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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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AT&T was always known for its great size, its anti-labor policies, and its racism and sexism.
Back in 1969 AT&T Vice-President Walter Straley told the assembled presidents of the Bell companies that "what a telephone company needs to know about its labor market [is] who is available for work paying as little as $4,000 to $5,000 a year."
Straley explained that two out of three people taking these telephone operator and clerical jobs were Black.
The telephone operator's job wasn't just low-paying. It was miserable. AT&T counted on a complete turnover of operators every three or four years.
At the same time, better-paying jobs like cable splicers and PBX installers were virtually closed to women and people of color.
All training for these better-paying positions is done on the job. So AT&T couldn't claim it was a question of hiring "trained workers."
AT&T was so blatant that as late as 1968 it was placing "whites only" want ads.
This corporate racism not only affected workers of color. Because of the racist hiring practices the unions representing AT&T's workers were weakened.
So even if the "craft" jobs at AT&T were filled almost entirely by white men, these workers were earning less than auto and steel workers. The result was even more profits for AT&T.
Once AT&T was so afraid of worker militancy that it actually tried to weed out any job applicant who knew a foreign language. AT&T considered such workers as "too sophisticated" and possibly "red."
Along with this was AT&T's deliberate policy of hiring as few Jewish people as possible.
The workers of AT&T fought this racism. It was their struggle that brought the most sweeping decision in the history of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.
At the vanguard of this struggle were the women telephone operators in New York City who demanded and got EEOC hearings in 1972.
Two of the organizers of this struggle were members of Workers World Party, Susan Steinman and Gavrielle Gemma.
Gemma, currently on WWP's National Committee, told Workers World Jan. 2 that "these 1972 hearings were the Gettysburg in the struggle against racist hiring practices. Women workers and all workers of color testified to the bosses' faces about their racism and sexism.
"Today the massive layoffs--like all layoffs--turn back the clock for women workers and people of color. It's the labor of all workers that produced the profits that allows AT&T to restructure and fire.
"The next step for the workers is to unite against AT&T's so-called right to make these decisions," said Gemma.
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