The thing the bosses never expect is how angry and smart the membership is. People went above and beyond during the course of this strike, and part of the reason people were willing to do that is that we knew we had the public at our back.

In other strikes, it’s very common to see articles and news stories in the media about how inconvenient and problematic it is when workers go on strike. There wasn’t a single story that I know about like that during the forty-five days we were on strike.

Instead, customers complained enormously about the incompetence — and occasional drunkenness and violence — on the part of the scabs they brought in to replace us.

The union gave a lead with a strategy of trying to evict out-of-state scabs from their hotels, but the membership took that opportunity and ran with it. People were getting up at four in the morning, and following scabs back to their hotels at eleven or twelve at night.

And members jumped on every opportunity for mass pickets and rallies. This created enormous momentum and confidence that we were having an impact. And it didn’t deter people when an injunction was brought against the hotel pickets. That just sharpened people’s anger at Verizon and the status quo of workers being at the bottom.

As my union brother said to me, “Every roadblock the company threw up, instead of slowing us down or stopping us, just fueled our anger and inspired us to find ways forward.”

There was something else I’ve never seen before in the previous strikes I was involved in: municipalities, starting in Long Island, passed resolutions in favor of not doing business with Verizon for the duration of the strike. Unions and community groups adopted picket lines at Verizon Wireless stores, and the May 5 day of action had pickets at around four hundred stores nationwide.

The company bragged that it wouldn’t miss an appointment or an earnings projection during the course of the strike. They were shown to be liars. Verizon’s second-quarter earnings projections declined, and its stock price fell by 5 percent. For a company as heavily leveraged as Verizon, that was an unsustainable situation.

In this strike, we were able to turn what had been a weakness into a strength when unionized wireless retail workers joined the picket lines for the first time. We were more able to confront the wireless stores because now they were potentially part of our bargaining unit.

It was our first breaching of the formerly impenetrable wall between wireless and wireline. This gave the strike a deeper significance because it was clear that we were fighting for the future of the union, not just our own pensions or health benefits.