With a new website—TMobileWorkersUnited.org—workers at T-Mobile US are connecting with each other to build strength in their drive for workplace justice and respect.

Working with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), T-Mobile Workers United (TU) is an alliance of hundreds of call center representatives, retail associates and technicians who are standing up to discuss the issues and challenges they face at the new T-Mobile US, a merger of T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS.

T-Mobile, the telecom company that last year closed seven call centers in the United States and shipped more than 3,300 jobs overseas, is running its remaining U.S. call center operations with abusive and intimidating tactics, T-Mobile workers at the company’s Charleston, S.C., call center told a workers' rights hearing (see video, below) last week.

Workers at a number of T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telekom) call centers are mobilizing to win a voice at work with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and have been met with a fierce anti-union campaign.

T-Mobile, the telecom company that earlier this year closed seven call centers in the United States and shipped more than 3,300 jobs overseas, is running its remaining U.S. call center operations under what workers describe as a “climate of tyranny,” says Lothar Schroeder of German union ver.di, which represents workers at Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s parent company. Schroeder spoke with Reuters. 

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) cut straight to the chase Friday at a Bring Jobs Home roundtable in Charleston.

We now give tax incentives for people who move jobs offshore. That's just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

“We need to be exporting our products, not our jobs,” says Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) who, with Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), recently introduced the Bring Jobs Home Act (S. 2884 and H.R. 5542). Union and community activists are building support for that bill, as well as the Call Center Worker and Consumer Protection Act (H.R. 3596), as part of the AFL-CIO’s Bring Jobs Home campaign.

Text JOBS to 235246 to get info and action alerts to help bring America's jobs home. (Message and data rates may apply.)

In the past decade, 50,000 manufacturing sites closed and 6 million American jobs were lost because of outsourcing. Today, the AFL-CIO union movement launches the first of several nationwide Bring Jobs Home events, with an action near Master Lock's flagship factory in Milwaukee, Wis., which has been producing the iconic padlocks since 1921.

Last year, under a new contract between UAW Local 469 and Master Lock, the company brought jobs back from China—a move union members at Master Lock and around the country would like to see become a trend in American manufacturing.

Blake Poindexter is a former T-Mobile USA worker who had worked in a call center in Frisco, Texas, before the company announced in March it would close that center along with six others. Last week, he urged Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann to respect T-Mobile USA workers’ right to join together in a union and stop the company’s harassment of workers.

You may have seen T-Mobile’s “Alter Ego” ad where a stylish young women in a big city luxury high-rise trades her chic designer party dress and high-fashion footwear for motorcycle leathers and boots. T-Mobile has an alter ego, too—job killer. This parody commercial from the Communications Workers of America (CWA) spells that out.

This is a cross-post from We Work Better Together, a project of the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

In an open letter published today in the New York Times, 11 leading German legal scholars and politicians called on Deutsche Telekom and other German companies to ensure that workers at German subsidiaries in the United States, particularly T-Mobile USA, are able to “exercise their unrestricted right to opt for organized representation in the company without fear. They must not be influenced, pressured, or intimidated by employers if they exercise their basic right for freedom of association. The human right of freedom of speech notably entails this right as well.”

T-Mobile will close seven U.S. call centers with some 3,300 workers, a decision the Communications Workers of America (CWA) says “harms workers and communities.”