American Federation of Teachers
Higher Education Conference
April 11, 2003
Remarks of Paul E. Almeida, President
Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO

The Department for Professional Employees is a coalition of 25 national unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO which represent over four million highly skilled, white-collar employees. AFT is one of those affiliates. DPE unions include professionals in over three hundred separate and distinct occupations. The occupations represented by DPE break down into five major areas health care, education, science and engineering, arts and entertainment and public administration. The DPE is the largest association of professional, technical and administrative support workers in the United States.

Among the missions of DPE are several that relate to this panel, they are:

·        Building alliances with non-union associations and societies that also promote the interests of the professional workforce;

·        Creating forums for affiliated unions to discuss and cooperate on issues of mutual concern,

·        Advance a public policy agenda in federal and state government that enhances the economic security, well-being and status of professionals.

The proliferation of professional and technical workers in the last quarter of the 20^th century, as well as the growth of contingent and other non-traditional work arrangements has caused major shifts within the American labor movement.  As implied commitments by employers to workers evaporate, so do the loyalties of professional employees to the organizations that employ them.

The changing character and conditions of work and the resulting turbulence have brought larger numbers of professional and technical workers into the labor movement. Today the workforce is 60% white collar and the labor movement is 50% white collar.

During the past two years, teachers and school administrators, engineers and technicians, nurses and doctors, university researchers, professors and graduate teaching assistants, psychologists, customer service representatives, as well as a host of others, have joined the millions who already find a voice for themselves and their professions within the unions of the DPE.

Research done by the DPE has shown that among professional and technical workers there is a high level of job satisfaction. Nearly 83% reported high job satisfaction because of the type of work they performed. Additionally 73% reported that they had been in their current occupation for the past ten years and 74% expected to be in that occupation in the next five years. The commitment to the work they do does not imply approval of employer actions. Top management was given negative rating by 56% in our study.

For professional and technical workers, the key attraction of employee organizations is that they give workers a voice. The key reason cited for not joining any employee organization is that they may create conflict at work. Eighty-one percent of the workers surveyed believe that employee organizations should seek to develop a cooperative relationship with the employer. Among different types of employee organizations, the top pick is a union by 36% and the second is a “professional association’ by 30%. Only about 12% opposed any form of organization. Professional are joiners.

As part of the research that DPE performs for our affiliates is to generate a series of publication that list societies among the areas of workers covered by our affiliates. Presently we have five such publications of societies for:

Professional and Technical Health Care Workers;

Engineers, Scientists, and Related Technicians;

Journalists and Communications professionals;

Psychological and Social Service Occupations; and

College and University Teachers.

So what does this tell us?

It tells that many of our members may well be and in fact are members of these societies.

So how do we use this to promote our objectives?

WE build coalitions.

I would like to share with several coalitions that DPE has been involved with and the positive outcome that we have achieved by our efforts.

The first began a year ago and dealt with an issue before the Federal Communications Commission’s dealing with the Newspaper-Broadcast cross-ownership rules. Federal law mandates that FCC rules undergo a biennial review.

Simply put the 1975 rule bars a single company from owning a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same market. The purpose of the rule is to prevent any single corporate entity from becoming too powerful a single voice within a community, and thus the rule seeks to maximize diversity within a market.

At the request of one of our affiliates the Newspaper Guild – CWA, DPE brought together several of our affiliates including the Writers Guild of American East and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists to devise a strategic campaign. The group determined after a meeting with FCC Chairman Michael Powell that we would need independent empirical data to make our case. On behalf of those affiliates I mentioned DPE engaged the Economic Policy Institute to engage Douglas Gomery a professor of media economics and history in the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Gomery’s analysis exceeded our expectations.

Our next question was how do we get this information widely know and in the right hands?

DPE affiliates decided to build a coalition and to hold a press event to introduce Gomery’s analysis. We knew who we could count on within labor to join our coalition but we needed a broader reach.

Our first step was to put a high profile panel together to attract the needed attention.

Refer to agenda.

Then build the coalition.

Refer to the co-sponsors.

Site some of the not usual suspects.

The press event was a great success with over 125 people turning out for it including many of the FCC staffers who would be charged with writing the rules. Further briefings were requested by FCC staff and key congressional committee members were briefed as well.

Our strategy had five parts: delay, educate, force public hearings, force congressional hearings and congressional pressure on the FCC.

