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For more than a decade, the Communications Workers of America has been trying to unionize T-Mobile, the U.S. subsidiary of German giant Deutsche Telekom, which is now the third-largest U.S. wireless carrier. The campaign has so far won only two union contracts, covering about 30 of T-Mobile’s roughly 45,000 employees. Now CWA is alleging to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that T-Mobile has adopted an anti-union tactic that’s been illegal since 1935: creating a company-controlled union to drain support for an independent one.
CWA says that in June 2015, Brian Brueckman, a T-Mobile senior vice president, sent employees an e-mail announcing “another big step to ensure your voice is heard” by management—the nationwide rollout of a group called T-Voice, composed of employee “representatives” from each call center, selected every six months by the company. “T-Voice is your voice,” Brueckman wrote in his e-mail, the first of several messages to employees that CWA contends contradict federal labor rules.
The CWA charge, filed in February and under investigation by the NLRB, says T-Voice is an illegal “company-dominated” labor organization, something Congress banned during the New Deal era. Back then businesses facing unionization efforts frequently responded by setting up their own pseudo-unions to sap support. “The idea was to take the wind out of the sails of employees who wanted a free union: ‘Here, we’ve got a system of representation for you,’ ” says William Gould IV, a Stanford law professor emeritus and chairman of the NLRB under President Clinton. In the decades since, “company union” cases have become rare.
Read more @: T-Mobile Accused of Fighting a Real Union by Creating a Fake One
A good hearted effort by T-Mobile to ensure that their employees voices are heard or is it an effort by T-Mobile to silence or hamper employees rights to unionize by setting up a pseudo-union, a company-union? I think this is pretty clear thats its a part of the effort by T-Mobile to hamper employees from joining a union.