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communication workers of america
Boycott T-Mobile—and All Trump Collaborators
Let's make it clear not just to T-Mobile but all of corporate America: There are costs to siding with this authoritarian government.
Oct 03, 2025
Ever since the Irish Land League organized community members in County Mayo to band together and refuse to serve, work for, trade with, or even deliver mail to the English land agent, Captain Charles Boycott, the boycott has become a staple in activists’ toolkit. And nearly 160 years since Captain Boycott was effectively ostracized—as US President Donald Trump and his cronies assail American democracy and send troops into our cities and masked goons onto our streets—it's a tool that’s gaining a renewed prominence once again.
After Target dropped its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) targets in February, Black faith leaders, including Pastor Jamal Bryant, called for a boycott of the company. “What we learned from the Montgomery bus boycott is that racist America doesn’t respond to speeches, it responds to dollars,” Pastor Bryant told his parishioners at his 10,000-member megachurch in Atlanta.
In the months that followed, Target’s sales, foot traffic, and stock price tanked. By August, Forbes was announcing that the boycott had cost the Target CEO his job and the company’s investors $12 billion.
After Elon Musk started his attempts to destroy the US government earlier this year, including bragging about putting USAID into the woodchipper, an act that may have killed half-a-million people so far, thousands committed to boycotting Tesla as part of the #TeslaTakedown movement.
If a company like T-Mobile believes that there are no economic consequences to siding with authoritarianism, they are much more likely to do it.
In the midst of the boycott, Tesla sales collapsed, the stock price cratered, and before long Musk was out of the government and engaging in a very public bitching session about President Trump.More recently, after Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel for comments following the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, a boycott of Disney grew so rapidly, with tens of thousands of cancellations of Disney, Hulu, and ESPN, that it forced the company into reinstating the comedian.
Attempting to build on this, the labor union, the Communication Workers of America, the Tesla Takedown campaign, and the climate coalition I held lead, Stop the Money Pipeline, have launched the T-Mobile Boycott.
In the fight to save democracy, T-Mobile has chosen the wrong side: It’s hosting Trump Mobile on its network, despite the conflicts of interest being so great they may amount to corruption. T-Mobile is also partnering with Elon Musk’s Starlink, pouring billions into the far-right extremist’s pockets, and it lobbied in favor of Trump’s deadly budget bill, which will strip healthcare from millions of Americans. T-Mobile has also engaged in years of union busting so vicious it recently became the first telecommunications company to be added to the AFL-CIO’s boycott list.
We’ve set a goal of 10,000 T-Mobile customers canceling their contracts between November 14-16. In the process, we hope to build on the energy of the Target, Tesla, and Disney boycotts and make it clear not just to T-Mobile but all of corporate America: There are costs to siding with this authoritarian government.
If you’re a T-Mobile customer, you can take the pledge to hang up on T-Mobile here.
Even if you’re not a customer, we encourage you to take the pledge to boycott T-Mobile. The boycott is happening right before the holiday season, when a lot of people switch carriers—tens of thousands of people pledging to never switch to T-Mobile at this time of year is an important part of the campaign.
But I also want to be honest with you, I don’t know if this campaign will work. While we’re urging people to cancel en masse next month, I recently completed a test run and canceled my contract with T-Mobile and switched to Visible (saving more than $60 on my monthly cell phone bill in the process).
As economically advantageous as it was however, it took me about 45 minutes to switch from T-Mobile, including a call to the company to get a “port out pin.” In the grand scheme of things, 45 minutes isn’t an eternity, but it’s also not nothing. It took me less than four minutes to cancel my Disney+ subscription after Kimmel’s suspension.
I have no idea if we can get 10,000 people to do something that might take them nearly 45 minutes, even if we can convince them it is a small but important act in the fight to save democracy.
But I do know this, in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century, Timothy Snyder’s first lesson was, “Do not obey in advance.” And not only is T-Mobile obeying in advance, it's actively courting the administration, even as the horrors pile up: the attacks on free speech, the naked threats against political opponents, the vanishing of countless human beings into a gulag in El Salvador.
So, in this time of grave peril for this country and the world, let us use our money to build the world we want to see.
From Target to Tesla to T-Mobile, let us boycott the collaborators.
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'Fight the Trump Takeover' Protests Against GOP Election-Rigging Plot Planned for Saturday
"This fight is bigger than any one state," said the chairman of the Texas House Democratic Caucus.
