Dawson said employees were given an opportunity to discuss the merger on Oct. 15, 2015, during a “town hall meeting” in an auditorium.

“We were told there would be no major changes until the end of 2016,” he said. “We were told we would have the option to unionize, and that union representatives would contact us. But once February came and went, and nobody contacted us, we finally reached out to a union. The union has to wait for us to contact them first. If we wouldn’t have reached out, I doubt we would have ever contacted a union. I think they deliberately told us the union would contact us to prevent us from organizing.”

He said many people were negatively affected by the decision to end part-time employment and flexible scheduling for students.

“We did surveys on it, and part-time or married students alone came to about 22 percent of the total workforce, and if you add part-time mothers, it’s probably going up to 30 (percent) to 40 percent of the workforce,” he said. “They used me for radio commercials to say ‘Hey, come apply to DirecTV’ and they had me say ‘We work with mothers and students.’ That was one of their bullet points to recruit people, and that changed right away.”

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