(Includes 2 articles and a video)

August 11, 2011 - Verizon’s strike in the Northeast is into Day Five, and big picket lines are turning away customers at Verizon’s wireless stores.

The strike covers 45,000 members of the Communications Workers and Electrical Workers (IBEW) from Massachusetts to Virginia. Verizon wants to eliminate pensions, as well as limit raises and force big health care costs onto current workers and retirees. The concessions would take $1 billion from workers, at a company which made almost $20 billion during the last four years.

“Everybody’s very motivated,” said Barbara Smith, a member of CWA Local 1109 in Brooklyn. When her local pickets wireless stores, “pedestrians stop and thank us because they understand that this fight is about more than Verizon.”

Operating Engineers, crane operators, and other construction and building-service workers in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are refusing to cross picket lines. Teamsters at UPS have refused to deliver to Verizon offices, denying the company wireless and fiber-optic equipment. Even some non-union workers are refusing to cross. Dozens of unions, from nurses to janitors to teachers, have bolstered picket lines in support.

Busy UPS drivers are double-parking their trucks next to the vans operated by scabs and managers, boosting efforts by CWA and IBEW members to delay and deny scabs’ access to the work.

Bob Master, CWA District 1’s legislative and political director, said cars driven by scabs have struck picketers, at least 20 so far, sending at least two to the hospital.

Injunctions

Verizon has secured several injunctions. In Pennsylvania the injunction limits the number of picketers at a location to six, and mandates they stay 15 feet from scabs. The Delaware complaint alleged that members shut off power to Verizon facilities and glued shut locks on trucks and garage fences.

In Philadelphia, management hadn’t moved trucks off the property ahead of the strike and tight, packed picket lines prevented them from going anywhere.

“We had them pretty much shut down for three days,” said Justin Harrison, a unit secretary in statewide CWA Local 13000. Mobile picketers are chasing trucks around town now that they’re out of the yard.

The company was in court Wednesday in New York seeking similar limitations on picketers’ activity. CWA attorney Gay Semel said that to win an injunction the company needs to claim that police can’t protect Verizon scabs and property, and that the company produced 20 instances of alleged violence.

An injunction delivered to strikers Thursday limited the number of picketers, from six to 50, based on the size of the location. Mobile picketers in New York are limited to six, and while in traffic they must follow 45 feet behind the scab van, Semel said. While courts are no friend of the worker, Semel added, she called these injunctions among the least restrictive she’s seen.

Wireless stores are unaffected, although Verizon is returning to court today to secure additional injunctions against those pickets.

CWA is targeting heavily trafficked New York City wireless stores and big, noisy lines are turning back customers. The pickets are orderly, and feel somewhat cramped, because watchful police keep picketers circulating inside metal pens.

Management is desperate to limit disruption at these wireless locations, especially ahead of September’s expected rollout of the next iPhone. The hot-selling gadget will be available at (mostly unionized) AT&T retail stores as well—and Verizon picketers would be more than happy to let customers know the closest location to patronize.

In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg’s administration has dispatched police to follow Verizon vehicles around, a taxpayer-provided security blanket for a company that paid no federal taxes in 2009-10 (and actually claimed a $1.3 billion refund).

Moving the Work

Reacting to the Northeast telecom unions’ long history of militant strikes and inside campaigns, Verizon has tried to limit their power over the years by aggressively contracting out work and moving it around the country and overseas. Eddie Blackburn, a service rep who handles fiber-optic products in Providence, Rhode Island, has seen his union, IBEW Local 2323, cut in half in his 11 years at the company.

Most media accounts relegate the unions to history’s dustbin, because they have not yet been able to organize most of the burgeoning wireless business. They ignore the merciless campaigns waged by Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and others to keep unions out.

But Blackburn says the huge spurt in wireless has a positive side in the strike. Even with a shrunken union, the rapid-mobilization capabilities of text messaging and Twitter feeds delivered to smartphones are enabling members to zero in on scabs’ locations and drive them nuts.

When a member discovered a downed line Tuesday, members converged to picket it. They kept residents from being hurt, Blackburn said, and waited for scabs to appear. (Utility workers also won’t cross their lines.) But when a call came of a scab van 15 minutes away, they dispatched another five picketers to surround it immediately.

“They weren’t prepared for how flexible and fluid our mobilizing can be,” he said. “It gets in their head. They’re not as effective.”

