campaign continues, american history tv presented series, historic presidential elections. learn about the issues of different eras, uncover what made the elections historic. explore their lasting impact on the nation. this saturday, the election of 1980. >> i been president now for almost 4 years. i've had to make thousands of decisions. and, each one of those decisions has been a learning process. i've seen the scene and strength of my nation and the crisis it approached in a tentative way. and have had to deal with those crises as best they could. >> are you better off than you were four years ago? is it easier for you to go and buy things in the store that was four years ago? is a more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? is america is respected throughout the world as it was?

do you feel that our security is as safe, that we are as strong as we were four years ago? >> in a landslide victory, ronald reagan defeated incumbent jimmy carter. watch historic presidential elections. saturday at 7:00 eastern on american history tv on c-span2. so now without further ado tonight, i am very excited to welcome debbie j. goldman celebrating the release of disconnected call center workers fight for good jobs in the digital age. goldman is yes -- [ applause ] >> the former research director and telecommunications policy director with the communications workers of america. this new book explores how call center employees and their union fight for good humane jobs in the face of degrading working conditions and lowering wages and how the actions of

workers, management and policymakers shape the social impact of new digital technologies and give new form to the telecommunications industry in a time of momentous change. goldman will be joined in conversation with joseph mccarten, a professor in the department of history at georgetown university and the executive director of the kalmanovitz initiative for labor and the working poor. please join me in welcoming to politics and prose. debbie j. goldman and joseph mccartney. >> [ applause ]thank you so much. first, let me say what a pleasure it is for me to be doing this event with debbie and before such a packed audience here, of very knowledgeable people, some of whom i think are in the book.

i first encountered debbie 17 years ago when she enrolled in a seminar, i was teaching at georgetown on the us labor and social history. and to see, um, the product of work she already had in mind when i met her 17 years ago, this book come to fruition in a really remarkable volume i would say one i think that's going to have a big impact on how historians like i think about recent us labor history. it's really such a pleasure. so debbie, if you would maybe start, it would be interesting for me and many people here, to hear what your journey was that led you to write this book. >> well, joe, first of all, thank you for that lovely introduction. and i also want to acknowledge

and thank politics and prose, not only the best bookstore in washington d.c, but probably in the country. [ applause ] >>and a union shop represented by the ufcw. and i want to acknowledge the owners when their employees wanted to organize collectively, they stood back and let the employees select a union without waging any kind of anti- union campaign. so thank you to them. ok. applause come out of our talk time so we can hold off on any more applause. joe, you asked me why i decided to write this book. well, when i started working at cwa, the communication workers of america in 1992, at that point, technology was already

decimating the work of the operators, the female job. within the, at that point, we would say the phone company, the communications company. but with the advent of competition with the break up of the bell system in 1984 and substitution of competition for regulation. we saw that the customer service operation was going to grow in importance. and when i say we saw, i want to acknowledge my mentor george cole who was the head of the research department. no applause. we love george. and i don't know if larry cohen is here at this point. hi, larry larry, who was then the organizing director and eventually the president of cwa for quite an important period of time. and they acknowledged that customer service was going to become a really vital part of the membership that we represented and a growing part. and this was at that point,

female dominated jobs. and they assigned to me the job of learning what was going on in the workplace. and i detail in the introduction to the book, the first introduction i had to a bell system, a telephone company call center. i was guided by a terrific woman, hazel de lavia, who was the president of her loca, and we went to a new jersey bell, at that time it was still called new jersey bell call center. and the manager took us in front of his computer and showed us how from his computer now, the same technology that routed the calls into the call center had attached to it software that could collect enormous data about what was going on in the call center.

