Diary of a Union-Busting Campaign

April 30, 2007

In the Loop: Faxes, Surveys, and Flexibility

Greetings VZB techs!

1) 35,000 reasons to recognize your union

Over the past month, over 35,000 union members and allies from around the country have faxed and emailed management to demand they recognize VZB techs' choice to form a union. Can you imagine 35,000 faxs flooding into VP Toohey's office in support of your union? Apparently, upper management got sick of the faxes and turned off their machines. But when they turned them on again, out came thousands of more faxes in support of the union. And each fax that was sent was also copied to their elected official in Congress. The company is feeling the pressure. And the pressure is about to increase.

2) Management breaks the law, again.

On April 24, the union filed an "Unfair Labor Practice" charge at the Labor Board accusing the company of violating its employees right to form a union. The Federal Government is now investigating management's anti-union activity. The union is specifically alleging that VZB has "promulgated an overly broad no-solicitation rule in order to discourage its employees from engaging in union and other protected concerted activities," and has "selectively and disparately enforced a company policy wherby the Employer prohibited union speech while permitting nonunion speech." The allegations focus on the Hillburn location in NY.

Over the years, the Labor Board has found that Verizon has repeatedly violated its employees' rights to form a union. Although the company rhetoric says they "respect" our rights to form a union, their actions clearly suggest they do not want people talking about the union, and are willing to break the law to stop any union talk.

The VZB techs in Hillburn are standing up for their rights. Stay tuned for updates on the Federal Gov't investigation into VZB's illegal activity. And if you have any information about illegal activity in your location, please email or call us.

3) Bargaining Surveys Due Back

Did you receive your bargaining survey from your committee member yet? All VZB techs (no matter what their view on the union) should fill out and return a bargaining survey. These surveys will form the basis of the bargaining priorities once we win. It is important to fill out your survey! A copy of the survey and a comparison sheet between working union @ verizon and non-union are available: VZB Bargaining Survey [Acrobat 13K] and Union/Non-Union Comparison [Acrobat 33K].

4) "Flexibility" after winning a union

Management has gone around saying that workers under a union contract lose flexibility. Specifically, they warn that we will no longer be able to "self-garage" the trucks, and the "union" will prevent people from doing more than one task, such as DSL work.

These are simply scare tactics! No elected union official will push to change anything about the techs' jobs unless a majority of the VZB techs demand it! The "union" is not an outside party, the union is all of us. And so, if VZB techs don't want to get stuck doing only one type of job, then no union official would have any reason to demand the company change. It is that simple.

There is some "flexibility" that the company will lose, however, when we win the union. They will no longer be "flexible" about changing our benefits and laying people off on their whims. They will not be able to take away the recent wage increases when we win a union, and they will not have the flexibility make changes that affect our jobs without negotiating with the VZB techs.

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It is amazing what has taken place over the past several months. The company has responded to our unity like never before. More raises than ever, more managers taking our concerns seriously, more promises, better chairs, talk of no more layoffs. It's dizzying. Management is hoping this union talk will go away, so they can get back to the bad old days of random layoffs, no layoffs, arbitrary treatment, etc. But when we stay strong and unified, managment takes us seriously. Lets keep it up!

April 18, 2007

Top Ten Reasons Not to Join the VZ Business Tech Union

10.	Worldcom, MCI, now VZB: Upper management has a track record of always treating us well.
9.	Paying up to $7,000 a year for health insurance is fine by me. What else would I do with that kind of money?
8.	No need for a real pension—I plan on dying at work.
7.	I just don't see how joining together with my co-workers and with 97,000 other Verizon workers can POSSIBLY increase our ability to negotiate improvements in our wages and benefits.
6.	I don't want to belong to any union that would accept me as a member.
5.	I don't like wearing red on Thursdays. I'm a "winter," and red isn't my color.
4.	How can a legally binding written contract with regular wage increases be better than just leaving my working conditions and benefits up to management?
3.	Six paid holidays a year is plenty. I love my job that much.
2.	Having strong job security and a voice on the job is so "last century."
...and the number 1 reason not to join the Verizon Business Tech Union...
1.	The 3 raises in a row management gave us, the increase in standby pay, and the promises of no more layoffs just happened to occur as we began forming a union. I believe Bob Toohey when he says that. He’s neutral, right?

