Verizon DSL → Verizon on Strike??

It going happen on August. Anyone heard?

Well, let me put it this way, in 2000 Verizon was so sure that there wasn't going to be a strike that very little planning was done and they were caught with their pants down. In this economic day and age it's really hard to predict corporate America.

I hope they don't strike cause i occasionally loose phone service and if they strike, it won't get fixed.

So, what's the complaint this time?

- Dan

Well the New York local is cwa1101. and they may have a website.

more OT, more pension,more everything, including more upload speed for residential subscriber
seriously thou, i dont know yet.

wouldnt it be great if they made a law saying if a service strikes,the customer doesnt have to pay there bill.:)and by law they cant disconnect you.

These two cover most of the Verizon employees.

»www.cwa-union.org/
»www.ibew.org/

the VZ corp wants a lot of givebacks. Apparently they want very retrogressive demands and disminishments.

It looks like they want to force a strike and break the union.

History in the Northeast shows a lot of strikes by phone workers.

7 months in 1971, 4 months in 1989 and alot of 1,2 & 3 week strikes in between.

for all the dirt and local union politics,
www.verizoneatspoop.com, click on employee greivances.
customer grievances are very interesting also.

Name: Anonymous
Date/Time: 6/30/2003 7:35:04 PM
City: NYC
State: New York
Grievance: June 30, 2003Union and Verizon at Odds on Focus of Talks

By STEVEN
GREENHOUSE

Threatened with a strike in a month, Verizon Communications has a
simple message for its unionized workers: Let's form a partnership so
Verizon, one of the few unionized telecommunications companies, can
compete in a fiercely competitive industry.
But the president of Verizon's largest union said it was well-nigh
impossible to take talk of a partnership seriously when management was
battling unionization efforts at Verizon's wireless operations.
Intent on cutting costs, Ivan G. Seidenberg, the chief executive of
Verizon, the nation's largest local telephone company, said it needed
the union to help reduce soaring health care costs, cut absenteeism and
ease contractual barriers to relocating workers.
Morton Bahr, the president of the Communications Workers of America,
replied that "partnership is a two-way street." During a lengthy
telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Bahr accused Verizon Wireless, a
joint venture owned 55 percent by Verizon and 45 percent by the Vodafone
Group of Britain, of "vicious, antiunion conduct," adding that the
company's pleas for cooperation seem "kind of contradictory, hearing all
that they're saying now against the union."
Since contract talks began in earnest last Monday, this powerful union
and this giant company, with more than $67 billion in revenue last year,
seem to be talking past each other, with each side insisting on a
different focus for the talks. With Verizon's traditional local
telephone business shrinking, Mr. Seidenberg sees cutting costs as vital
to Verizon's long-term health, while Mr. Bahr sees unionizing the
steadily growing wireless operation as pivotal to his union's long-term
health.
Mr. Bahr has threatened a walkout on Aug. 2 by 75,000 Verizon workers
in 12 states in the Northeast if the company does not agree to strong
contractual provisions to pave the way to unionize nearly 20,000 workers
at Verizon Wireless, which Verizon controls.
The union's No. 1 goal in its two-week strike against Verizon three
years ago was to secure promises that would make it easier to unionize
Verizon Wireless. But the communications workers have not unionized any
of Verizon's wireless workers in the last three years, and they blame
management's opposition for that. Union officials contrast this with
their success at Cingular Wireless, a joint venture of BellSouth and SBC
Communications where 15,000 wireless workers joined the union as
management remained neutral.
Company officials argue that it is inappropriate for the union to seek
to negotiate about unionizing Verizon Wireless because the existing
agreement governing those matters does not expire until August 2004.
Furthermore, company officials assert, Verizon Wireless is a separate
entity.
"Verizon Wireless isn't part of these negotiations," said Peter Thonis,
a company spokesman. "We believe it's extremely important to focus on
the needs of the 75,000 workers covered by the current union contract."
Verizon executives also assert that managers of the wireless operation
are not fighting unionization. These executive say managers at Verizon
Wireless are allowed to speak out against unionization because the
contract reached three years ago, even though it is called a neutrality
agreement, allows either side to give its views on the subject.
"Our position isn't that we oppose unionization," said Eric Rabe, the
vice president for media relations at Verizon. "We feel the employees
should be the ones making this decision."
The union points to various Verizon Wireless letters and Web sites
attacking unionization, including a letter by a vice president for human
resources saying: "Our position is clear. We do not support the efforts
by unions to unionize our employees."
Management, the union points out, has told workers that the union
desperately needs them to increase membership and that when union
bargaining begins workers can lose benefits they already enjoy.
"I know Ivan Seidenberg's philosophy," Mr. Bahr said. "He can't support
this kind of vicious, antiunion conduct."
Greg Neubauer, a customer service representative at a Verizon Wireless
call center in Orangeburg, N.Y., said the unionization campaign there
failed because of management's campaign against it. "A lot of people are
for the union, but people are afraid," he said. "Some of them are
intimidated."
He said he earned $32,000 a year, while unionized operators and
technicians generally earn $45,000 to $60,000 a year, which the company
says makes them among the nation's highest-paid unionized employees.
Verizon executives want the negotiations to focus on ways to make
Verizon more competitive during an era of deregulation in which prices
are falling, revenues are stagnant, several major telecommunications
companies have gone bankrupt and low-cost competitors have entered the
fray.
"The issue of becoming a more efficient company and a better competitor
is essential not only for Verizon but for our employees," Mr. Thonis
said. "If you're thinking what's good for unionized workers, helping
Verizon remain competitive has to remain high on the list."
"To maintain its market position in this competitive environment,
Verizon certainly has an incentive to cut costs," said Richard W. Hurd,
a professor of labor relations at Cornell. "By the same token, with a
continued growth in wireless, the union has an incentive to gain access
to the wireless part of the market. The C.W.A. won't recognize Verizon's
needs unless Verizon recognizes the C.W.A.'s needs."
The company argues that it loses $600 million a year to absenteeism,
noting that 6 percent of unionized workers are out each day. It also
says that its workers pay 5 percent of their health care costs, while
General Electric's unionized workers pay 18 percent and workers in the
average company health plan pay 26 percent. The company has proposed
higher co-payments and deductibles.
"We're not proposing that they go to 18 or 26 percent, but there has to
be a number that is fair above 5 percent," Mr. Rabe said.
Pointing to a recent contract with Qwest Communications International,
in which the union agreed to wage freezes, Mr. Bahr said his union often
granted concessions when companies were in need. But he said that
Verizon, with high executive salaries and $4.08 billion in profit last
year, was not in need.
Copyright 2003

