Remarks by CWA Secretary-Treasurer Jeff Rechenbach at the 72nd CWA Convention

CWA Secretary-Treasurer Jeff Rechenbach addresses the 72nd CWA Convention in Washington, D.C. on July 26, 2010.

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Good afternoon. Thank you Ed for that very kind introduction, I wouldn’t “refudiate” a single word of it. But moreover, thank you for the leadership and energy that you have brought to our Board and our Union.

Did everyone enjoy the heat here in DC this past weekend? It was so hot on Saturday that I called my ex-wife just to get the cold shoulder.

As I was coming back from the break the security guard at the side entrance here was having his lunch and listening to Rush Limbaugh on his radio. I am still amazed this guy has people listening to him.

I did read the other day where Rush was just married for the 4th time, I heard he blamed the breakup of his first three marriages on Barack Obama. But his new wife is now officially the 4th woman to learn how he earned the nickname Rush.

I was also a little surprised to learn that Elton John performed at his wedding. So in Rush’s world it is OK for gays to sing at a wedding, just not their own.

Any of you make it over to the White House this weekend? You might have seen a tea bagger protest in Lafeyette Park across the street. A number of the signs they were carrying demanded tax cuts. 88% of tea baggers actually believe their taxes have gone up under Obama, when in fact, taxes went down for over 98% of Americans! So apparently the message here is we want to be taxed less, but we want to be taxed less by a white guy.

It is an honor to be here again as your Secretary Treasurer. And it is a privilege to work with my colleagues here on the Board, most especially, our Executive Vice President Annie Hill and our President Larry Cohen. With our movement under assault I can’t think of two others I would want to lead us through this difficult time.

I wish I were standing in front of you today helping to make plans for explosive growth in our Union on the heels of the Employee Free Choice Act becoming law. But all of you know the sad, sordid tale of that. Instead I am charged with filling you in on where we stand as a Union without the benefit of EFCA.

First off, let me assure you that politically we will not stand idly by and feel sorry for ourselves. With 60 Democrats in the United States Senate it was reasonable to expect that we could hold our own with this super-majority and get the law passed.

But we had Senators who forgot how they got to the world’s most exclusive club, one in particular, Blanche Lincoln.

I was thrilled President Cohen invited Lt. Governor Halter here this morning because I viewed the Lincoln/Halter race as a key turning point in our movement. For the first time in my career as a union activist, we were holding the “promise us anything, but turn their backs on us when they get in office” candidates, accountable.

We took on the Democratic establishment, the White House and former President Clinton, who glibly categorized us as a special interest group, all of whom blindly rallied to Senator Lincoln’s side.

They were joined by corporate interests, the oil industry, WalMart and the Chamber of Commerce who recognized they could beat Lincoln in November, but stood a good chance of losing to Halter.

Blanche Lincoln may have won the primary, but I can assure you it was labor that won the day. Blanche Lincoln will lose in November and be replaced by a Republican, but I don’t count that as the victory.

The victory comes with the message we sent to every blue dog Democrat that might be tempted to turn his or her back on working families. I can assure you that political insiders realize that Senator Lincoln had to spend every dime she could get her hands on in the primary and as a result the cupboard is bare for November, and her labor sugar daddy is not going to be taking her calls.

We will lose the seat in the fall but we win in the long run as spines around the country start to stiffen up. And God knows we need a few more spines in this town!

But in the meantime what is on the horizon for CWA? We find ourselves in a situation largely unfamiliar to our Union. The books are closed on the 2009/2010 fiscal year, and I am sure it comes as no surprise to you that we have been experiencing unprecedented membership loss.

In fact, this past fiscal year we lost more members than any year in history. We will start the upcoming fiscal year with 32,000 fewer CWA members than the previous year. And with announcements from some of our key employers, the year ahead seems on track for more of the same.

Beyond the human pain, which is immeasurable, what does that mean in dollars and cents? In the 2007/2008 fiscal year we projected over $120 million in dues income, for this fiscal year we have built a budget on a projected dues income of $99 million. A dramatic drop to be sure, but each of you have, no doubt, experienced similar losses, with maybe just a few less zeroes.

A Union that is going to survive into the future, especially one that has the added dimension of financial losses, needs to be in a constant state of self-examination. Simply longing for the past is not a strategy for the future.

Under President Cohen we began that process back in 2005 with our Ready For the Future initiative. Passed in 2006, it has enabled us to train and energize hundreds of activists across the country.

As a follow up to that I was asked to be part of a committee to take another look at the work we began with Ready for the Future. We came out with a number of suggestions and I want to thank you for your bold action to adopt most of them this morning.

But our report did not end there, and I hope you will take the time to read all of it, not just the items which require action. For example we believe a serious discussion of our allocation of assets should be undertaken.