 

April 8, 2007

Quarantining Verizon's Union Workers

From MyDD, April 8, 2007
By Nancy Scola

For the moment, let's forget the important recent debate over whether easing the joining of labor unions is a net good or a net bad for both American workers and American business. Let's instead look at how a Fortune 50 like Verizon might attempt to rid itself of an unwelcomed business reality: many of its workers currently belong to a union, either the Communication Workers of America or the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Verizon is a sophisticated, modern telecom behemoth. It isn't likely to resort to blunt-instrument union-avoidance techniques like summarily firing workers who are pro-collective representation.

So what's Verizon to do? Verizon Inc. CEO Ivan Seidenberg is attempting to restructure the telecommunications industry, or at least where Verizon fits into that industry. Verizon's approach to the future is to grow the business while lessening the impact of unionization. How? By quarantining already the unionized technicians, sales people, and service reps of core Verizon from the rest of the growing employee population by building cordon sanitaires around their unit. The end result: unionized Verizon lacks the density that ideas need to spread effectively.

As it stands now, unionization at core Verizon is concentrated to workers who handle POTS - that's Plain Old Telephone Service. The Seidenberg approach is to not let that high rate of unionization in core Verizon infect the rest of the company as it grows or acquires new units. Verizon has long tried to keep the unions out of Verizon Wireless. Now it's attempting to do the same with other units as they are added to the amalgamation. Case in point is Verizon Business, aka VZB. VZB used to be part of MCI until last year or so, and is now operated as a separate, non-unionized business unit under the umbrella of Verizon Inc. Verizon is moving more and more services and clients and accounts to VZB - so rather than getting rid of existing union jobs exactly, they're just growing the areas where non-union jobs currently thrive.

As part of my work with the AFL-CIO I've been meeting with the CWA, who along with the IBEW are running a joint campaign to organize about 400 VZB techs in the northeast. About 150 are right here in New York City. The VZB techs have signed cards saying that they want to join the union. Those cards were verified by John Kerry, Stephen Lynch, John Tierney, and others (watch the video). Verizon won't recognize them. Senators Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, and Schumer, and Reps. Slaughter, Weiner, and Nadler and others have pushed the company to recognize the employees' choice. Of course, were the Employee Free Choice Act to pass the Senate and become law, that card check would be enough to form a union here.

A big part of this picture is that Verizon is aiming to compete with the cable companies, particularly via FiOS, Verizon's fiber-optic cable service to the home. FiOS means super-speedy broadband Internet. (Like up to 50 Mbps under ideal conditions. At that speed I could fully download the next movie in my Netflix queue, which happens right at the minute to be "Harlan County, USA," in about 5 minutes.)

But FiOS also means that Verizon can compete with the cable cos in delivering custom digital television content. Not to draw too much into this discussion, but the buildout of resource-intense last 100-yards technologies like FiOS is one of the things that telecoms cite when they argue against net neutrality. Neutrality (they argue) threatens their ability to control their own revenue streams, and the buildout of FiOS is 'spensive, something like $18 billion.

So Verizon wants to compete with the cable folks. But whereas the rate of unionization in the phone-line-in-the-ground business is around 90%, it's at just about 4% in the cable industry. By comparison, it's at something like 35% in the wireless industry, where Verizon also competes. But even in wireless there are other models. Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) has adopted a stance of neutrality when its workers want to join a union, and something more than half of its workers are unionized. Verizon's different approach means that Verizon Wireless and Verizon wireline are kept deliberately separate, including distinct websites at verizon.com and verizonwireless.com. Verizon customer service reps for the wireless service can't answer a question about wireline services. Instead, they'll transfer you to a unionized rep. Quarantined, see?

As I learn about labor, it seems to me that the whole field of union-avoidance is self-educating, in a way. Best practices get studied and copied. If Verizon is successful in quarantining its union workers as it diversifies and grows, then I'm thinking we'll see these techniques learned from and replicated by other employers in the same boat.

April 1, 2007

Don't Be Fooled

Let's see what VZB pulled out of the union-busting bag of tricks today. Why, it's one of our old favorites: the "Union Awareness" website for employees. "Union Awareness," or U.A., is just a euphemism for another U.A. -- Union Avoidance.