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you asked for it...

On strike for 17 weeks to keep out health benefits intact. Back in 1989 they company said they couldnt afford it, blah blah blah.

Then a few years later they were reportng "record breaking profits", quarter after quarter. Sounds like the health care issue didnt affect them as much as they claimed in 1989.

Now its 2003, Nynex is now Verizon, a much bigger, wealthier company and theyre crying the same tune.

WE PROVED THEM WRONG in 1989... I wonder if during the record breaking 90's, if we had given in and paid towards medical, they would have given the money back since they were doing so well.

VERIZON: WE DIDNT BELIEVE YOU THEN AND WE DONT BELIEVE YOU NOW!!!

Espicially with those fat bonuses and that retired 3 million dollars a year for LIFE consultant Chuck Lee.

My ex is in management in VA, and she says that this one will be a long one. They have contractors ready in Canada to take I & R calls. All managers have been assigned jobs and have been notified of a 12 hour per day, 7 days a week work schedule.

Yep, it's kind of hard to cry poor when your company grosses $55,000,000,000 per year.

Vz is big hogger. They cant never get enough, Im mean they have more money than God....sheesh!!

Looks like it's going to happen. From the Boston Globe, July 7, 2003

Analysts think bitter Verizon strike looms
Bracing for long, disruptive walkout
By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 7/7/2003

With 26 days left before contracts expire for 80,000 unionized Verizon Communications Inc. workers in the Northeast, telecommunications companies and analysts are bracing for what many see as a likely protracted and disruptive strike whose effects could ripple through the telecom industry.

Verizon's network is heavily automated, and the company in past strikes has been able to shift managers to cover for many striking technicians. But a long strike could cause delays for Verizon customers seeking to have phone lines installed and repaired. Homeowners and small businesses would probably be given less priority than government agencies and big corporations.

A multiweek strike could also snarl operations for competitive phone companies that rent Verizon lines and, some analysts said, potentially slow down revenues for struggling telecom equipment vendors.

Both Verizon and leaders of its two major unions, the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said they hope to avoid a strike after the Aug. 2 contract expiration. But Verizon has begun canvassing retirees seeking potential volunteers to come back to work in August, and some union locals have already printed up "Strike 2003" T-shirts. Some union members suspect Verizon executives want to provoke a strike as a real-world test of how many employees it actually needs to run its 57 million-line network, so it can figure out how many of its 230,000 jobs it could eliminate over time.