every service representative's desk was color coded, whether she was on the phone or not on the phone. whether she had keyed out and said i'm off schedule or not. how long she was on the phone. what her sales were. he could punch, the same way you can do on your iphone now, he could punch down to that and see all that detail for that service rep. he could also punch out and see what was going on throughout his call center and then other call center managers were all tied in. they could see everything that was going on in every new jersey bell call center. he was absolutely delighted with the system. and hazel and i looked at each other and we said, oh, no, we know what this is going to mean. what it meant was that that kind of data that they were

collecting, allowed the management to squeeze out any second of downtime from the work that the call center service reps were doing. so they could speed up the work one call after another into the headphone. they could track whether the service rep was adhering to her schedule. if you called in and you asked and you were talking to the service rep and she was supposed to go on break at 10:30 but she was still on the call and she wanted to help you and she stayed on the call. she was out of what they called adherence. and if you were out and then if she took her 15 minute break and therefore came back late, she was again out of adherence. they implemented adherence tracking and could discipline people for not being in

adherence. and of course, what this did to the service rep whose identity was tied with being able to help people. it meant that she couldn't really do her job, which causes enormous stress. they could track your sales results. they could track what you said. and so if i called in and said i have a problem with my bill, the service rep was supposed to upsell to you. the customer who couldn't pay their bill was now getting a sales pitch. all of this was now enabled by this new digital technology. and so when i saw that, and hazel saw that, and this then got disseminated throughout both at&t and the local bell companies, our members began to rebel and they turned to their union, one of the few customer service groups that has a union . and they turned to cwa and

said, you've got to help us relieve this stress. now, the challenge is unions know how to negotiate over wages and benefits, pensions, health care. how do you negotiate to relieve stress? and what i had the front row seat was learning from our service rep union leaders what they thought needed to be done in order to make the job, what it had once been, which was a humane job, albeit paternalistic, militaristic, rules oriented. that was the bell system. yet, people had some degree of autonomy and control over being able to do their work. now, this was all driven by the computer. and i got to listen to our service rep leaders who were

telling us and the men who were negotiating their contracts, who were telling them here's what we need. we need some relief from this incessant surveillance of our work. sound familiar? we need some relief from this constant phone call dropping into us and we have to, oh what's it called? we had to do two tasks at one time, take the call for the new customer while we're typing in the notes from the other customer because we have no time to do our paperwork. we need some time off the phone so we can do what we promised the customers, call them back. so i was learning all these things and watching what were they able to achieve? how did they build power within

the male dominated union? and what was -- and then after 1996 when a new law was passed in congress, the telecommunications act of 1996, which opened up all markets to competition. so now the cable company was becoming your phone company and your internet company and eventually wireless was coming in. so we saw all of this happening, and i was assigned the lovely chance to pretend that i was a lawyer and an economist and represent cwa on telecommunications policy at the fcc. and on some legislation and eventually around mergers in front of the doj. so i was seeing what was happening under competition and deregulation at the front line workforce. while i was seeing the policies

that both democrats and republicans had adopted to substitute competition as the way to incent lower prices and innovation, instead of regulation. and what that meant was that our employers, which were at&t, verizon and other regional bell companies, our employers which had been union for decades were now competing with comcast, spectrum ,time warner, tmobile ,sprint, mci. all of these, not just non union anti union companies that the regulators were giving favorable treatment so that they would encroach upon the market share of the union

companies. so while we at one point, we as labor struggling against our employers, we were also seeing that in the larger political economy, the pressure was on our employers to race to the bottom. and that what we've seen. when the bell system was broken up in 1964 two thirds of telecommunication workers were union. if i were to ask you what the percent is today. my research department colleagues could tell you it's under 10% now. it's not because we've lost the industry, you know, how dynamic communications is. it's growing. some of it overseas, albeit, but it's growing. but what's growing are these non union companies? so that's why i wrote the book

. >> well said, and the passion that you hear in that answer. let me assure you sort of suffuses the book as debbie tells the story, which is about communications, workers and their struggles. yes. but i think it's also about the whole labor movement. all of what's happened to working people over the past half century or so. in some ways, the workers described in this book, the ones that debbie spent her working life at cwa devoted to trying to help and to keep organized and to fight, in some ways those workers were like canaries in the coal mine of what was happening to the working class in general, i would say in the late 20th century, this book begins in the 1960s, it ends around 2000 and between those times, a vast