After delay worked with the FCC’s review of this rule, FCC chairman Powell initiated a broader review of six major broadcast rules in September of 2002. Powell described this review as, “the most comprehensive look at media ownership ever undertaken by the FCC.”

The six rules are:

The Newspaper-Broadcast Cross-Ownership Prohibition;

Local Radio Ownership;

National TV Ownership;

Local TV Multiple Ownership;

Radio/TV Cross-Ownership Restriction; and

Dual Television Network Rule.

Three weeks after Powell announced consolidation of their rule making the FCC released 12 empirical studies which according to the FCC purported to have examined the current state of the media marketplace, including how consumers use the media, how advertisers view the different media outlets, and how media ownership affects diversity, localism, and competition.

The FCC’s plan was to try and fast track the rules and have them issued by the end of 2002.

The original coalition of the Newspaper Guild, Writers Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists met to determine how to proceed. We decided to commission Dean Baker Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research to critique the FCC studies.

Refer to handout.

It is available on the DPE web page for viewing and copying.

Baker’s critique has been widely distributed to our original coalition partners, congress and the FCC staff and commissioners. In fact three commissioners and their staff have been personally briefed by Baker and members of the coalition. 

To date our strategy is working as no rules have been issued.

In fact on March 19, Chairman Powell received a letter from a group of Senators. I’ll read you the last paragraph of the letter. “It is therefore essential that the Commission justify how any changes in media rules will promote diversity, competition, and localism by soliciting public comments focused specifically on the agency’s proposed changes. Please do not proceed with a final rule until the Commission provides both a full description of all proposed changes and the empirical foundation for the changes, as well as provide for an ample public comment period, so that members of the public and Congress will have an opportunity to evaluate the new rules’ potential impact.”

This letter was signed by Senators Wayne Allard, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins not your usual suspects for our support. And just last week the commerce committee with jurisdiction over the FCC sent another letter to Powell with Olympia Snowe and Trent Lott joining most of the democrats as they questioned the chairman further about these rule changes.

So where are we with this coalition?

The rule making has been substantially delayed, we have forced three public hearings one by the FCC and two held by the coalition partners, one congressional hearing by Senator McCain, we have educated congressionals, the FCC, some in labor (the AFL-CIO Executive Council recently passed a resolution supporting our campaign), and the public. Our fear is that if we they don’t speak up now we will wake up one morning with only a handful of people deciding what we see, hear and read for news. 

The next coalition I would like to speak about actually started before the previous one but due to the events of 9/11 it was postponed and then slightly redirected.

This coalition started within labor with AFT, The Newspaper Guild and DPE hosting an event at the National Press Club on “The Corporate State (of Mind) and Free Expression.”

The concept for the event was the growing concern and pressures on the rights of professionals to perform their work without undue restrictions. This program actually fits well with the rule making that is going on at the FCC. With fewer and fewer owners controlling the market place of ideas the public is limited to the diversity of voices that is necessary for full and open debate of the issues facing us today.

A by product of this event was the establishment of the “Professional Rights and Opportunities Network” the launching of a web site DPE-pro.net. PRO will release periodic reports, hold forums, coordinate public information campaigns and propose model contract language, as well as suggest legislative and regulatory reforms on issues pertaining to the rights of professional employees. We plan to expand this coalition and to begin aggressively monitoring many of the employers where our members work.

I would like to touch on three more coalitions very briefly. The first deals with an issue that that has impacted the high tech workforce. The H1-B guest worker visas, a provision in immigration law that allows employers to sponsor high tech workers to work in the US for up to six years. These H1-B visa holders are not classified as employees and therefore cannot be organized they most always work for less than the prevailing wage and US workers have no protects when layoffs occur. US workers can be laidoff while H1-B workers remain, US workers can be laidoff and then replaced by H1-B visa holders. There is a question that gets raised with higher ed graduate and students who sometimes get H1-B visa as well. Higher ed is exempt from the cap and provisions that the high tech employers operate under. Attached to the material is a list of the coalition. This coalition is combination of labor, engineering societies, and independent employees associations.

Building a Digital Workforce was a coalition of labor and business through the National Policy Association to look at the digital divide and lastly Highway Robbery a report on contracting out is the by product of the National Association of State Highway and Transportation Unions a group of AFL-CIO and independent unions.

While coalitions are often successful they are often born out of necessity and short lived. AFT’s Secretary Treasurer Ed McElroy once told me something that Al Shanker had shared with him “that you have to make a friend before you need a friend.”

That is how we should look at coalition building. 

Thank you.