T-Mobile Accused of Fighting a Real Union by Creating a Fake One

For more than a decade, the Communications Workers of America has been trying to unionize T-Mobile, the US subsidiary of German giant Deutsche Telekom, which is now the third-largest US wireless carrier. The campaign has so far won only two union contracts, covering about 30 of T-Mobile’s roughly 45,000 employees. Now CWA is alleging to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that T-Mobile has adopted an anti-union tactic that’s been illegal since 1935: creating a company-controlled union to drain support for an independent one.

“It’s a little bit flattering,” says CWA organizer Josh Coleman, a former employee. “We have momentum; the company’s trying to stop it by copying our union.” CWA says that in June 2015, Brian Brueckman, a T-Mobile senior vice president, sent employees an e-mail announcing “another big step to ensure your voice is heard” by management—the nationwide rollout of a group called T-Voice, composed of employee “representatives” from each call center, selected every six months by the company. “T-Voice is your voice,” Brueckman wrote in his e-mail, the first of several messages to employees that CWA contends contradict federal labor rules. T-Mobile didn’t respond to interview requests for this story. But in an e-mail last December, a company manager in Missouri described T-Voice as “a direct line for Frontline feedback to senior leadership” and said that T-Voice representatives would be bringing “pain points” from workers to management and “tracking and communicating resolution back to the team.” T-Mobile also has cited T-Voice’s input in e-mails to workers announcing perks such as spa days for longtime employees, free Wi-Fi, and cell phone charging station