change has taken place. part of it is a change in the nature of capitalism as we move from a kind of managerial to a financial capitalism. part of it is a change in technology from analog to digital, as debbie is talking about. part of it is a political change away from new deal style regulated economy to the neo liberal economy. so all of that is in the book. and that's one of the things i think that makes it a really powerful book for helping us understand not just communications workers, but what's been happening to workers in general. and part of the problems that they've been facing, fighting back. so debbie, to bring our audience into that story, could you say a few words about what it was like in the pre- divestiture era of at&t where you had a unionized workforce

of service workers, predominantly women. yes. as you would note, it was paternalistic, but the fact that they were a union was really crucial. what was that world like before all these changes started? >> i love to tell this story and i actually had to learn it because i came to cwa after computers had been brought in. so i did interviews with folks who had been service reps in the 1960s and 1970s, and they told me and taught me that at that point, the customer service business office was a small office located in your community. often the service reps knew the local community. they worked only on paper records. there's a picture in chapter one of my book that shows what the office was like at that point. and if you called in the person who would answer the phone and you answered on the first ring, there's a story i hear from hazel de lavia that she says to this day she cannot stand to have a phone ring twice. they were trained. customer service was absolutely

the culture of the bell system at that point. she would, you, the service rep would get the call for somebody in her area, and she had next to her a file cabinet of paper. they called it a tub that had all the records and you would search for -- my friend kathy riley is nodding because she had summer jobs in chicago -- in such an office. you would pull out the paper for that customer and you would, um, if they wanted, you know, there wasn't too many choices at that time, you could have a princess phone, you could have a black rotary dial phone. yes. and you could, you might have a question about your bill and the service rep would solve your problem and then make the notation by hand and put it in the outbox.

and somebody like kathy riley would come by and pick it up and take it to the service order writer who would type it up and then it would go to the appropriate department. and then it would finally come back to you the service rep and you would refile it. now, if it turned out you called in for and the person who's in your area is busy, then the call would go to another service rep who then would get up. i'm sorry. i shouldn't get out of this chair. who would get up and walk over and pick up the paper and maybe be able to talk a little bit to the other 30 or so service reps in the office build camaraderie, learn from each other and get up. i would ask how many times a day, 20 or 30 times a day. now, just think about that. you all probably have a picture of a warehouse sized call

center with cubicles dividing people one from the next. they do not get up from their seat except for if they are union, their negotiated breaks and their lunch hour, what a difference just in terms of health and safety and building friendship and camaraderie. that's what it was like in that period. to >> what extent did the breakup of the bell system begin to change all of that? and along with the introduction of new technology and how did workers react to the changes as they came? >> ok, the bell system was broken up in 1984 and i'm not going to tell that story. i have that in chapter two of the book, what was driving it? it's interesting to see that it was democrats as well as republicans who thought that competition should replace regulation. competition came first to the long distance industry. and i can see the demographics

of this audience, you remember when sprint and mci were offering you $100 so that you could switch your phone long distance service. so at&t now had to set up a brand new customer service operation prior to this if you had a question about before the break up of the bell system, if you had a question about your long distance bill, actually, the local company handled that question. now with the strict wall between the at and t the long distance company and the regional bells at and t had to set up a brand new customer service operation and they came to cwa and they said we're probably going to have to hire 10,000 to 13,000 people. they could be union. we're not going to fight that. that was in the old days. they actually thought that as

you grew a title, they, that they would be union, but we can't compete with the nonunion labor costs of mc i and sprint at the wage rate of the service reps that are, that are in your title. so if you want to keep those folks in house, you need to agree to a 20% wage cut. now, there were no service reps in these centers. so it wasn't a political problem that people would see their wages cut. but the union, oh, and by the way, what were they going to do? who are they going to contract out with? american airlines. which at that point with the saber system had the most advanced call center technology. so, if you were the union leader, and i see my friend larry cohen in the back thinking this through, what would you do? would you believe them that they were going to contract it

out and refuse to take the wage cut? or would you think? nah, they're not really going to do it. you don't know. and after much soul searching the unit that bargained with at&t agreed to the 20% wage cut. so that's what competition meant. in the local bell companies, they couldn't do that so they tried to divide the job and take the less skilled parts and make a 20% wage cut for that, but it didn't work. they wanted one stop shopping, but that's what competition meant, a race to the bottom. >> and part of that race to the bottom was driven as you allude to earlier by federal policies like the telecommunications act. and could you speak to the fact

