Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 61
the experience of telecommunications unions the world over, Bernard
and Schnaid argue that ‘the symbiotic relationship that existed between
phone companies and their workers was reflected in the fact that telecommunications
unions often sided with employers at regulatory hearings.
They felt that their members’ wages and job security depended on the
companies’ prosperity’ (Bernard and Schnaid 1997: 166). In the case of
the US, the main trade union confederation, the American Federation of
Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) was directly
involved in CIA and State Department funded foreign policy campaigns
against Third World unions labelled as communists during the height of
the Cold War (Moody 1988; Ross 2004).
In developing countries where rates of urban unemployment and underemployment
were high, national governments looked at telecommunications
as an area for job creation. Although an extreme case, the example
of apartheid South Africa is illustrative of the racialization of labour
within the highly unionized telecommunications sector. Horwitz (2001)
writes that the South African state’s ‘job reservation system’ promoted
the ‘expansion of the white public sector workforce’:
As the apartheid policy of white uplift succeeded, Afrikaners moved
into technical and managerial ranks, and nonwhites began to occupy
the lower job grades of the parastatals [state-owned monopoly enterprises].
A gradual shortage of white labor meant corresponding
increases in the employment of blacks ...But this increase was not a
matter of course. At the SAPT [South African Posts and Telecommunication]
it required agreement by the white staff associations (the
name for the postal trade unions) over the number of non-whites who
could be taken into service for training each year. (81)
Racist hiring and promotion practices were codified in apartheid state
policy, but similar formal and informal practices existed within telecommunications
unions in many parts of the developed and developing world,
highlighting that there were real limitations of the national monopoly
model (Bernard 1982; Chakravartty 2001; Green 2001). While workers
benefited from union membership in terms of wage increases and job
security, feminist research reminds us that sexism and racism featured
prominently in the history of labour movements in both the North and
South. 5
As a service, telecommunications density increased above the 60 per
cent mark in all First World nations by the late-1970s. For much of
the rest of the world, however, state control of the telecommunications
infrastructure did not necessarily translate to the state’s prioritization of