Plus, he said, members are flocking to the activity, which he admits is “sort of fun.” Videos have surfaced “highlighting the hack, garbage work management is doing,” Blackburn said.

But the other side is carrying cameras, too, and giant anti-union megaphones like Fox News are only too happy to paint the strikers as out-of-control vigilantes. Reports of vandalism and a striker “endangering” his child have been amplified.

“You could be Mother Teresa on the picket line, and they’d still find a way to go after you,” Blackburn said.

More importantly, he said, the mobile picketing gives members something effective to do, rather than picketing office locations where managers do inside work and there’s little opportunity to take action.

Meanwhile, the union dispatched its negotiators back to the table Wednesday. Verizon removed its proposal that attached wage increases to management-determined productivity measures, but union officials say the company is still dithering in negotiations.

“The only serious thing here is the traffic I’m stuck in,” said CWA Local 1400 President Don Trementozzi, on his way back to Rye, New York, for another bargaining session.

The unions are planning a vigil at Verizon chairman Ivan Seidenberg’s house in the pricey Hudson river community of Nyack on Friday.

Source: Labor Notes

Verizon $ Billions Roll in While Workers Walk Out

At Verizon locations throughout the Northeast, 45,000 workers started walking picket lines Sunday. Their strike, brought on by a flood of concession demands the Communications Workers say will pick $20,000 from each worker’s pocket, is the largest the country has seen in four years. Verizon, which has made $19 billion in profits in the last four years, announced July 29 its wireless unit would pay a special $10 billion dividend to shareholders. At the same time, its negotiators were pushing for $1 billion in concessions from workers. (Unions.org)

At Verizon locations throughout the Northeast, 45,000 workers started walking picket lines Sunday.

Their strike, brought on by a flood of concession demands the Communications Workers say will pick $20,000 from each worker’s pocket, is the largest the country has seen in four years.

Verizon, which has made $19 billion in profits in the last four years, announced July 29 its wireless unit would pay a special $10 billion dividend to shareholders. At the same time, its negotiators were pushing for $1 billion in concessions from workers.

At Verizon locations throughout the Northeast, 45,000 workers started walking picket lines Sunday.

Their strike, brought on by a flood of concession demands the Communications Workers say will pick $20,000 from each worker’s pocket, is the largest the country has seen in four years.

Verizon, which has made $19 billion in profits in the last four years, announced July 29 its wireless unit would pay a special $10 billion dividend to shareholders. At the same time, its negotiators were pushing for $1 billion in concessions from workers.

“We’re on strike for our bargaining rights, just like Wisconsin or Ohio,” CWA President Larry Cohen told members on a union-wide conference call Sunday. “We can never end this recession by cutting the wages of workers.”

The company proposed to eliminate pension accruals for current workers and defined-benefit pensions for new hires. Its bargainers want to eliminate job security and shift the cost of health care to workers.

They demanded to replace regular raises with management-determined productivity measures. They want the right to shift more work away from union members and out of the country. They look to axe paid sick days and take away Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Veteran’s Day as paid holidays. They want to fight items as small as a $3 parking reimbursement.

A hundred concession proposals still sat on the bargaining table shared by the CWA and Electrical Workers (IBEW) as the contract expired Saturday night.

The strike appeared to surprise some, on both the union and management side. One pair of managers rushed into the field “fixed” a shorn phone line with duct tape.

Patti Egan-Walters, a business agent for CWA Local 1005 in New York, said another manager confided that he had been dispatched to drive around the city in a Verizon truck—but without any training in how to fix or install anything.

His orders? “When you run out of gas, come on back.”

Negotiations in 2003 and 2008 ran through contract expirations. The company flew in a replacement workforce and housed them, but when the unions stayed inside, the cost of keeping a scab workforce idle quickly escalated, prompting a settlement. This time, members say the company’s demands are so severe, the unions had little choice but to walk out.

“They want to take 60 percent of the contract and dump it,” said Ed Fitzpatrick, president of IBEW Local 2222 in Massachusetts. “These boys are making billions and all they want is cheap labor.”

Tashauna Jackson, a CWA Local 1105 steward, noted that the chairman of Verizon’s board took home $55,000 a day last year—and that in four years, the company’s top five executives bagged $258 million between them.

Yet Verizon says union members must suffer to bring labor costs into line with non-union competitors, prompting members to point out that the union would rather lift cable and wireless workers up to their standards. “We’re not going the way of Wal-Mart,” said John Colleran, a Local 2222 steward.