that you noted earlier, it was both democrats and republicans that were favoring competition, opening up markets,in the telecommunications field and really not caring much about the impact that would have on workers. >> well, this was a period in which it was a lot of it was by democrats. it was senator kennedy's committee which did the investigation that led. and stephen breyer, who we, many of us love down the supreme court. his top aide that wrote the airline deregulation act that not only put downward pressure on the airlines, but as we've seen over the past decades, a customer service has just gone, you know, it's disappeared in the airline industry, trucking all of this and telecommunications. the idea that if we only have

competition, that is going to drive innovation and lower prices. the problem of course is that, at least in an area where communications is so vital, everybody has to have access now to the internet. then to the telephone, once you introduce competition, where do the companies invest? where they can make profits? so we still see that we have 10- 20% of our americans who can't afford internet service or who don't have good internet service because the companies no longer, and they used to have to when they were regulated, but they no longer have to build everywhere, and they don't have to meet although, and it's gotten so

bad. and my friend nell geyser, who is now the cwa a research director and she's pointing to my colleague, kan hadi. i saw a couple of weeks ago, the fcc is opening an investigation into the quality of customer service. it is so bad. this is never anything that we were able to get them to pay attention to during my 30 years at cwa. but it's gotten so bad. let's see if they can do anything. >> so you tell a story of how public policy, corporate, policy changing technology, begins to erode working, working power, the power of workers on the job and to hit at union membership. now, cwa is a remarkable union. we have many people here from

cwa because all through this period, it was one of it was a fighting union. and in the post patco era, i wrote a book about patco and strikes started to disappear largely from our industrial relations landscape. cwa really continued to fight, continued to go on strike. and you tell the story in the book of worker resistance to these trends. how would you talk about that part of the story here and to what extent did workers fight back? how did they fight back? and what impact did they have? workers? the service reps used a variety of strategies, collective bargaining, contract enforcement. >> they even tried to use labor management, joint initiatives, not so successful, fighting the outsourcing of their work, somewhat successful. but the book, the last chapter of the book talks about a verizon strike in the year 2000

and one always likes to end a book on a high note and this was a high note. don't read the epilogue if you don't want to see the in the year 2000 cwa recognized. well, first of all, by this time, you'd had the post telecommunications act of 1996 opening up of all markets, you had an enormous amount of mergers and acquisitions going on. so by this point, there was one phone company from maine to virginia and west virginia, 87,000 union members and bell atlantic had bought, merged and renamed itself verizon. just that year. at the same time, cwa was going into contract negotiations and cwa recognized that it needed to do at verizon what it had successfully done down with a

southwester bell telephone company which eventually became sbc, which if i'm going to keep you dizzying, eventually merged with at&t and took the name of at&t. okay, have i confused you totally? anyway, back to the year 2000 down in the southwestern bell area, cwa had waged a five year campaign. we call it five years to card check and one of my dear friends, judy graves, from that area is very familiar with this leveraging a variety regulatory opportunities on the front line, organizing wireless workers. seeing that this is in the mid- 1990s when wireless was growing, but not yet dominic, cwa was able to leverage, through a variety of mechanisms, to eventually get southwestern bell to agree that it would step back and be neutral. and recognize majority sign-up

for a way to unionize. and bring collective bargaining. and under that, sbc.pacific bell and ameritech and eventually bow south and eventually at&t. this meant 45,000 at&t wireless workers were able to win union recognition and get a contract. and by the way, if any of you care, at&t is still the only union wireless company. remember that. back to 2000, cwa recognized that it needed verizon was becoming now a wireless company, and all of you, i assume, think of verizon primarily as a wireless company. you might get your broadband

from them as well, your internet. and it needed to negotiate a similar agreement with the verizon leadership. at the same time, the service reps were completely up in arms about the stress in their call centers. and by this time, after 10 years of educating the predominately male, but now they were to only mail, bargainers, about the situation in the call centers, the union put stress relief in the call centers as one of its top three issues. job security, organizing rights at verizon wireless, and stress relief in the call centers. in the service reps got together and put together an agenda. well, bargaining was not going well. and the unit of 87,000, somewhere ibu w in some areas,

