Xfinity workers in Massachusetts celebrated another organizing win after a decisive majority of network maintenance technicians in Yarmouth voted in May to unionize with the IBEW and Middleboro Local 2322.
“Our workers there got wind of some changes coming that would not be good for them and called us up,” said Local 2322 Business Manager Eric Hetrick.
Organizing workers at Comcast, Xfinity’s parent company and the largest cable and home internet provider in the U.S., remains a key goal of the IBEW and its Telecommunications Department. So far, only a handful of the company’s units nationwide enjoy IBEW representation — and up to now, just one Xfinity garage in Massachusetts.
Hetrick knows firsthand how anti-union Comcast and Xfinity can be: It took 11 years of hard work, but in 2021, he and his team successfully negotiated first contract covering more than 50 Xfinity technicians in Fairhaven.
For most of the nearly two dozen technicians at the Yarmouth garage, the motivation to organize came from little things adding up over time.
“It’s been like a slow burn,” Hetrick said. “Then one day, you wake up and you realize what they’re trying to do, that things aren’t as good as they used to be.”
The Yarmouth garage’s service area covers the entire Cape Cod peninsula plus the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. Job security, said Second District International Representative Steve Smith, was perhaps the biggest concern for the technicians, considering Xfinity’s increasing reliance on sending work to contractors, whom it calls “business partners.”
“The techs really like the work that they do, but if you don’t have a job to go to on Monday, that’s a pretty big problem,” said Smith, who services Local 2232. “If Xfinity decided they wanted to shut down the garage and ship everybody off someplace a hundred miles away, that could be a real hardship.”
Xfinity’s managers also were signaling their intent to assign the technicians, who primarily perform outside cabling and pole work, to go into residences and perform installations and service work without a corresponding increase in pay or benefits.
“They just felt undervalued and disrespected,” said Hetrick, who also noted that the technicians’ nighttime on-call pay rates had not risen in nearly a decade.
Managers seemed inclined to rethink some of their plans, though, once they realized how the Yarmouth technicians’ interest in signing union-interest cards was gaining momentum, he said.
“Everybody in the garage saw how solidarity worked and wanted to stay the course,” Hetrick said. “They did the work and kept together.”
Contract negotiations between Local 2232 and Xfinity were just getting underway as this Electrical Worker was being prepared.
Going into the talks, “the existing group [in Fairhaven] is an advantage for us,” Hetrick said, noting that that group’s first agreement contained layoff prevention among its many gains. “That contract is one of our biggest benefits.”
The IBEW’s negotiators, though, were bracing for a long fight to gain a first collective bargaining agreement because Xfinity is preparing to appeal the organizing vote.
“The good news is that Eric was a negotiator for that first Fairhaven contract, too. He’s well aware of what to expect,” Smith said. “I’m sure he’s not thinking we’ll have an easy time of it, because we won’t. But that’s OK because he’s up for that battle.”
Telecommunications Director Robert Prunn said that allowing unionizing efforts to drag on, and hoping that workers lose interest in it, may seem part of Comcast’s playbook, but the IBEW does not back away from a chance to make workers’ lives better.
“They might be one of the biggest union busters in America,” said Prunn, whose department represents more than 50,000 workers in wired and wireless broadband, broadcast and communications systems in the U.S. and Canada. “But the next organizing win or contract win could be the one that inspires another workplace to sign up for representation from us — and that makes our fight worth it.”
