National Skills Summit

National Skills Summit
Skills Summit Highlights

Statement from Morty Bahr

Morty Bahr

Everything that we do is in partnership with one or more employers: with agencies of government, with academia, mainly with community colleges. Also with the Empire State College, which plays an enormous role because of their emphasis on distance learning.

It is important to know how CWA got started in this role. I was elected president of the union 15 years ago when both the telecommunications industry and the nation were undergoing many changes. The break up of the Bell system threw our members out of their safe cocoon of monopoly. Before the break up, new technologies came out of Bell laboratories at what I would call "a humane pace." No one was going to release new communications technology ahead of them. As a result, no one ever lost a job due to changes in technology.

Then, there was the break up of the Bell system -- and how that changed society in this country and abroad. The rapid deregulation in the telecommunications industry and the global economy impacted our 500,000 members and caught them by surprise. It did not really matter which facet of this series of rapid changes caused the pain. The pain was there. The word job security - that idea someone could come out of high school and go to work for the telephone company for 35 years and retire from the same office, perhaps from the same desk - was gone forever.

Instead, we begin to work towards employment security and to ask ourselves: How do we make our members more employable? Hopefully within the company at which they work, but if not, in the general industry. We came up with the following solution: We have to negotiate for the very best educational programs that we can as a union and then encourage our members to avail themselves of these opportunities.

What we have done by encouraging the use of these educational programs is develop - without actually calling it that - the best affirmative action program in America… We have changed lives. When the president of their union stands before a group of telephone operators and tells them that they will not finish their careers as telephone operators because the technology is changing, they listen. They pay attention but then you have to give them the answer. The answer is education. Avail yourselves of the opportunity to learn. Not only are we trying to help our own members, we are now encouraging workers to return to school for the sake of self-fulfillment. Companies are now competing with each other for the opportunity to partner with technology companies to upgrade worker skills.