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Dan Gillmor tells this story about the phone workers union helping SBC steamroller the Illinois legislature and DSL users at the same time. While his headline is a little inflammatory, his point is essentially true. There's more to it than that, though.
The Communication Workers of America (CWA), who represents the workers at SBC and all the other Baby Bells, have bought into management's thinking on the Internet. At least the union leadership has. Certainly not the first time that's happened, but still not smart long-term thinking. Lets examine these perhaps self-evident truths:
- True, all of the Baby Bells' competitors for both phone service and space on the DSL pipe are non-union to their very core.
- True, that because of this, they can compete very effectively on price with the union company.
- True, there aren't enough people in the country who care enough about the union label to make a difference when making a decision about phone and/or Internet service, so organizing a boycott of the competitors is probably not going to be successful long-term.
All this points to the fact that the CWA, and the rest of the union movement, still has to come up with a strategy to organize workers against a deeply hostile management. It is time to open up those dusty labor history texts and see how this was done -- in the midst of a Great Depression, no less -- in the middle of the last century.
It is unfair to say that labor was the key player in this Illinois thing. We are seeing here yet again what Really Big Money, the kind that labor never has, does to the political system.
10:16:29 PM 
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