Will New York’s Cable Strike Revitalize the Labor Movement — or Kill It?

Charter/Spectrum is already a bloated cable behemoth building toward monopoly. Now it wants to crush the union.

By Bob Hennelly

An ongoing strike by 1,800 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 3 in New York, against the cable giant Charter/Spectrum, could well determine whether the American labor movement has a fighting chance for a revival. The strike has gone on for almost six months, and many of the union families face foreclosure or eviction.  For decades, these workers worked with the company’s corporate predecessors, made a living wage, had decent benefits, sent kids to college and made profits for their employer.

But Charter/Spectrum is not your cable company of yesteryear. These striking workers are up against a multibillion-dollar behemoth that approaches being a 21st-century version of the Rockefeller Standard Oil Trust of the 19th century. How it got so big so fast is another example of our “regulators” — and too many of our elected officials — falling captive to whatever big capital requires to get bigger, no matter what the collateral damage. A couple of thousand New York-area families is nothing to this crew. It has grand designs on global domination.  Just check out  Charter/Spectrum’s board.

Charter/Spectrum is the nation’s fastest growing cable provider, and the second-largest, serving 25 million households spread out across 41 states.  In New York City, it also owns NY1, the city’s dominant 24/7 cable news outlet. The architect of Charter/Spectrum's meteoric ascendancy from bankruptcy, in 2009, to near national monopoly in many parts of the country, is Tom Rutledge, a cable executive who lives in Connecticut. Last year, he was awarded $100 million in compensation, mostly in stock options, which could make him (depending on which list you prefer) the highest-paid CEO in the United States. 

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Source: Salon.com (via The Empire Report) 

Related story: Cuomo Exhorts Strikers But Won’t Broker Deal