Aug 15, 2025
Nationwide protests against US President Donald Trump's scheme to get Republican state legislatures to redraw their congressional maps are set to kick off this weekend.
The "Fight the Trump Takeover" movement is planning a national day of action on Saturday, August 16 that will feature coast-to-coast demonstrations from as far east as Lubec, Maine, to as far west as Anchorage, Alaska.
"Trump is trying to steal the 2026 election by rigging the system and changing electoral maps," the coalition behind the protests said on its website. "He started in Texas, but he won’t stop there. We are fighting back."
The protests are being done in partnership with several prominent progressive groups, including Indivisible, MoveOn, Human Rights Campaign, Public Citizen, and the Communication Workers of America. Some Texas-specific groups—including Texas Freedom Network, Texas AFL-CIO, and Texas for All—are also partners in the protest.
Axios reports that an "anchor rally" in Austin, Texas will kick off the nationwide events and will feature speakers including Democratic US Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett, as well as former Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke and labor activist Dolores Huerta.
The location of the Austin rally is symbolically important because Texas is trying to become the first state to redraw its maps to benefit Republicans under Trump's nationwide gerrymandering scheme, which in the coming weeks could include states such as Ohio, Indiana, Florida, and Missouri.
Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu told Axios that "this fight is bigger than any one state" because "we're defending our entire country from the Trump takeover, and I'm honored to stand with every patriotic American who refuses to let extremists rig the system."
Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-executive director of progressive organizing group Indivisible, told Axios that Trump's plan "is as crooked as it gets" and described it as part of a larger plot to "lock in minority rule for a generation."
Democratic-controlled states, led by California under Gov. Gavin Newsom, have started to fight back against the Trump plan by proposing their own redrawn maps aimed at squeezing out Republicans in their states. Newsom this week held a big rally in Los Angeles with other California Democratic heavyweights where he stressed the need for Democrats to give Republicans a taste of their own medicine.
"It's not enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil, and talk about way the world should be," Newsom said at the rally. "We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt, and we have got to meet fire with fire!"
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Video Game Actors Strike for AI Protections
"The video game industry generates billions of dollars in profit annually," said one union leader. "The driving force behind that success is the creative people who design and create those games."
Jul 25, 2024
After nearly two years of negotiations with video game giants and no deal that would protect performers from artificial intelligence, unionized voice and motion capture actors who work in video game development announced Thursday that they will go on strike starting at 12:01 am on Friday, July 26.
The performers are represented by Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), which last year won a contract for TV and film actors that included "unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI," after the union went on strike for four months.
The union has been negotiating on behalf of video game actors with major production companies including Disney Character Voices Inc., Activision Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc., and has won concessions over wages and job safety—but "AI protections remain the sticking point," said SAG-AFTRA on Thursday as the impending strike was announced.
Unionized actors want protections that would stop video game companies from training AI to replicate actors' voices or likeness without their consent and without compensating them.
"The video game industry generates billions of dollars in profit annually," said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator for SAG-AFTRA. "The driving force behind that success is the creative people who design and create those games. That includes the SAG-AFTRA members who bring memorable and beloved game characters to life, and they deserve and demand the same fundamental protections as performers in film, television, streaming, and music: fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the AI use of their faces, voices, and bodies."
"Frankly, it's stunning that these video game studios haven't learned anything from the lessons of last year—that our members can and will stand up and demand fair and equitable treatment with respect to AI, and the public supports us in that," he added.
Sarah Elmaleh, negotiating committee chair for the union's interactive media agreement, said the negotiations have shown the companies "are not interested in fair, reasonable AI protections, but rather flagrant exploitation."
"We look forward to collaborating with teams on our interim and independent contracts, which provide AI transparency, consent, and compensation to all performers, and to continuing to negotiate in good faith with this bargaining group when they are ready to join us in the world we all deserve," said Elmaleh.
The unionized actors voted in favor of the strike authorization with a 98.32% yes vote, said SAG-AFTRA.
The strike was announced as more than 500 workers who help develop the popular World of Warcraft video game franchise voted to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA), with the games publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, recognizing the bargaining unit.
CWA noted that the workers' journey to union representation began with a walkout in 2021 at Activision Blizzard, which was later bought by Microsoft, over sexual harassment and discrimination.
"What we've accomplished at World of Warcraft is just the beginning," Eric Lanham, a World of Warcraft test analyst, said in a statement. "We know that when workers have a protected voice, it's a win-win for employee standards, the studio, and World of Warcraft fans looking for the best gaming experience."
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