mostly cwa, went out on strike. for those three demands. and the service reps won enormous protections, remember i said, i do you relieve stress, they won the right to 30 minutes off the phone every day. except busy mondays. for most of us who work as professionals, they may not sound like a lot, but that was huge. they won limits on the amount of supervisory monitoring they won the right to transfer out of their jobs if they weren't doing well with sales. the company had this really weird policy. if you didn't do well with sales, you couldn't transfer to a nonsales job. he won the right to do that. and a variety of other things that they won. so, a strike with the men

technicians, and there were women technicians, one of my friends, laura unger, was one of the lead, and any hill, two women who became technicians and then leaders of the customer service bargaining units. now, in terms of the verizon wireless, tell that story. and larry can probably tell it the best, but i'm going to tell that story. verizon signed a deal that it would agree to neutrality and majority sign-up among its workers. wireless workers. and that was signed on the contract. it would be for four more years from 2000 to 2004. after the contract was signed, they just went and violated it. they closed down the three

verizon wireless centers in the northeast where there had been organizing going on. and they moved the work to the south, the right to work states. now you had the area with stronger union support closed. and then they just went and violated -- they set up websites that told their wireless workers why would be bad to be with the union. the managers were instructed to tell folks why it would be bad. and under those conditions the verizon wireless workers, some of them, more recently even, some of them have organized. it's a very, very tiny amount. so that's the kind of situation that we are faced with. and so, i could not and this talk without saying that part of the challenge is that our labor

laws are just so weak. not just that they are not enforced, they are so weak. you fire worker, you don't have the pay penalty. until maybe you are found guilty and have to pay any back pay that they may have missed. unless they've been working, because after all, it could take years. you close a call center, they say this for economic reasons. even though it was because there was strong union support. so, we need stronger laws, and we need ultimately a radical change in the way in which we see our ability to have union representation. because, and i have a chapter in the book about what's happened with the outsourcing, under the neoliberal ideology

that the most important thing for a corporation, for a company is to increase shareholder value, one of the ways you increase shareholder value is you outsource a lot of the work. and particularly, with telecommunications, like it is, you outsource a lot of the work and and call centers you send it overseas. and so, we need to go back, have a law which in essence brings us back to what we had under the monopoly bell system, which was if the company grows, the union grows. the entire industry is represented by the union. so you don't have a race to the bottom. you have real, natural contestation between labor and management. but it's not with the nonunion side of the industry, in essence , sitting on the same side as the employer.

and this is what we call sectoral bargaining. and there's thoughts about that we need to begin to look toward that. and of course we need to reregulate our economy. competition is not serving all of us equally well. >> well said, debbie. and i was going to ask you, what are some of the lessons you draw from your story? but you really covered that. so, i do want to say we have a microphone here and we have a very knowledgeable audience. please come up to the microphone. but before we take the first question, one quick final question for me, this is a story largely about women and the role that they played in fighting back. could you say a word about what that story offers us as a bit of hope? the labor movement now is led by a woman.

but when you begin your story, women were very marginal still in the movement. >> women fought for and gained their power. i will leave it at that. i want to do one other thing, with those of my colleagues from cwa who taught me so much, please stand so we can acknowledge all of you. >> [ applause ] >> thank you. >> wonderful. let's go to a question. >> so, i was a summer intern at the united mine workers in 1973 were 1974. i grew up in a new deal. and i believe in labor unions. i saw you on c-span a couple of days ago, and the only thing you left out was the implacable resistance of business from

