For its part, the CWA bureaucracy is attempting to divert strikers into toothless appeals with a petition campaign addressed to AT&T CEO John Stankey.
While acknowledging in its petition that AT&T made “over $16 billion in profits in 2023,” it begs the CEO “to respect the dedicated employees who work every day to provide service and support AT&T’s customers.”
At this critical juncture for the strike, rank-and-file CWA member must break the spell of the union bureaucracy’s corporatist maneuvers, take control of the strike and contract talks, and make the broadest appeal to their brothers and sisters throughout the CWA, and in other unions, to unify in collective struggle against the corporations and state apparatus.
Honeycutt has acknowledged that “Teamsters are refusing to cross picket lines to deliver packages to AT&T locations.” But the Teamsters bureaucracy is currently actively engaged in betraying their railway brothers and sisters in Canada, who are being set up by the Canadian government and the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) to accept the dictates of Canadian National (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC).
The experiences of federal mediation, utilized by the union bureaucracy and corporations in both Canada and the US against railroaders and west coast dock workers in 2022 and 2023, underscores the dangers posed to AT&T strikers.
The collective strength of the international working class must be mobilized and united in order to defend its interests against the corporations, state apparatus and the union bureaucracies. The latter which effectively serve as a labor police force to keep the rank-and-file membership imprisoned behind the bars of capitalist exploitation.
AT&T strikers throughout the US Southeast must establish direct channels of communication across picket lines, and strategize how to defend and continue their strike against the company. A step in this direction should be the demands for no federal mediation in the contract talks, for direct rank-and-file oversight and live streaming of the talks, and for AT&T workers throughout the country to unify in a nation-wide strike against the company. For this, a political break with both the Democratic and Republican Parties, the twin parties of Wall Street and the Pentagon, is essential.
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Publish date : 2024-08-25 17:09:00
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