We brag about our triangle with Collective Bargaining, Organizing and Legislative/Community Actions as the three sides, but truth be told, it is hardly a triangle when we spend nearly 80% of our assets on the collective bargaining side of that triangle.

With the desperate need for legislative action needed to give workers any hope for economic justice and with our Union losing 6% of our members every year, we find ourselves on a course that simply cannot be sustained.

While all three sides needn’t be in perfect balance, it is a physical impossibility to build a triangle where one side has 80% of the resources.

For the here and now however, the report that you will hear from the Finance Committee in a few minutes will include significant changes and cuts to accommodate our lost income.

For example, we have become much more aggressive with the renting out space in our Headquarters building. In the past year we leased out our entire second floor and within the past month we signed a lease with the Transport Workers Union to move their headquarters from New York City to here in Washington and lease out our entire 9th floor, including our Executive Board Meeting room.

We brought in professional fund advisors to manage and take fiduciary responsibilities for our Member’s Relief Fund, Defense Fund and Pension Plan. This change saved our funds over $700,000 annually in bank and transaction fees to those funds.

We have implemented an expedited local dues processing procedure and are in the midst of reworking our overall dues processing systems.

We have made application for the early retirement health care rebate under the new Obama healthcare plan, which should yield us $2 to $400,000 in relief to our over $8 million annual retiree health care costs.

We have reduced audit fees by a quarter of a million dollars by eliminating redundancies.

But clearly,this is not a problem that we can simply cut our way out of. This crisis can only be addressed with an aggressive growth vision. And it is not just for the sake of our bottom line, but for the very survival of our existing membership.

With only 7% of the private sector workforce in unions we can’t reasonably expect to make the same kind of gains at the bargaining table that we did when we represented nearly a third of the workforce.

And the right wing which has made an art form out of driving wedges between workers has a new target. Not satisfied with race, religious or other dividers, they have now singled out public workers for attack. If you are a public sector worker you are today under assault from nearly every corner of our society. It reminds me of the quote made famous in the 1800s by railroad tycoon, Jay Gould. He said, “I can hire one half of the workforce to kill the other.” Over 100 years later, if you are a public worker it sure feels that way.

Our nation desperately needs a revitalized and reenergized labor movement, not just for the sake of our survival, but for the sake of our overall economy. We cannot sit by and watch the tide of wealth continue to stream away from working class families and into the hands of the super wealthy.

I am sure many of you remember Joe the scab plumber from the 2008 Presidential campaign. He asked then candidate Obama about taxes on small businesses. And in the answer, Senator Obama talked about the need for the redistribution of wealth. Instantly, the minions at Fox News and others rose up in horror, wasn’t that Socialism?!?

Sadly, we never heard the Senator utter the words redistribution of wealth ever again during the campaign. But I submit to you my friends, that is exactly what we need to do in this nation.

How many of you here today consider yourselves to be in the top 10% of this nation in terms of financial wealth? I can assure you no one up here is in that category.

Well, the top 10% of Americans have an incredible 71% of this nation’s wealth. If you add in the next 10% you will find that the top 20% controls over 82%. The bottom 60%, the group that nearly every one of us in this room falls into, we control less than 5% of America’s wealth. In fact, the bottom 40% own less than 2/10ths of 1% of America’s wealth!

Think about that. The people that create the wealth enjoy the very smallest percentage of it. And the rich just keep getting richer.

Not to pick on you Yankee fans who were saddened with the passing of George Steinbrenner, by the way, George was originally from my home town of Rocky River, Ohio, but before you shed too many tears for George’s family, do you know how much tax they will have to pay on George’s $1.3 billion estate? Zero, zip, nada, nichts, not a penny. Money that we WORK for every day is taxable, but inherited wealth, tax free, no matter how large the estate. And George was the 4th billionaire in the US to die this year without having their estate taxed.

The rich and powerful in this nation control the wealth and will do whatever they need to do to hold onto it! The system is broken brothers and sisters and it will be up to us, the labor movement, the greatest instigator of social change in the last century and in this century, to step up and lead the coalitions that will be necessary to make the changes our nation needs.

Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities opens with, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And so it is here, with all of the challenges facing us, we can leave this hall with unity like we have never seen before, and turn this into the best of times. Or, we can turn on ourselves to the delight of those that would love to see us fail and quickly see bad times turned into the worst of times.

I know we are better than that, with all of the problems on our plate, you have demonstrated a commitment to our Union and our movement that is second to none. I can’t think of a better group of people to go into this battle with than our members and the leadership they have entrusted in this room.

Let me close with one of my very favorite quotes by Catherine Booth, the co-founder of the Salvation Army, she said, “If we are to better the future, we must disturb the present.”

Thank you for being willing to join as President Cohen leads us to rip down the “do not disturb” sign that the status quo has hanging outside the gates of power and charging forward to better the future for our members, their families and all working families in our nation.

Thank you for allowing me to spend this time with you.