Unions, furious over recent layoffs and what they call lavish executive pay packages, are dead set against Verizon's drive to raise employee health insurance costs. Suffering the third year of a telecom slowdown and mounting competition from wireless and Internet carriers, Verizon is expected to push for deep concessions to shore up its finances and resist labor's drive to get Verizon to ease its opposition to labor efforts to unionize Verizon Wireless workers.

The situation leaves many analysts seeing a strike as likely, possibly on the scale of the bitter, 100-day walkout at Verizon predecessor Nynex in 1989, which included scattered acts of vandalism and sabotage that snarled phone service. Stephen Kamman, a telecom industry stock analyst with CIBC World Markets Corp., said: "I'm operating on the assumption that we likely have a strike. The duration is the question. There's a general sense that it's a more likely outcome than not."

Besides possible delays for phone-line installations and repairs for Verizon customers in the Maine to Virginia region, including more than 3 million businesses and homeowners in Massachusetts, a Verizon strike could snarl operations for companies that use its lines. It could delay capital spending by the nation's largest phone company, potentially affecting third-quarter revenues for struggling telecom equipment vendors such as Lucent Technologies Inc.

CIBC's Kamman estimates that Verizon will generate 5 to 10 percent of Lucent's wireline revenues during the third quarter. If Verizon is preoccupied with maintaining service and deploying executives to work 14-hour days filling in for technicians, Kamman said, it could slow or shelve capital expenditures in the summer quarter. Other Verizon vendors that might face smaller impacts than Lucent include Nortel Networks Ltd., Alcatel, and Juniper Networks Inc.

For Lucent, Kamman said: "It's a material headache. It's less an issue that the spending won't come in ever, it's more that it might come in later. If the strike drags on, then I think you'll start to see growing concern."

Lucent spokeswoman Mary Lou Ambrus said the company, based in Murray Hill, N.J., believes "it would be inappropriate to comment at this time" on the possibility of a strike.

The chief executives of two competitive phone companies serving Massachusetts and the Northeast that rely on some Verizon lines to serve customers, Broadview Networks Inc. of New York and Conversent Communications LLC of Marlborough, say they are speeding up orders for Verizon lines this month, expecting workers will strike soon after current three-year labor pacts expire Aug. 2.

"I think management is really trying to bust the union on this one," said Conversent CEO Robert Shanahan, stressing he is personally neutral. "I think they're prepared to let them strike until they break. As a result, every line we need that we can get in now, we're trying to get in."

Shanahan and Bob Carp, president of Galaxy Internet Services Inc., a Newton Net service provider that rents Verizon lines, said they have begun looking for alternative carriers to provide phone and data lines.

"We are attempting to work with all of our customers to notify them that a strike may be imminent, and if so, installation for new service may be backed up by weeks, if not months," Carp said.

Broadview CEO Vern Kennedy, who was a Nynex executive during the 1989 strike, said he worries that Verizon may use a strike and its aftereffects as an excuse to drag its feet providing lines to competitors.

"I've got enormous skepticism about Verizon playing fairly during this difficult time," Kennedy said. "They absolutely cannot use the smokescreen of a strike to advance an anticompetitive agenda, but I don't have a lot of confidence that they won't try."

Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said competitors' predictions about the likelihood of a strike are an understandable "sales tactic," but reiterated Verizon's hope that a new contract can be in place by Aug. 2.

"We are at the absolute posturing stage of negotiations here," Rabe said. "You're going to hear the most incendiary language" before negotiations begin in earnest later this month, Rabe said.

However, union officials including CWA president Morton Bahr contend Verizon is already spending millions in preparation for a strike, including soliciting retired managers and union retirees to come back to work. "Obviously, they're gearing for a potential strike," Bahr said.

Rabe confirmed such letters have gone out, but described them as only "general prudence and contingency planning." However, Rabe also said Verizon thinks customers would face substantially smaller problems in a strike this year than they did in 1989 because of technology advances including Web-based ways for customers to directly order service upgrades that do not require physical work on phone lines.

Some analysts question whether the CWA and the IBEW could successfully pull off a strike that forces Verizon to negotiate a more favorable settlement. "This is a very, very weak time in the industry," said Patrick Comack, a telecom stock analyst with Guzman & Co. in Miami. "Unions are going to have to work with management."

Out of curiosity, what exactly is the compensation packages of these 80,000 unionized VZ. workers, e.g. salary, overtime, benefits, etc.? Are these minimum wage jobs? Minimal corporate contribution to health benefits?

