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July 31, 2001
Cisco, Union Forge Unlikely Alliance
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The Communications Workers of America, the union that represents telephone-company employees, among others, has asked Cisco Systems Inc. to retrain its members for Internet-related jobs.
Strange? Only when you consider that Cisco not only has no unionized workers itself but also provides technology that displaces unionized workers at other companies.
But CWA Executive Vice President Larry Cohen tells the Wall Street Journal that his union is simply trying to survive; Cisco's home turf of the Internet "is the future of communications networks," so that's where the CWA wants to organize.
About half of the CWA's 740,000 workers are employed at phone companies such as AT&T Corp. and the Baby Bells. But traditional telephone systems are being replaced gradually by networks using the Internet-based technology sold by Cisco and others.
Cisco CEO John Chambers is a key supporter of President Bush, but Chambers' political views are not an issue with the CWA, according to Cohen, who estimates one-third of CWA members voted for Bush last fall. "We don't view [Cisco] as an anti-union company," he says.
Cisco, of San Jose, Calif., says it is happy to help. For the cost of a few dozen donated routers and switches, Cisco can expand the cadre of technical workers trained on, and partial to, its equipment, according to the Journal.
After graduation, the newspaper notes, participants could help Cisco expand its foothold inside phone companies. Other graduates hope to land jobs designing and running corporate computer networks, where they might decide to use Cisco in their products.
The partnership grew out of a 1998 meeting between Steve Hill, the union's employment-training administrator, and Scott Knell, a manager in Cisco's networking academy program, which offers training in Internet basics to high school and college students.
The two men sat on a Job Corps advisory panel, and they began discussing possible ways that Cisco and the CWA could work together.
In 1999, the company and the union jointly won a $143,000 grant to offer the networking-academy training to members of the military preparing to leave active duty.
Last year, they opened the program to all CWA members, backed by a second, $1.3 million government grant, derived from fees paid by U.S. employers who import foreign technical workers under the H-1B visa program.
Cisco, the Journal notes, has been one of the largest users of the H-1B program, which unions have opposed.
Since it started, the training program has spawned a high-level friendship between Cisco's chairman, John Morgridge, and CWA President Morton Bahr, who have been working opposite sides of the communications highway for decades.
Morgridge has accompanied Bahr to local union halls, where he has heard Bahr warn members that they risk becoming obsolete. "My vision of unions is they often get locked into a fixed environment," Morgridge tells the Journal. "Mort Bahr clearly recognizes that this industry is in transition and that for the good of his workers he's got to train them."
Bahr praises Cisco for developing the "new generation" of technology that will help the CWA "be in the forefront to train our members."
To view the Wall Street Journal article, click here.