Joseph, a wire worker with less than five years on the job in Northern Virginia, told the WSWS Verizon Worker Strike Newsletter that there was pressure building up on management due to an influx of customer requests for services. Trainor said Verizon is trying to remove job security from the negotiations, as well as diminish the company’s accident disability plan and retirement benefits.
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CWA said that Verizon has “not agreed to staff to the number of employees necessary to handle the work volume that originates in the Mid-Atlantic Region”.
“Unfortunately”, Reed said, “union leaders have their own agenda rooted in the past and are ignoring today’s digital realities”.
According to Verizon spokesman Rich Young, there was a short meeting in the Philadelphia region on Friday. Customer self-service now accounts for more than 60 percent of all service transactions, Erwin said. They want us to pay a lot for our health care. Verizon has cancelled new installations of its high speed Fio Internet and TV service for the next one to two weeks. Even Verizon’s FiOS routers are now considered “self-healing” – users can instruct them to reboot themselves if there’s a problem.
“We’ll continue to ramp from that”, Mudge added.
Pacing down the Lewiston Road sidewalk carrying signs on the second day of a nationwide strike, union field technicians and central office technicians based in Batavia spoke in unison with 40,000 other Verizon workers.
McConville wouldn’t confirm specifics on how far employees would be moved for work or for how long. I mean, when the CEO’s compensation, 30 minutes of his pay equals what an average employee makes a year – come on, give us a break.
The strike, said to be one of the largest in Verizon’s history, could interrupt service for countless customers although the company says they have trained non-union workers to fill in.
The long-term impact to the company will be more reputational than economical. Outsourcing call-center jobs to foreign countries and requiring workers to relocate for months at a time – potentially resulting in disrupted families – remain two of the top points of disagreement.
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But there was another, more personal undercurrent among the members of Communications Workers of America Local 1117. “We aren’t doing enough to improve technology in Batavia”. “That’s not really our issue”. He said customers will not be affected by the strike, however. Verizon is also hiring more low-wage, non-union contractors, the union says. “And now there’s a whole lot that doesn’t”.
