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IBEW Push for Satellite Television
Installers Continues

August 16, 2006

A multi-state effort to organize satellite television installers continues on several fronts, with two elections coming up in the next few weeks and the recent settlement of several charges against the company.

MasTec has been the focus of IBEW organizers since last spring.  On June 14, a group of approximately 100 installers and warehouse workers in Tampa, Fla., won IBEW representation in the first election of the campaign.

On August 23, approximately 45 workers will vote in a National Labor Relations Board-administered election in Ft. Pierce/Port St. Lucie, on Florida’s east coast.  Unlike the confrontational weeks-long public campaign in Tampa two months ago, organizers are taking a lower, but equally effective, profile, said lead organizer Carmella Cruse.

“The workers are starting to see if they stick together and don’t fight the company, they have a better chance of avoiding harassment,” Cruse said.  “We’re staying in touch with the workers, but we’re not in the company’s face.”

Like the MasTec employees in Tampa, those in Ft. Pierce/Port St. Lucie have issues with job security, capricious work rule changes, unfair pay deductions and long hours with little overtime pay, said organizer Kitty Prouse.  In June, they reached out to Ft. Lauderdale Local 728 after MasTec fired 38 workers in Orlando for organizing activities.  First, the workers circulated a petition in support of their Orlando co-workers.  Then they signed authorization cards within two days. 

“They were very motivated by what happened in Orlando,” Prouse said.     

Although the company continues to hold captive audience meetings, they are not using the opportunity to bash unions.  Instead the managers have been thanking workers for their hard work, Prouse said.  It appears the IBEW’s filings of National Labor Relation Board charges have had a chilling effect on the company’s earlier disregard for the employees’ right to organize and be represented by the IBEW.

A unit of approximately 30 workers in West Palm Beach will vote next, on September 15.  These workers had been included with those in Ft. Pierce/Port St. Lucie, until the company separated the unit in the past few weeks, said organizer Marie Gonzalez.  So far, the company has not put up much of an anti-union campaign, although it did display posters from a recent national advertising campaign that likened unions to cockroaches.

In Texas and Georgia, the NLRB has recently chided MasTec for its surveillance of workers it suspects of union activity.  In Atlanta, the NLRB ordered MasTec to post notices conspicuously stating that workers have a right to join a union and assuring them the company will not unlawfully watch workers engaged in union activity or any way coerce workers exercising their rights under the National Labor Relations Act.  In Ft. Worth, Texas, the company had to post the same assurances as well as promise it will not interrogate workers about other employees engaged in union activities or call the police to remove IBEW organizers from property it does not own.