This is not a union making unreasonable demands of a struggling employer. This is the same fight that the working class is engaged in throughout our country: a fight against the wealthy and corporate oligarchs for a fair slice of the pie.

First, some quick facts.

Verizon is the highly unionized traditional landline telephone company that also sells FIOS - cable TV and data over fiber optic cables. The strike is against Verizon.

Verizon owns a majority stake in Verizon Wireless - a mostly non-union cellular carrier.

AT&T is a highly unionized cellular carrier.

Verizon paid it’s top 5 execs $250 million over the past 4 years.

Verizon’s CEO makes over 300 times more than the average Verizon worker.

Verizon banked $6 Billion in profits last year.

Verizon Wireless just paid it’s owners (Verizon and Vodafone) a $10 Billion dividend.

Verizon is a member of ALEC, and sits on the ALEC Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force. (Just throwing this out there - it seems interesting that telephone deregulation legislation is sweeping the states along with union busting and other ALEC tricks. I wonder where all those deregulation bills originated.)

Collective bargaining is highly effective: Verizon union workers get health care, dental, a defined benefit pension, and an hourly wage that provides a decent working class life.

Now to the news:

Two unions representing 45,000 workers at Verizon Communications announced early Sunday that they were calling an immediate strike because of a lack of progress in contract negotiations. The strike involves Verizon telephone field technicians, call center workers and cable installers from Massachusetts to Virginia and is expected to cause some delays in repairing and installing land line phones and Verizon’s FiOS television and Internet service. Officials with the two unions, the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Verizon was demanding far too many concessions — on health coverage, pensions and other matters — and was not backing off many of them.

Like other US companies, Verizon is making record profits.

As Corporate Profits Rise, Workers’ Income Declines The new figures indicate that corporate profits accounted for 14 percent of the total national income in 2010, the highest proportion ever recorded. The previous peak, of 13.6 percent, was set in 1942 when the need for war materials filled the order books of companies at the same time as the government imposed wage and price controls, holding down the costs companies had to pay. In the first quarter of 2011, the latest figures available, the new estimates indicate corporate profits accounted for 14.2 percent of national income, well above the 13.1 percent that had previously been estimated. ... Employees have always received more than half the total national income, until now. In 2010, the percentage of national income devoted to wages and salaries fell to 49.9 percent, and it slipped a little more to 49.6 percent in the first quarter of this year. That continued decline may help explain the economic worries of many Americans who have jobs but still fear they are falling behind.

This is what we are fighting. The working class is being asked to make do with less and less even as the ownership class banks record profits and sits on billions of dollars that should be circulating in our economy.

Like Scott Walker’s fight against the unions in Wisconsin, Verizon’s strategy is classic divide and conquer: in this economy, who’s gonna feel sorry for the union worker with the cushy job and free health care?

Like Wisconsin, we MUST be supportive of the unions, for as go the unions, so goes the middle class.

Western and co-author Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at the University of Washington, looked at the period between 1973 and 2007, when inequality in hourly wages spiked by 40 percent. During that time, union membership for private-sector male workers fell from 34 percent to 8 percent (female workers were never as unionized as their male counterparts). Their paper in the August issue of the America Sociological Review concludes that deunionization's biggest effects on inequality were indirect: 1) The threat of unionization caused non-unionized employers to raise wages; that threat disappered along with unions.

2) Unions occupied a bully pulpit; knocking them off left the moral case for equality vulnerable to attack. (What do you mean Viacom's CEO isn't worth $85 million?)

3) Workers lost their Washington lobbyists, and with them, any hope of winning political battles for better wages and benefits.

Verizon workers are out on strike for all of us.

Strike News from CWA 1101 here.

UPDATE:

Adding Links:

Verizon Mobilization on Facebook

Take action by welcoming the new Verizon CEO

