SENATORS EXPRESS ‘DEEP’ CONCERNS OVER VERIZON'S BARGAINING

The senators said they were concerned that Verizon was asking for “a greater share of the costs of health benefits [to] be shifted to employees and retirees at a time when health costs are already rising steeply.” They also criticized Verizon’s apparent resistence to an agreement permitting workers at Verizon Wireless to select a bargaining representative. “If that is in fact the case, we urge Verizon to stand by the terms and conditions of the card check agreement it has committed to, so that the employees themselves can make this important decision fairly,” the letter said.

Meanwhile, to support the CWA and IBEW in their “fight” with Verizon over a new agreement, the AFL-CIO launched a “Fairness at Verizon” campaign to “build community support in the fight to keep quality jobs.” As part of the campaign, which was announced by AFL-CIO Secy.-Treas. Rich Trumka at a press call Wed., the union asked Verizon customers to sign a pledge to switch their service to AT&T or to cancel their enhanced services “if and when the union decides it’s time.” He said the program could cost Verizon $800 million per year and would “stay in place until we see that Verizon has made a real commitment to keep good jobs in our communities.” -- www.fairnessatverizon.com.

In a statement, Verizon called the campaign “extremely misguided” and said it would “only succeed in hurting the very workers the CWA leaders say they want to protect.” It said when customers leave Verizon to go to AT&T, “our revenues go down. That means we can’t employ as many workers -- union or management.” It also said losses to competitors could negatively impact the price of Verizon stock, in which union-represented employees in the northeast and mid-Atlantic states alone had about $2.7 billion invested through the company match in the 401k savings plan. “Verizon employees don’t win in this type of high-pressure game. In fact, we all stand to loose,” Verizon said. CWA Exec. Vp Larry Cohen shot back: “The question back to them is why are you spending millions of dollars a day to replace those workers, and now you care so much about them?” He said Verizon had the “worst labor relations in a large telecom company in this country.” He said the carrier switch program was designed “to offset [Verizon’s] tactics of hiring more than 20,000 potential replacement workers and moving thousands of managers from other parts of the country to take the work of those employees.”

Verizon strongly rejected reports in the Daily Labor Report and other media that it was trying to gain the ability to move union jobs abroad: “Verizon has no such plans, and has never proposed during bargaining that Verizon be allowed to move jobs out of the country. This is misinformation pure and simple.” However, a CWA spokeswoman questioned “why it took them 13 days to seek such a correction despite the fact that this issue has been getting a lot of attention in the media?” She also noted there were about 3,000 jobs in Verizon operations such as DSL that were already contracted in Canada.

Commenting on the current status of the bargaining, Cohen said although some progress had been made, “critical issues remain about hometown jobs and quality of service.” Trumka said Verizon “continued to demand givebacks in job cuts despite its position as the nation’s most successful telecom company.” He said Verizon was “very, very profitable, with $4.1 billion in profits last year” and was also “extremely well positioned in moving ahead in the next generation of telecom technology.” He said the top 11 executives at Verizon had earned $427 million over the past 6 years, and the top management team lavished $501 million in special deals in last year.

Cohen said the issues under discussion were “unique in our bargaining with large telecoms,” and the conflict with Verizon “stands in contrast” to the relationships that exist with other companies of the same size, such as SBC, BellSouth and AT&T. Cohen said employment security was part of the unions’ agreement with the company in 2000, when Bell Atlantic and GTE merged to form Verizon. “They want to take back what they had agreed to in the prospective of making that merger,” Cohen said. He said the unions wanted to have an agreement that preserved employment, not particular jobs: “We are talking about employment security, not job security. We talk about training, we talk about jobs of the future. It’s virtually unique for a company of this size in this country to continue to demand the right to outsource, the right to lay off.”