District 1 of the Communications Workers of America is comprised of New York, New Jersey, New England. In its early years, immediately after the founding and consolidation of the CWA (1947-1951), the District was made up primarily of telephone workers. It was the nerve center and power base of the national union, whose early leaders and first president, Joseph Beirne, had come from the New York Metropolitan Area. Under District Director Mary Hanscomb the District gained steadily in size, but the biggest leap in numbers and political clout came when District organizer Morton Bahr (formerly president of Local 1172) and several associates succeeded in bringing in 24,000 workers of the New York Telephone Company (later NYNEX and still later part of Verizon). As a result of this campaign the membership of the District more than doubled. The two biggest locals in District 1, Local 1101 (New York Tel) and Local 1150 (AT&T Long-Lines) carried considerable weight in the affairs of the union nationally. Bahr served as New York State Director from 1961 to 1963, and assistant to District 1 Director George Miller from 1963 to 1969. During the 1960s Bahr and Miller fought off several attempts by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to raid CWA locals, and oversaw the beginnings of what was to be a crucial area of expansion for CWA, the organizing of public workers.
Morton Bahr succeeded Miller in 1969 and assumed the new title of Vice-President for District 1. As the organizing gains of the 1960s were carried forward, tensions within the bargaining process began to make themselves felt throughout the telephone sector of the union.
In the summer of 1971 the CWA launched a strike against New York Telephone, which left lingering bitter feelings between the union and the Company. In addition, key elements in the District held out stubbornly in a "wild-cat" protest against President Beirne's initial attempts to reach a settlement in the strike, and the conflict stretched to 218 days. The settlement of the strike paved the way for national bargaining in telephone -- a long-held goal of the CWA -- finally achieved in 1974.
The present headquarters of the District, at 80 Pine St. in lower Manhattan was established in 1972. Vice-President Bahr served on the union's Bell System Bargaining Committee, and led the District's highly effective lobbying efforts in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. He has said that the CWA was the most politically influential union the New York State during the 1980s.
In 1983 the huge International Operating Center in Manhattan was closed, resulting in a major lay-off of traffic workers. This was only one effect of the court-ordered AT&T divestiture, which took full effect in 1984, and resulted in major company restructuring and changes in working conditions.
Jan Pierce, formerly CWA Area Director for Upstate New York, served as assistant to Morton Bahr, and succeeded to the position of District Vice-President, when Bahr became national president of CWA in 1985. Pierce, known for his militant approach to labor issues, presided over the aftermath of divestiture at AT&T and beginnings of the sweeping change in the telephone industry, change that was to bring drastic downsizing and the transfer of much of the industry away from the urban centers of the Northeast. Larry Mancino took over as Vice-President of District 1, then numbering some 120,000 in its ranks, in 1996. Under Mancino the make-up of district membership continued to diversify, and increased through the merger of the CWA and several smaller unions. The district came to include nurses, librarians, clerical workers, television and radio technicians, and journalists in the private sector, as well as tens of thousands of state and local public workers.
