Proceedings and Index of the 52nd Annual Convention - 1990 TABLE OF CONTENTS MONDAY MORNING SESSION Call to Order Welcome Remarks—Marjolaine Botsford, Canadian Coord. Invocation by Reverend Patricia Lisson Presentation of Colors Welcome Addresses— Councillor Michael Walker Julie Davis Jan Pierce Remarks—Mrs. Karen Horgan Presidential Address—Morton Bahr Address—Fred Pomeroy, President, CEW of Canada Address—Shirley Carr, President, CLC Rules of the Convention Report of Credentials Committee Report of Resolutions and Rules Committee Recess MONDAY AFTERNOON SESSION Call to Order Report of the Secretary-Treasurer James B. Booe Report of the Defense Fund Oversight Committee CWA Defense Fund Members' Relief Fund Rules Recess TUESDAY SESSION Call to Order Invocation—Rabbi Howard Markose Report of Resolutions Committee (continued) Address—Philip Bowyer, General Secretary, PTTI Report of the Constitution Committee Address—Richard Trumka, President, United Mine Workers Report of the Director of Organizing, Larry Cohen Presentation of Organizing Awards Report of Resolutions Committee (continued) Motion re: Constitutional Amendment No. 6 Recess WEDNESDAY MORNING SESSION Call to Order Invocation—Reverend John E. Facey Executive Vice President M.E. Nichols Address—Joy Langan (Member of Parliament) Finance Committee Report Executive Vice President Barbara Easterling Savings and Retirement Trust Report Address—Elizabeth Glaser, Pediatric AIDS Foundation Resolutions Committee Report (continued) Appeals Committee Report Recess WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON SESSION Call to Order Resolutions Committee Report (continued) Newsletter Awards Resolution—AT&T Bargaining Strategy Memorial Service Motions from the Floor Resolution—City of Hope COPE Awards Resolution—South Africa Closing Remarks—President Bahr Adjournment Communications Speakers' Index MONDAY MORNING SESSION June 11, 1990 The Opening Session of the 52nd Annual Convention of the Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, CLC, held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Toronto, Canada, June 11, 1990, convened at nine-thirty o'clock, a.m., Temporary Chair Doug Grey, President, Toronto Typographical Local 91, CWA Local 14030, presiding. TEMPORARY CHAIR GREY: Delegates, please be seated. We have a very full agenda this morning, so I want to ask all of you to take your seats at this time. The 52nd Annual Convention of the Communications Workers of America will now come to order. Good morning. Welcome to Toronto and District 1, and welcome to our first Canadian convention. My name is Doug Grey, and I am President of Toronto Typographical Local 91, CWA Local 14030. (Applause) I have the honor of serving as your Temporary Chair for this morning's session. Now, you wouldn't know you were in Canada if you didn't hear something said in French, so I would like to call upon Marjolaine Botsford, our Canadian Office Coordinator, to welcome you en Francais. Bon Jour. MARJOLAINE BOTSFORD (Canadian Coordinator): Bon Jour. ... Ms. Botsford expressed greetings to the convention in French, and those remarks translated into English are as follows: Good morning. It is with pleasure that we warmly welcome you to Canada and most particularly to the City of Toronto, which is the location of our 52nd Annual Convention of CWA, and our first one to be held in Canada. During this week, your Reception Committee will have a booth at the entrance of the Convention Centre for the purpose of answering your questions and in order to make your visit as pleasant as possible. We hope that your stay will be very enjoyable as well as productive. Have a fine visit. Have a good convention (Applause)... TEMPORARY CHAIR GREY: Merci beaucoup. (Applause) As is our custom in CWA, we will begin our Convention with a prayer. I would like to call upon Reverend Patricia Lisson of the Davenport-Perth United Church of Toronto to lead us in the Invocation. Please remain standing after the Invocation. Reverend Lisson. REVEREND PATRICIA LISSON (Davenport-Perth United Church, Toronto, Canada): Good morning. Just to give you a little context from which I come and what I do in my work, I am a Minister of the United Church of Canada, but I do not preach every Sunday morning. I am affiliated with a congregation in the west end of the city. We are just redeveloping our property and sharing our space with the neighborhood center. So we deal with health care and with senior citizens, with youth and with family and young moms and children. So, my work is very diverse, and I am glad to be here this morning. I would like to share with you this morning a story about a village, and that village was situated along a beautiful river, a nonpolluted river, I might add. Many of the villagers went out and wandered along that river for recreation and spiritual growth and just to have a lot of fun. As they were wandering one day, a group of them noticed there was a baby floating in the river. Immediately somebody dived in and rescued the baby. They took the baby off to the village and cared for it and loved it and it stayed with them. Two weeks later they were walking again along the same river and saw another baby floating in the water. And again the same thing happened. This began to happen on a regular basis. Every day somebody was finding a baby in the water. Well, a group of people got together and formed a committee, as we all do, and began to study the issue. They set up a royal commission on the subject. They decided that they needed to be by the river to rescue the babies, and, as time went on, more and more babies appeared in the water. It was not only every other week; it was every week and then every day and then three or four times a day. So they put people along the river, to station them along the river so that they might notice when the babies are starting to come down the river so they could get them and fish them out of the water more quickly. This happened more often and of course they became more and more busy setting up systems to care for these babies, to adopt the babies, and they became so concerned about rescuing the babies out of the water. It became such a large problem that they couldn't handle it, and babies began to slip by and people became very nonchalant about these babies that were drifting by and nobody to rescue them. Finally, somebody said, "Why are these babies in the river? Where are they coming from?" And everybody was so busy caring and setting up systems that they didn't bother asking the question and they couldn't deal with that question at this point. So these babies kept coming and person kept saying, "Why don't we go to the top of the river and find out why the babies are in the water?" Nobody would listen. They continued to set up more complex systems and social service networks to deal with the babies in the water. But nobody wanted to get to the root cause of why and how and where the babies were coming from. And as I think of Toronto today, and most of you are not familiar with our city and our social issues, but I am sure you have read about Meech Lake and some of our national issues. One of the things from a community worker's perspective and from a religious person's perspective is that we need to get to the root of the cause. In Toronto we have 3,000 homeless people a night on our streets. In this beautiful city of wealth, we have homeless people wandering around. We have huge numbers of people at our food banks, in this rich country of Canada, that go to bed hungry. That is why we need to go back to that root cause. As you gather here today, to consider your work of your Union, consider how you are going to address the needs of your brothers and sisters within the Union, you need to ask the question of why do we have the problems and how are we going to address them. How are we going to be inclusive; how are we going to include racial minorities; how are we going to include women, the disabled, and are we really going to take them seriously and give them power? As we think of those babies floating down the river, we do have a mandate, we do have the order, if you want to call it that, to address our brothers and sisters, whether we like it or not, because we are human beings gathered together today as one group of people. Let us pray. Living God, loving God, we thank You and we praise You for the power of Your presence here in our midst for this opportunity to come together to affirm our identity and to celebrate our common hope. We thank You for the quality of achievement that is represented here among all peoples, among women, racial minorities, physically disabled, for the many diverse people that continue to contribute toward the building of a better world. Pour out Your spirit upon us. We pray for all members who are not here because of illness, injury on the job, and we pray that they may be strengthened and held and that our prayers may touch them and they may know that we are thinking and concerned about them and that our love and warmth will surround them and help in the healing process. O, God, we come before You with the concern of our country, the concern of our world. Be with our leaders as they deliberate the needs of our country.