1935 on. it never stopped. it never was reduced. it just got worse and worse and worse. and now, you know, they run everything. my question is, and is for both of you, i worked for the united mine workers, places like -- and you talk about the role of the united mine workers and john l lewis and all of that. what's happened to the union members? west virginia was a democratic state when i was growing up. and that was minors. i mean, they were treated terribly. they are still treated terribly. they get paid better, but the mind working conditions despite ms ha, they were still terrible. and they throughout the pensions. but west virginia has become a red state. and those were miners who were voting for trump and very

antiunion people. >> what we let to answer your question? >> sure. >> thank you. >> and debbie, you of your own thoughts. i would you say most of those people probably are not union anymore. and that is, in a way, what has happened in the coalfields is similar to the story, i think, to what debbie tells in this book. a story of the arrival of finance capitalism and how that changes things. and how the competition within that field began to break down. used to be a bituminous coal operators association that so poorly bargained with them. that was among the kind of changes that happened. >> why did the miners change their votes? why do they vote republican? >> i think in some cases, is debbie's story shows, they were voting for democrats were

putting through some of these regulatory policies. it wasn't necessarily a neat partisan story. >> did happen it cwa? or are they still union members who are prounion? >> yeah, our members are prounion. there's no question about that. >> the miners are not. >> i want to let other people have a chance to ask a question. >> come on up to ask a question. >> hi, get in the line, that's best. >> thank you. it's really sad but informative story. and hopefully the next regime in the u.s. government to make an improvement. the question is really, professor, you've been speaking about the difference between finance capitalism and business capitalism.

and for those of us, not familiar with those terms, perhaps you could educate a little bit. thank you. >> you used not the term business capitalism, but what you call it? >> managerial is a -- managerial capitalism. there's a general sense that during the new deal period from the 1930s to the 1970s, businesses understood what they needed to do with the prophets was not only shared with shareholders, but also reinvest in their production or their services. so as to constantly improve. with the advent of deregulation of financial markets, companies, not just financial companies, not just hedge funds and private equity, but other companies use the kind -- their profits to invest in these private equity hedge funds. and other mechanisms to increase the investment

capital. but if they were not reinvesting in the same way, in their companies -- and so, economists and labor historians and others have now come to talk about this period as a period of financial capitalism. which imposes all kinds of different challenges than we had during that period from the new deal through about the mid- 1970s were the u.s. economy really dominated the world. europe and japan were still recovering. and it's once they recovered and you had the global competition, that unfortunately, too many policymakers and elected officials bought into the idea that if we just let the market have free reign and got rid of all regulation, it would both create investment and it would trickle down to working people.

we see, with the huge gap now, i don't know what it is, the richest 20 americans own more than 80% of the rest of the population. this is not led to neither equity nor democracy. which is so important. and i think that gets at some of the questions you are asking. >> and just to add onto that a little bit, the phrase, maximizing shareholder value, that didn't exist for the 1970s. that became a concept in which the focus, the sole focus was about improving stock prices. before that, is that he said, men, capitalists in the u.s. tended to balance stockholders and stakeholders interests. stakeholders went to the side, especially workers as the shift happened. that is part of what she documents, i think. >> okay, i want to turn this to

a little bit of a self- interested question. what has happened to the call centers? for example, with comcast, you wait forever for them to pick up. and often it's a gentleman, usually, but sometimes a woman, from the philippines. who answers the call center. i'd like you to talk about the little bit of diverting some of the work overseas, and the implications for payment. and, i must be one of the few people left with a landline. what has happened to that in verizon? i went to one of their outreach places, they don't even deal with that. some of us who like land lines are left to drift. >> i will get to that secondly. first of all, the prior question said this was a depressing story, i'm sorry, i do want you to leave you feeling depressed. yes, working people and these service reps head to fights. but they fought and they often won. so this is not just a story of

defeat. but they are up against huge, huge barriers. and we all need to take from this, not only that we need to support unions, but we need to support regulatory and public policy changes. because that provides the ground -- the guard rails on which companies that operate. >> [ applause ] now, let me get back to your question. it was, first of all, i'm glad you mentioned how bad comcast is. it's a company i love to hate. they are viciously antiunion. and in fact, when they bought, at one point at&t had a broadband company, a cable company, this was in the 2000s, when comcast bought it, they then systematically -- we had 20 bargaining units. systematically refused to bargain with any of those bargaining units. the workers saw that the nonunion workers were getting

