The Communications Workers of America (CWA) posted a press release a couple of days ago:
After trying for ten months to reach a fair contract, nearly 40,000 Verizon workers from Massachusetts to Virginia will go on strike at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, April 13 if a fair agreement is not reached by then. The Verizon strike will be by far the largest work stoppage in the country in recent years.
“We’re standing up for working families and standing up to Verizon’s corporate greed,” said CWA District 1 Vice President Dennis Trainor. “If a hugely profitable corporation like Verizon can destroy the good family-supporting jobs of highly skilled workers, then no worker in America will be safe from this corporate race to the bottom.”
Even though Verizon made $39 billion in profits over the last three years — and $1.8 billion a month in profits over the first three months of 2016 — the company wants to gut job security protections, contract out more work, offshore jobs to Mexico, the Philippines and other locations and require technicians to work away from home for as long as two months without seeing their families. Verizon is also refusing to negotiate any improvements in wages, benefits or working conditions for Verizon Wireless retail workers, who formed a union in 2014.
This comes after 10 months of contract negotiation and about one month after 20 Democratic senators wrote and sent a signed letter to Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s CEO, pleading with McAdam to do the right thing. Amongst the numerous corporate bullshit Verizon is trying to pull:
- Offshoring and contracting out even more customer service work to Mexico, the Philippines and other locations.
- Cutting job security for all workers.
- Requiring technicians to work away from home for as long as two months, without seeing their families. For anyone trying to balance work and family life, this is impossible.
- Refusing to negotiate improvements to wages, benefits and working conditions for Verizon Wireless workers, who formed a union with CWA in 2014.
- Freezing pensions at 30 years of service and forcing retirees to pay extremely high health care costs.
- Slashing benefits for workers injured on the job.
And before your capitalism-is-the-bomb, this-is-the-best-way, rising-tide-floats-boats friend can finish his sentence, just let him know this:
For years, Verizon has been cutting vital staff — it has nearly 40 percent fewer workers now than a decade ago. Verizon has failed to hire the personnel necessary to properly roll out FiOS, the high-speed broadband service that is still unavailable to many of its customers. In cities like Philadelphia and New York, Verizon has failed to meet the buildout obligations under their citywide cable franchise agreements.
And Verizon FIOS? That’s the service that Verizon was given billions of dollars in corporate subsidies and then decided not to finish the job. Just. Not. Finish. It. Here is some of Verizon’s response to the threat of a strike.
The telco countered that it remains committed to a deal, but said the unions would “rather make strike threats than constructively engage at the bargaining table.”
Verizon said it could continue to serve its customers whether of not the unions struck and that it has been preparing for that possibility for more than a year, training nonunion workers to do “virtually every job function handled by our represented workforce.”
There’s also this classic big business response from a company that has a virtual monopoly in its field with no competition to worry about.
“A strike in this case is not going to change the issues on the table that need to be addressed,” Reed said. “Union leaders need to take an honest look at what Verizon is proposing.”
An “honest look”? How about go fuck yourself. Here’s a letter from all of the mayors of major municipalities being screwed over by Verizon’s futuristic vision of what a goddamn utility is supposed to provide.
In some cases, such as New York City, Pittsburgh, Jersey City and Newark, Verizon has failed to meet contractual or legislative deadlines to make fiber optic cable service available to many of our residents. In New York City, as elsewhere in the Northeast, the FiOS build-out has clear franchise deadlines and availability requirements for residents who would like to purchase FiOS. As New York City thoroughly documented in its recent audit, Verizon has failed to meet its contractual deadlines for rollout and service installation. In other cases, such as Syracuse, Worcester, Lowell, and Albany, Verizon has simply refused to build FiOS at all.
Based on irrefutable evidence of your company’s poor service record, lack oftransparency and accountability, or demands for exclusive agreements with landlords throughout the region, we are deeply concerned that you have not acted like a good corporate citizen and that an incomplete FiOS rollout will result in decreased competition and the reduction of benefits to consumers throughout the Verizon footprint. As elected officials, it is our obligation and our responsibility to bring these complaints to your attention.
So, when you find a story fed to a pro-business outlet like Forbes or Business Weekly with a Verizon exec talking about how there are this many people being serviced and how the business is changing, just remember this: they are making money, more money now than ever before, and everything else they are telling you is a lie. They do not follow their own rigged contracts for chrissakes! Just because some of them convince themselves they aren’t lying doesn’t make it any less a lie.