Workers were on strike since April and were without a contract since last August.
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It appears that after the meet up, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) were able to discuss a 4-year contract that will need to be ratified by the members of both unions, as further noted by the same post.
Close to 40,000 Verizon workers are ready to return to work on Wednesday, ending a seven-week-long strike that was one of the largest in recent United States history.
Installers, customer service employees, repairmen, and other landline and cable workers in nine Eastern states and D.C. have worked without a contract since August.
A spokesman for Verizon, Rich Young, said Monday this proposed contract “provides the majority of the changes in the contract that we were seeking, and we feel it’s a major step in the right direction”.
“After more than six weeks on the picket line, Verizon workers won an excellent new contract that will protect good jobs and preserve our standard of living”, Dennis Trainor, vice president of the CWA District One, said in a press release.
In addition to the wage hike and new jobs, the CWA said the tentative agreement includes $1,250 signing bonuses in the Mid-Atlantic region, and a $1,000 signing bonus plus a $250 healthcare reimbursement account in the Northeast region.
Verizon worker Fitzgerald Boyce, 45, said he was likely to vote in favor of the agreement.
“The tentative agreements reached today are good for our employees, good for our customers and will be good for our business”, Marc Reed, Verizon’s chief administrative officer, said in a statement. The unions agreed to shoulder hundreds of millions of dollars more in health-care costs during the life of the contract, and union members will be paying higher monthly premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.
Verizon and the labor unions had been in dispute over the new labor contract for almost a year, and union workers launched a strike in mid-April.
The Communications Workers of American Union President Chris Shelton said in a prepared statement that a new agreement was reached and was a victory for the working family.
In Brooklyn, New York and Everett, Mass., workers will get a $2,800 minimum in profit sharing, pension increases and a first contract.
Proposals to change seniority rules and to make the company’s sickness and disability policy more strict were also withdrawn, and the company agreed to change a performance review program in New York City that many workers had considered abusive.
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The strike was the biggest in the USA since a similar Verizon dispute five years ago. Union locals said any problems were isolated incidents not sanctioned by labor leaders; a DE judge said Thursday he felt the unions had “a causal role” but declined a Verizon request to hold them in contempt of a prior court order spelling out permissible strike activities.