401(k)s, and they were told, well you are union, we have to negotiated. you can get your 401(k). and then they systematically refused to bargain. and eventually the workers said, okay, then we are deserting from the union. so at least we can get a 401(k). that is the kind of thing comcast did. it's a company i love to hate. but, you asked about off shoring. yes, what happened was that first the phone companies realized they could save some money by outsourcing their work. then, those companies came to the phone companies and said, you know, we can save even more money if you let us first ascended to india, and now for the kind of call centers we are talking about, to the philippines. there's probably at least 1 million call-center workers in the philippines for whom this

is better pay and being a nurse or a teacher. so, interestingly, and i want to again, this is an example of, i don't want you to leave depressed, but just understand how hard it is, but at least the union is fighting this fight. when there was a more recent verizon strike in 2016, some of you may remember it, and calls were being sent from the rise and call centers to the philippines, the philippine workers, who really have no rights for collective action, reached out to cwa and said, we're getting your calls. and cwa brilliantly sent a delegation over to the philippines and initially met with some violence, but eventually it was recognized

that was not a good idea. anyway, and so cwa established a relationship with these philippine workers. and the verizon workers in america, who, some of them said, you know, we don't like those filipinos, they are taking our work, came to understand that the one they ought to be madd at is the employer. not the filipino workers. and cwa and the worker centers in the philippines, which operate under incredible repressive conditions, have maintained that relationship. and we have helped them when they asked for it. another example, and now you're going to have to help me on this one, i believe we have relationships with a call-center tele-performance workers in the dominican republic? and we have a contract with them?

>> no, we have a corporation agreement. >> come to the microphone. >> this is really quite impressive work. >> yeah, cwa did sign a cooperation agreement with a union that organized free trade zone workers in manufacturing before organizing call-center workers who were also being treated as in free trade zones. so, you should also mention the percentage protection of calls, call routing, as a response -- >> yeah, i know i had to bring up to the microphone. one of the things that nell and her other -- are elected leadership did in verizon is -- and i think also maybe at&t wireless, is that we have to protect keeping some jobs in america. we have a watermark and the

company cannot outsource jobs if it would cause our members, the number we represent, to go below that watermark. >> and the future landline is completely gone? >> the future of landline is they are gone. there is no regulation. they are gone. california will not relinquish oversight over land lines. but the real tragedy is that there is no regulation over wireless or over our internet. and that's where all the communication is. and you and i may be the last ones in washington, d.c. with a landline. >> thank you. i think we have a couple of questions lined up. there are some other land lines in the audience. >> david, please. >> so, i want to thank you both a wonderful presentation. and debbie, thank you for your work.

i came to the microphone because i want to ask about whether you thought about reframing the issues in a way that reaches an audience outside the union. and here's what struck me about it. you talk about the stress for call-center workers of being pushed not to provide service. they were used to taking care of people. they were part of the community. that was their job, that was how they saw themselves. in work we did, we saw a literature of moral distress among nurses who were pushed not to care for patients. pediatricians in d.c. have been

leaving pediatric centers because the employer wants them to do 10 minute visits with seriously ill children. , dr., et cetera, et cetera et cetera. and it's not just professionals. craftspeople so take pride in their work. construction workers want to do it right. they go through lengthy apprentices on the union side. they know how it should be done. and they're being pushed to do it faster and on the cheap in ways that are dangerous for everyone. so, it seems to me, your themes are not just about call-center workers, not just about unions, about the nature of the society we want to live in and the quality of life for everyone around us. >> i couldn't say it better. >> [ applause ]

>> please. >> nice to be here. nice to be celebrating your book. the whole time you were talking and talking about the changes that have come with the call centers and cubicles, what i was thinking of his, gig workers. right? because that is sort of the next thing. and you can imagine them saying, will ever but he's got a phone, just sit at home and answer the phone calls. we will just route them to your phone and you'll answer and you'll be an independent employee. how does this whole move towards pushing more and more, not only offshore, only to centers, but to these nonemployee gig workers? that's a really important question. because i think probably a third of the workforce now works for a subcontractor or as an individual contractor.

