Verizon says it has to cut costs on its landline network, but 45,000 strikers point to the billions in profit made on their backs
Outside Verizon's lower Manhattan headquarters, crowds of nearly 200 strikers are camped out – many of them with their whole families, as construction workers from the World Trade Center site next door come by to wish them luck. Some strikers were listening to union officers give speeches on bull horns when someone motioned that the replacement workers were coming back from their lunch break: cries of "scab" pierced the air.
The company is fighting back vigorously. A Manhattan judge just ruled that only a specified number of strikers can picket a company site: between six and 50, depending on the size of the location, public radio reported.
Workers at the telecoms giant have been on the picket line before – for example, during the four-month long strike of 1989 at the predecessor company, NYNEX. But the current action – 45,000 members of the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers from New England to Virginia walked off the job 7 August – comes at a critical moment. A strike at a high-profile company that is so profitable yet is asking for extreme worker concessions is a fight that unions hope could win wider sympathy around the country. Yet unions struggled to turn the national media coverage of the Wisconsin protests into electoral victories; the public may not be ready to support labour.
A year ago, CWA leaders told its members to prepare for a strike. The company demanded $1bn in concessions – amounting to a salary and benefits cut of $20,000 per worker, and the elimination of pensions for new workers. CWA District 1 Vice President Chris Shelton said that the company was also demanding retirees pay $6,000 annually for their medical benefits "after they made promises that it would be free". This, union leaders point out, is despite a $19bn profit in the past four years. Verizon's argument is that all the profits come from the non-union wireless operation, while the unionised wireline end is a bulky, money-losing dinosaur.
But does the company's claim stand up to scrutiny? Wireline maintenance is actually the backbone of the wireless service. Cell phone carriers (Verizon and other companies) use the copper infrastructure built and maintained by union workers. That same network also supports landlines for businesses, which still rely on them, and alarm systems for offices and homes. "AT&T, MetroPCS, they lease it from us," says Mike Nixon, who has worked as a field technician with the company for 23 years. "Verizon profits no matter what."
The strikers say it's about corporate greed. In fact, Verizon started a new venture, Verizon Wireless, when it went into the cell phone business – in order to avoid the new workforce from automatically being fed into the bargaining unit. A 2007 report by American Rights at Work (pdf) said Verizon has "maintained non-union divisions by interfering with its employees' freedom of association" even though the company "could choose a high-road model of investing in its employees and still compete in a rapidly changing industry."
The CWA's Shelton said he was getting hundreds of emails a day from non-union workers in support of the strike. More inspiring, he added, was that CWA picketers have been protesting outside Verizon Wireless stores, and on several occasions, the low-wage retail workers at these locations greet the protesters and inquire about how they can join the union.
"People are angry," says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labour education research at Cornell University's school for industrial and labour relations. In New York, the CWA has been successful in strikes against the phone company in the past. In 1989, it fought off cuts to healthcare benefits, and later secured work breaks for members, Bronfenbrenner says.
Unions in Wisconsin thought they were at a turning point, but the Republicans kept their majority in the state senate by winning four of the six recall elections this week. People, generally, are a long way from rushing to sign their union cards. But when Verizon's service is eventually slowed by the strike, more and more people will pay attention. Few are likely to be sympathetic to Verizon.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/12/verizon-strike-union-wisconsin
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