Deutsche Telekom: American and German telecom unions accuse T-Mobile USA of “massively overawing” employees trying to unionize

Climate of fear or malicious campaign? “Throughout the world, Deutsche Telekom respects workers’ rights and is a loyal interlocutor for all elected employee representation structures” declared Thomas Sattelberger, chief human resources officer at DT, as an answer to the recent criticism from German and American telecom unions about his company. He simply added: “We’re not going to import the German culture of co-management because we respect a country’s cultural and national specificities.” He thinks unions have organized against DT a “malicious” and “irresponsible” campaign. Nevertheless, the criticism coming from Ver.di and CWA unions, that work together within T-Mobile (see our dispatch No. 080285), is quite heavy. Verdi and CWA also base their attacks on a report carried out by John Logan, labor law export at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment of the University of California (IRLE) in Berkeley (see our dispatch No. 100181). He carried out many interviews with T-Mobile USA employees and takes stock of many cases of lobbying on employees in touch with union representatives or members. He says that there is a climate of fear among employees as soon as you mention unions. For their part, Ver.di representatives who went to the US say that they had to organize secret meetings with the employees. It is true that, even though American law condemns layoffs for “union reasons,” American courts only sentence guilty businesses to very small fines.