- Dan

Most unionized workers are fairly compensated. A field tech in the New York Metro area makes roughly $66 to $67K per year with those in the city proper receiving $20 per week more.
As you get away from the city the salaries go a little lower but, depending on where, actually have more buying power.
As of now the union members don't contribute to their health care and have a few choices such as Blue Cross or an HMO. Dental is set on a fee schedule depending on area.
Overtime is paid at time and a half up to 9 hours and everything over is double time.
Sundays are automatic double time.
It seems the company is asking for quite a few givebacks , some of which may be seen at CWA 1103's website.

And the educational backgrounds of such workers?

- Dan

Most that I know are High school grads. Some college grads but most have HS or some college.
BTW, they also have an excellent tuition assistance.
The company pays it all.

OK, so were talking approximately $70K/year + full benefits for a field tech with a high school diploma. IMHO, considering today's economic climate, they have absolutely nothing to complain about.

As an interesting comparison data point: the median salary for a pediatrician in NJ is $100K + benefits, and that's for someone with an MD degree and three years of residency training.

- Dan

Actually we're talking a average of around $52K and all new hires for data services are required to have at least a 2 year associates degree. At least that's the way it is in the old Bell Atlantic area. So far as having nothing to complain about, go work there for a few years and come back and tell us what you have to complain about. Up until about 12 years ago it was a pretty decent place to work, but those days are long gone now. Eaten up by the almighty corporate profit.

It's the give backs that are causing the riot. And I happen to agree with them.
No one wants to give back wages or benefits that have been worked for and won.

said by ediblet1:

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So far as having nothing to complain about, go work there for a few years and come back and tell us what you have to complain about.

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No, actually I'd rather hear it from you. If it is such a horrible place to work at, why are people still working there? Surely there are other jobs available that pay $52K/year to $70K/year for someone with a HS or Associates degree?

- Dan

said by 93254336:

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OK, so were talking approximately $70K/year + full benefits for a field tech with a high school diploma. IMHO, considering today's economic climate, they have absolutely nothing to complain about.

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Here we go with the high school education. There is an on going education with technology changing every other month. I'll bet if you walk to your car on a cool day your hands hurt. How would you like to hang off a stick in a driving freezing rain pulling wire? Then make sure they go to the right place. Those salaries you quote make up maybe one percent of the work force. They make about one hundredth of what top management makes. You should be happy; unions have been losing ground for twenty years. When that brain dead Regain let the air traffic controllers go the robber barons went wild.

If the health care profession was not so greedy health care would not out pace inflation three to one every year. That is a big issue. The company can not afford to keep there employees healthy because of the greedy health care profession.

The salaries that I quoted are the numbers that people (who presumably know what the pay scale for field techs is) posted in this thread.

How would you like to stay up for a 24+ hour shift every third night for several years, weekends and holidays included, and get paid $30-40K/year for it?

> The company can not afford to keep there employees healthy because of the greedy health care profession.

Perhaps if the company didn't have to pay HS grads as if they had Doctorate degrees, they could afford to keep their employees healthy.

- Dan

The churn rate now is horrible. Especially in Northern Virginia & D.C. average employment length is around 4 years. You can put up with a lot of crap for those kinds of wages, but then the time comes where it's just not worth it anymore. In the last building I worked in there were 1100 people and probably 100 of them were on extended benefits with stress related illnesses or taking what we used to call the "Drug of choice of Bell Atlantic", Prozac. If I could have found another job paying anywhere near the same money, I would have left years ago. The people still hanging on aren't there for job enrichment, they're riding the cash cow until the legs buckle.

I'm fully qualified in data and carrier maint. up to and including OC3 and currently have resumes on file with 26 companies without a nibble. The jobs just aren't there anymore. Everyone want you have this qualification and that qualification but they only want to pay $25K.

Top tech pay in Verizon mid-atlantic region is $1,025 per week in a major city such as D.C.

said by ediblet1:

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I'm fully qualified in data and carrier maint. up to and including OC3 and currently have resumes on file with 26 companies without a nibble. The jobs just aren't there anymore. Everyone want you have this qualification and that qualification but they only want to pay $25K.

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Precisely, that's currently what the market will bear. So why should any company have to pay a premium price when there is a glut of qualified technicians available?

- Dan

It goes with the old axiom, "you pay minimum wage, you get minimum wage." I can see the day coming when they will offer two wage scales, one for current employees and another for persons hired after a specific cut-off date. It's been going on in a lot of smaller telcos and eventually will reach the big boys. Up until the early 1980's CWA worker were grossly underpaid. When I started I could have made better wages being a security guard at the local chemical plant. The older workers help form the company into what it is today and deserve to be rewarded appropriately.