http://themilitant.com/2016/8017/801701.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 17 May 2, 2016
(lead article)
Verizon strikers: Time to say no to concessions!
Stand in solidarity with 40,000 strikers
Reuters/Shannon Stapleton
Strikers demonstrate outside a Verizon Wireless store in New York City,
April 18.
BY TAMAR ROSENFELD
NEW YORK — The nearly 40,000 workers on strike at telecommunications
giant Verizon in nine states and the District of Columbia are receiving
support from working people throughout the region. They walked off the
job April 13 in the face of demands by the company to raise health care
costs, outsource jobs and force out-of-town transfers for two months at
a time. Their contract expired Aug. 1.
The strike by members of the Communications Workers of America and the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers affects the company’s
operations from Massachusetts to Virginia.
“In 2011 we had a lot more people asking, ‘Why are you going on
strike?’” during that two-week walkout, said Joe Pacheco. “Now we’re
getting more words of encouragement.”
“We’re on strike because we’ve given back in the last three contracts,”
striker Tony Mondie told the Militant. “At some point we have to stop
going downhill, we have to say, ‘Enough!’”
On the first day of the strike downtown streets echoed with strikers’
chants and truck drivers honking horns in solidarity as some 400 workers
gathered at 6 a.m. in front of a Verizon building in midtown Manhattan.
Co-workers exchanged embraces, a scene repeated across the city as
pickets were dispatched to different locations, including Verizon
Wireless stores.
“I think we are getting more solidarity because with harder times a lot
more people are aware of the importance of unions,” Anne Wray-Penders,
51, a network services coordinator, said on the picket line April 19.
“Verizon is making billions,” said Rohan Seales, who works at a Verizon
construction garage. “Why are they trying to take away the benefits our
union has fought for years to get? Workers hired after 2000 have no
pension, only a 401(k). They sign a contract with the company for a
maximum of two years,” and must start over, never working their way up
the wage scale.
“The company doesn’t give us anything,” said Herman Maxwell, a field
technician who started working for the company in 1988, when it was
called NYNEX. “People have fought for what we have, even given their
lives. Gerry Horgan was killed on the picket line in 1989.” Horgan was
struck by a vehicle operated by a scab during that four-week strike and
died the next day.
Maxwell described how managers track workers on the clock or the GPS.
“People are being suspended because they can’t account for where they
were for a few minutes,” he said.
The strikers work for Verizon’s landline, Internet and television
service of copper wire and fiber optic cable. The company’s lucrative
and expanding wireless division is largely nonunion. Organizing the
wireless workforce is one of the biggest challenges facing the CWA.
Workers at Verizon’s six wireless retail stores in Brooklyn and one in
Everett, Massachusetts, are unionized. “The company fired one of the
main organizers, Bianca Cunningham,” CWA Local 1101 steward Fitz Boyce
said. “We’re fighting for her. The nonunion store workers are treated
worse than we are. The company holds weekly in-house meetings to talk
against the union. Some work on commission and their wages are low.”
“The National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of Bianca’s union
complaint,” CWA Local 1109 Vice President Mike Gallo said in a phone
interview April 19, “but the company appealed. We’re keeping up the
fight as we negotiate a first contract for the Brooklyn store workers.”
Marches, rallies across New York
Hundreds of strikers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge April 14,
rallied in downtown Brooklyn and then marched to the Brooklyn Navy Yard,
where Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie
Sanders were debating that evening.
Dozens of strikers in high spirits honking all kinds of horns created a
din April 18 in front of the Renaissance New York Midtown Hotel where
Verizon is housing managers replacing striking workers. Later that
morning they and several thousand others rallied at a nearby Verizon
building.
In a phone interview April 20, Verizon spokesperson Ray McConville said
the company’s demand to make mandatory out-of-state transfers for up to
two months “is not a must-have item,” but “we have to have added
flexibility to move workers around.”
Verizon prepared for the strike, training thousands of managers and
others to take over strikers’ jobs.
The company is running full-page newspaper ads in the region’s dailies
with titles like, “What’s there to strike about?” They declare that
“technicians in the New York area have wages and a benefit package that
averages $130,000 a year.”
“Not us!” was the response of picket Nancy Glennon, an office worker who
started in 1983 at age 22. “Our top pay after four years is about
$71,000. Techs get about $82,000 and some do a lot of overtime. I think
Verizon is counting all the benefits and overtime.”
At the April 18 rally Tommy Ballard, a CWA member and technician, said,
“It’s disgusting that Verizon makes billions and they want us to give
something back. They want us to pay double for our medical. Even with
the 6.5 percent wage increase they offered, we would lose overall.”
“Part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in,” Ballard said, “is
because we shouldn’t have made major concessions in the 2011 contract.”
Others shared this view. “In the 2011 contract our deductibles all got
higher,” said Wray-Penders. “My husband takes a medication that used to
cost $3 per tablet, but it went up to $8 in 2011.”
Strikers are picketing at Verizon offices and wireless stores every day.
Related articles:
Teamsters hold DC rally to demand halt to pension cuts
On the Picket Line
Protests across country demand $15/hour and union
Labor actions rise in China as bosses slash jobs, wages
Fight for pensions for entire working class
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