As the mas­sive strike at Ver­i­zon enters its sec­ond month with no end in sight, the stakes — for the work­ers, the com­pa­ny, and the broad­er labor move­ment — are ris­ing. Even main­stream media out­lets like the New York Times have tak­en note, cast­ing it as some­thing of an epochal bat­tle over whether the econ­o­my can tol­er­ate good jobs that actu­al­ly deliv­er eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty and decent benefits.

The strike began on April 13, when 40,000 Ver­i­zon land­line work­ers, rep­re­sent­ed by the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers of Amer­i­ca (CWA) and the Inter­na­tion­al Broth­er­hood of Elec­tri­cal Work­ers (IBEW), walked out after nine months of con­tentious and fruit­less con­tract nego­ti­a­tions. The unions are fight­ing employ­er demands to make out­sourc­ing and off­shoring jobs eas­i­er, as well as cut­backs in health benefits.

Ver­i­zon isn’t budg­ing. It opened the month of May by can­cel­ing strik­ing employ­ees’ health insur­ance — an action that was tech­ni­cal­ly legal, but union offi­cials say rep­re­sents a depar­ture from the past. In the mean­time, unions have been help­ing mem­bers patch togeth­eremer­gency health cov­er­age.

These days, a strike of the Ver­i­zon action’s scale and dura­tion is exceed­ing­ly rare. That’s large­ly because the stakes for work­ers are so high. Strik­ers don’t just lose their pay and ben­e­fits — they risk los­ing their job entire­ly.

When Con­gress passed the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act in 1935, their explic­it pur­pose was to encour­age col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing, restrict inter­fer­ence with unions’ right to strike, and pro­hib­it dis­crim­i­na­tion against work­ers for union activ­i­ty. (They were also hop­ing that by pro­vid­ing an order­ly process for union recog­ni­tion, work­ers would stop phys­i­cal­ly occu­py­ing cor­po­rate prop­er­ty and dis­rupt­ing commerce.)

But almost imme­di­ate­ly after the NLRA’s pas­sage, the courts got to work gut­ting union rights. In 1939, the Supreme Court decid­ed that ​“of course” Con­gress didn’t mean to cur­tail cap­i­tal­ists’ right to keep their busi­ness­es open, and so ​“of course” employ­ers could hire new work­ers to per­ma­nent­ly replace strik­ing work­ers. Being replaced, they rea­soned, wasn’t the same as being fired or dis­crim­i­nat­ed against.

In the 1980s and ​’90s, employ­ers began using this legal prece­dent in earnest. They’d bar­gain unions to an impasse, dare them to go out on strike, and then replace work­ers with scabs. The tac­tic worked, suc­cess­ful­ly decer­ti­fy­ing much of the union­ized indus­tries in the US.

Unions still have lim­it­ed legal recourse. In the cur­rent dis­pute, the CWA has filed an unfair labor prac­tice charge with the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board over Verizon’s bar­gain­ing con­duct — a move that could pro­vide strik­ers with a mea­sure, but far from a guar­an­tee, of pro­tec­tion against per­ma­nent replacement.

Verizon’s machi­na­tions under­score work­ers’ vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. The com­pa­ny is plac­ing full-page ads in news­pa­pers seek­ing out ​“tem­po­rary full-time tech­ni­cians” (it claims to have recruit­ed ​“thou­sands” of scabs, a fig­ure so vague that even For­tune mag­a­zineput it in scare quotes) and attempt­ing to lure work­ers across the pick­et line. So far, Ver­i­zon boasts, one thou­sand union mem­bers have scabbed. But even if that num­ber is accu­rate, it would amount to less than 3 per­cent of the workforce.

One of the rea­sons the Ver­i­zon work­ers are strik­ing when few oth­er unions are will­ing to take the leap is that their skills and expe­ri­ence are not eas­i­ly replace­able. As social media sites like the Stand Up To Ver­i­zon Face­book page show with aplomb, scabs are bum­bling through their repair work, with often dan­ger­ous consequences.

