Communications Workers of America

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CWA

Communications Workers of America
Founded	1949
Members	700,000+ (2006)[1]
Country	United States, Canada
Affiliation	AFL-CIO, CLC
Key people	Larry Cohen, president
Office location	Washington, D.C.
Website	www.cwa-union.org

Communications Workers of America (CWA) is the largest communications and media labor union in the United States (the union also has locals in Canada), representing over 700,000 workers in both the private and public sectors. CWA is headquartered in Washington, DC and affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the Canadian Labour Congress, and Union Network International. The current president is Larry Cohen, a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council.

CWA's roots lie in the organizing of telephone workers into the National Federation of Telephone Workers, founded in 1938. After losing a strike with AT&T in 1947, the federation reorganized as CWA, a truly national union, which affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1949.In 1994 the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians merged with the CWA and became The Broadcasting and Cable Television Workers Sector of the CWA, NABET-CWA. Since 1997, it includes The Newspaper Guild, and since 2000 it includes Human Rights Watch's support staff. In 2004, the Association of Flight Attendants merged with CWA, and became formally known as the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, or AFA-CWA.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Bahr, Morton. From the Telegraph to the Internet: A 60 Year History of the CWA. Washington, D.C.: Welcome Rain Publishers, 1998. ISBN 1566499496
• Palladino, Grace. Dreams of Dignity, Workers of Vision: A History of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Washington, D.C.: International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, 1991.
• Schacht, John N. The Making of Telephone Unionism, 1920–1947. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985. ISBN 0813511364

[edit] External links

• Communications Workers of America