Verizon workers fight corporate greed
2016 2016-05Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 12 →
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On April 13, nearly 40,000 Verizon workers on the East Coast, from Maine to Virginia, walked off the job. In the larg est U.S. strike in five years, workers from the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) walked out in response to the concessions that telecom giant Verizon has been demanding.
Workers have been without a contract for the past 11 months. The unions offered some concessions on health-care costs, but the company wasn’t appeased, still not budging on numerous drastic take-aways.
Verizon is demanding cuts to workers’ health care, freezing pension benefits at 30 years, and outsourcing call-center jobs to non-union, low-wage places such as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and the Philippines. The company is also seeking the ability to send field techs out of their home states for up to two months at a time. This would place additional strain on fami lies who are already feeling the daily pres sures of life in capitalist society, where the ruling 1% aims to slash funding for social services and schools.
Verizon claims that concessions would save money in the company’s declining land-line sector. The com pany, like AT&T, has encouraged customers to switch to less labor-intensive and largely non-union wireless service. There is little doubt that eventually, amidst a shrinking customer base, Verizon hopes to abandon land-line operation entirely.
At the same time, Verizon has been unwilling to negotiate a first equitable contract for its wireless retail-store workers. The retail workers are some of the company’s lowest paid employees, even though in 2015 the company raked in more than $18 billion in profits—paying its CEO Lowell McAdam $18 mil lion and an additional $230 million to other top ex ecutives. The company has also invested $5 billion on share repurchasing, by buying its own stock and then jacking up the price to increase profitability.
Fortune magazine ran a story headlined “Verizon Brand Takes a Hit With Consumers As Strike Drags (continued on page 10, in “Film Eye in the Sky”)