaign of intimidation and firings, Peter Harkins, chairman of King Teleservices, told the New York Sun in January, “The fact is that we haven’t violated any rules. It’s that the employees here don’t want [the union].” Claudia Sanchez, the swing shift worker, disagrees. “Almost across the board, people got on with it. Not just the 311 people but the rest of the
people on the floor got interested,” she says. “It was a pretty significant statement to get almost 70 out of 110 workers to sign cards. If management
hadn’t managed to break the momentum, we’d have had a union by now.”

The consequences of privatization

The climate for public sector workers seeking a union—at least here in New York City—is far less hostile. The employer of public sector workers is the government—in other words, elected officials who have to face the voters.
“We’re able to go to the boss and say, ‘We can produce so many people on election day,’ and that gives us a seat at the table,” says Atul Talwar, the labor lawyer. Plus, the local Public Employment Relations Board is much more responsive than the notoriously understaffed NLRB. “The law for public sector workers isn’t pro-worker,” says Talwar, “but it’s much less anti-worker than the private sector.”

But a growing trend by city, state, and federal government officials to privatize public sector jobs means that many people who were once government workers now find themselves facing the poorer worker protections in the private sector. A survey conducted by the Charlotte Observer in late 2003 found that all but two states use outside contractors to answer calls from Food Stamp recipients. And George W. Bush has announced plans to privatize as many as 850,000 federal workers, including such essential
jobs as tax collection and aviation safety. Elected officials in some 31 states and on Capitol Hill have begun to resist this trend, considering legislation that would at least block the outsourcing of government work to companies overseas.

One powerful reform effort could make a difference for workers like Denzil Wallace and Claudia Sanchez: a bill drafted in part by the AFL-CIO called the Employee Free Choice Act. Under this legislation, when a majority of employees sign cards declaring their interest in joining a union—just like the 311 workers at King Teleservices—management would be required to recognize the union. The law would also strengthen the penalties for intimidating or firing workers during organizing drives. “The labor movement,” wrote Acuff in the April 18 Nation magazine, “agrees almost unanimously that the freedom to form unions is the central issue at the heart of our work over the next four years.”

In the meantime, the effects of the unionization effort are still being felt at King. In January and February, King management called a series of meetings to dialogue with employees, and suddenly granted workers three sick days a year plus raises of 75 cents to $1.25 an hour. “Had it not been for our unionization effort,” says Sanchez, “they would never have done the little that they’ve now done. Even though we didn’t win, some good came out of it.”

It’s not over ’til it’s over

And the struggle at King isn’t over yet. Jonathan Werbell, a spokesperson for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, told the New York Sun that 311 call overflow was only outsourced because when the help-line was new, it was hard to gauge how much staff would be needed. Once King’s contract expires, likely in two years (the city has refused to turn over the contract to 1180), the City Council may review the mayor’s decision to use an outside contractor. “Instead of contracting the work out, maybe the city should hire these workers and pay them a decent wage with full benefits,” says Susan Russell, chief of staff to City Council member Robert Jackson, chair of the Council’s Contracts Committee. “And if we’re going to contract the work out, then we have to ask whether we’re treating the workers fairly and what steps the city will take to make sure these workers get the pay and benefits they deserve.” Meanwhile, King has just announced that it will move its 311 callers from Long Island City to Brooklyn, where a core group of union supporters may restart their organizing efforts.

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