Ver­i­zon is will­ing to cope with the tem­po­rary inep­ti­tude because it is intent on fac­ing down the unions. With cell phones sup­plant­i­ng land­lines and fiber-optic cables becom­ing a more lucra­tive mar­ket than Ma Bell’s lega­cy cop­per wires, the com­pa­ny wants to quar­an­tine the unions from its growth divisions.

To that end, Ver­i­zon has vig­or­ous­ly resist­ed union orga­niz­ing attempts at its wire­less divi­sion — and with much suc­cess. While the staff at a hand­ful of wire­less stores have orga­nized, none have won a contract.

For their part, the strik­ing unions have extend­ed their pick­et lines to as many Ver­i­zon Wire­less store­fronts as pos­si­ble. Any dent they can put in the wire­less division’s mar­ket share, the unions rec­og­nize, is col­lat­er­al dam­age for Verizon.

They’ve also fanned out to the legal and polit­i­cal front. Ear­li­er this month, the unions filed fed­er­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions charges against Ver­i­zon for its strong-arm tac­tics in push­ing tra­di­tion­al tele­phone cus­tomers to switch to the company’s more mod­ern (and more expen­sive) fiber optic system.

And they’ve applied car­rot-and-stick pres­sure around the company’s high-speed Fios ser­vice, which is in high demand among res­i­den­tial cus­tomers — and there­fore pop­u­lar with local politi­cians — but remains a low­er invest­ment pri­or­i­ty for Ver­i­zon than its non-union wire­less division.

In oth­er activ­i­ty off the pick­et line, union activists and sup­port­ers dis­rupt­ed Verizon’s May 5 share­hold­ers meet­ing in Albu­querque, New Mex­i­co. Two hun­dred and fifty activists protest­ed the con­fab, includ­ing fif­teen who engaged in civ­il dis­obe­di­ence. Union pen­sion vot­ers, rep­re­sent­ing $1.3 bil­lion in Ver­i­zon stock, also forced an ulti­mate­ly unsuc­cess­ful vote on a res­o­lu­tion to cur­tail exec­u­tive compensation.

To some extent, work­ers have ben­e­fit­ed from strik­ing in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year. Bernie Sanders, whose insur­gent cam­paign received its most promi­nent union endorse­ment from the CWA, was on the pick­et line the first day of the strike and has been doing sol­i­dar­i­ty work ever since. Even Hillary Clin­ton — no doubt pres­sured by a sur­pris­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive pri­ma­ry — found a com­fort­able pair of shoes and joined a pick­et line.

The opti­mistic view is that this indi­cates the resur­gence of a long-mori­bund labor movement.

Last year, the fed­er­al Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics, which keeps track of ​“major work stop­pages” (those involv­ing more than one thou­sand work­ers), report­ed a 400 per­cent uptick in lost work­ing hours over the pre­vi­ous year. The increase rep­re­sent­ed the high-water mark for strike activ­i­ty over the past half-decade — and the Ver­i­zon strike alone blows that record out of the water.

Yet the strike is also a major test of whether rel­a­tive­ly well-posi­tioned work­ers can with­hold their labor and win.

A com­mon chant on pick­et lines is ​“One day longer, one day stronger.” That is par­tic­u­lar­ly true of a strike like this one, which is by design and cir­cum­stances a war of attri­tion. The com­pa­ny bud­get­ed for first quar­ter strike-relat­ed prof­it loss­es, but admits that a pro­tract­ed strike could impact the entire year’s bot­tom line.

The strik­ing work­ers, of course, face far worse pri­va­tion. They don’t have share­hold­ers to under­write their loss­es. They just have a strike fund (and a sol­i­dar­i­ty fund). But most work­ers, union­ized and non-union­ized, are in even direr straits.

The out­come of the Ver­i­zon work­ers’ strike will there­fore be tak­en as a labor bell­wether — for good or ill.

The CWA is a spon­sor of In These Times. Spon­sors play no role in edi­to­r­i­al content.

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