Verizon signed a neutrality agreement as part of the settlement ending the 18-day strike in 2000. It promised to allow the unions to organize its wireless workforce—but the company violated the agreement as soon as the ink was dry, fighting viciously against every organizing drive. Today, only 50 Verizon wireless workers have a union.

MOBILE PICKETS
At the Manhattan headquarters Monday, passing cars and trucks honked in support of picketers, to loud cheers and whistles. Workers chanted and booed as managers entered and left office doors just feet away.

Two cops stood watch under the Verizon sign, while others directed anyone wearing a red shirt into an area enclosed by metal barricades. In Albany, a tight group of picketers blocked doors until police forced them to let managers through. One injury was reported in Monday’s picketing.

Thirty managers in Manhattan, some with suitcases, entered the building at 7 a.m. Later a group of seven managers in workboots and backpacks (presumably filled with tools) were seen leaving. A dozen picketers followed them into the subway. “Are you kidding, you’re going to follow me?” said one manager to a striker.

Workers from the headquarters office normally travel on foot to do installation and repair in lower Manhattan. The pickets would follow struck work throughout the day, said Local 1101 steward Ron Spaulding, making life as difficult as possible for scabs.

The “mobile picketing” strategy, honed in a four-month strike in 1989, is under way in Massachusetts, too. Techs track the vehicles leaving garages and send out the call. “We can get 50 people in a heartbeat,” Colleran said, surrounding a manhole or scab truck in the field.

Members have noticed that many safety precautions have fallen away in Verizon’s rush to get managers into the field, and mentioned their concerns to OSHA.

Strikers said Verizon’s attacks would spread to other unions, and push down non-union workers even further.

Union members don’t pay health care premiums at Verizon, a plum they have defended through previous strikes—and one which is increasingly hard to defend, because President Obama’s 2010 health care reform will levy a tax on their so-called “Cadillac” plans.

“We fought for those benefits for all those years,” said Brian Tyrrell, a special services technician in Manhattan, recalling the sacrifices of past strikes, including the 219-day strike in 1972.

Although the tax won’t be levied until 2018, thanks to union lobbying, Verizon is demanding that union members start paying thousands of dollars now.

Some leaders, like CWA Local 1400 President Don Trementozzi, argue that the unions should instead push the companies to back single-payer health care plans in East Coast states, which would take the issue off the bargaining table—and off the company’s back—without decimating workers’ paychecks or coverage.

OFF THE PICKET LINE
Both CWA and IBEW leaders are clear that traditional strike tactics won’t win this walkout—and that they’re not going to play by the usual rules. Heavy automation and outsourcing enable the company to maintain the network and send struck work, especially the sales and service work of call centers, flying around the globe.

“Our work is going to India, China—with globalization, the company is at an advantage,” Jackson said.

So the unions are targeting Verizon wireless stores, where pickets are turning away customers and denying the company revenue at its most profitable source.

Union negotiators met with the company Monday. Rebutting Verizon’s claims, they say the company canceled bargaining sessions leading up to the strike, and that they are prepared to talk.

Cohen has said the goal of the strike is not necessarily a contract settlement but simply to stimulate serious bargaining.

This leaves open the possibility that the unions could submit an unconditional offer to return to work, coming back inside to restart talks—and holding open the possibility of walking back out if Verizon’s bargaining stance doesn’t improve.

If Verizon, frustrated, locks the workers out, their access to unemployment insurance is triggered and the union could file unfair labor practices over the company’s bad-faith bargaining position. Leaning on state benefits would take some of the pressure off the CWA’s $400 million strike fund and help the IBEW—which has no fund—stay in the game.

“It’s possible to carry out a guerrilla strike campaign—though there are some risks,” says Boston labor attorney Bob Schwartz, author of Strikes, Picketing, and Inside Campaigns. The company could discharge strikers if it convinces the National Labor Relations Board that the union is engaging in premeditated intermittent strikes.

But the unions are in uncharted territory, he said.

He pointed out that the unions maintain their right to shut down all parts of their employer’s business—union and non-union—and apply pressure to its suppliers, which both unions are pursuing aggressively.

On Sunday’s call with members, CWA District 1 Vice President Chris Shelton promised more.

“We’re going to use some tactics we’re not used to,” he said. “But we have to, because the old tactics don’t work anymore.”

Jenny Brown contributed to this article.

Source: Unions