that's my phrase for a gig worker. we have two vehicles and i think it addresses what david was saying. first of all because of the way we have, economists call a featured workplace, we have broken the relationship between management and who actually controls the work and the people who do the work. often through temporary jobs, two gig work, through subcontracting, et cetera. and so one of the things that people who are thinking about how do we then have collective representation for these people, there's been some progress under this brilliant nlrb general counsel where she is trying to say in many cases

there is a joint employment relationship. and so you hold, whether it's the franchise or the gig or whoever, you hold those that have the ultimate economic control responsible. but ultimately, that's why talked about sectorial bargaining. because then the gig worker who might be at home taking the call , for an at&t, would be represented by a union that represents the whole sector. but back to david's point as well, not only deed -- do you need collective representation, because what is weaker than the people -- the feeble power of one, you need collective action. that's the whole basis of the national labor relations act. the you cannot, you have to balance between the one worker in the company that has all the

power. but we actually need to look, in many ways, at a regulatory system. so whether it's the medical system, whether it's the education system, the communication systems, there are various ways in which we've got to reregulate. so that race to the bottom -- and the irony here is -- and if my friends from the consumer federation or the consumers union were here, the irony in communications is, there should be an alliance between the consumer and the union. but the policies that i talked to you about, the competition, was embraced by the consumer organizations. because they wanted lower prices. and we all have to think a lot, it's the walmart strategy. and so how can you nice giant

and safeway compete? we have to think a lot about if low prices although we want. >> [ indiscernible-low volume ] >> it does because it has this incredible audience but they are very unique. tony? >> let me just say, we have just a couple minutes, i see two people waiting. if you both could ask her questions and then will let debbie have the final word. >> debbie, thank you for this great book. looking for to reading it. i want to ask, if you were advising all the workers who are organizing starbucks, it seems like they're all kinds of lessons that, if you take a step further, the monitoring, all the orders going into stores, i met nell, how long ago was that? a couple weeks ago? at the only unionized starbucks up the street here on connecticut avenue.

i mean there almost 500 stores and over 10,000 baristas that have signed union cards. but it seems to me that we still got a long way to go. >> with a time so short i'm going to jump in quickly. >> let's hear this and then let debbie -- >> self-interested questions. the pensions these companies control that they are selling to the lowest bidder, getting rid of the pension benefit guaranty insurance, cwa has a lawsuit against that for at&t and some of the other companies, verizon, any comment? >> raise your hand. >> debbie, final word to you. >> so tony, i don't think i have to give any advice to the starbucks baristas. they know what they're doing. and i think we need to recognize the incredible victories that they got. that starbucks has now said, were going to back off from our antiunion and were going to negotiate a contract. so i think that is the kind of scale that we need.

and i just have to close with another incredible story from cwa that i hope points to the kind of thing that we need. and my dear friend, alan, knows this well. when microsoft wanted to buy activision, a gaming company, and gamers have been coming to cwa and saying, help us. help us. you know the kind of pressures that we are under in our work. and cwa had been working with them and helping them organize and had organized a few small places. when microsoft wanted to find out whether there was mood and capitol hill to support this merger, they were advised, you better go talk to cwa. and they did. and they said, okay, what you think? and then our president, whose name was chris shelton, now our president is clive cummings,

chris shelton said, if you grow , the union needs to grow. and we need for you to be truly neutral. if any microsoft worker wants to have a union, and would you believe it? microsoft agreed. and since then, various units of the gaming companies that they bought, and microsoft itself, have begun to organize and, i believe even negotiate some contracts. cwa is getting into supporting and helping tech workers, high- tech workers, you think of them as libertarian, the same kind of things, david, that you talked about, they are experiencing. and they understand they need collective representation in order to have good working conditions. at jobs that they otherwise would love. you all very much.

>> thank you, debbie. >> [ applause ] if you are enjoying the tv, sign up for a newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive a schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, book festivals and more. tv, every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at tv.org. television for serious readers. weekends on c-span two, c- span2, every saturday american history tv documents america story , and on sundays, tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more. including mid-co-. >> where you going? or, maybe a better question is, how far do you want to go? and, how fast you want to get there?

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