A View From The Left-Organize All Wireless Workers!-Verizon Strike Beats Back Company Attack-An Analysis

Workers Vanguard No. 1092	1 July 2016

Organize All Wireless Workers!-Verizon Strike Beats Back Company Attack

Verizon workers along the East Coast organized in the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have voted overwhelmingly to ratify contracts agreed to at the end of their hard-fought seven-week strike this spring. The company had been out for blood against the unions, which are concentrated in the wireline (landline and FiOS broadband) division, aiming to further gut the shrinking union workforce. Instead, the strike forced Verizon to back down from its “last, best and final offer,” a litany of giveback demands ranging from pension concessions to attacks on job security that would have led to layoffs and more outsourcing.

The company was also forced to relent on work-rule changes that would have let management deploy workers far from their homes at whim. Several workers told Workers Vanguard that they were happy to see that the hated Quality Assurance Review (QAR) program, which the company had used to enforce discipline, was done away with. Undoubtedly the company will try to implement a new draconian discipline system that the workers have to be ready to confront; as one veteran union steward told WV, “You can have a contract and the company can violate it all the time. They always try that,” adding, “You always have to fight.”

In the end, the one big concession obtained by Verizon was hundreds of millions of dollars in health care cost savings. Union officials had offered this giveback long before the strike began. The additional cost to workers will eat up much of the 10.9 percent increase in wages agreed to over the four-year life of the contracts.

Verizon was also hell-bent on blocking union inroads into its highly profitable wireless sector, which is dependent on the infrastructure of the unionized wireline business but is virtually unorganized. The company had rebuffed all attempts at negotiation with nearly 80 retail workers in Brooklyn and Everett, Massachusetts, who voted for union representation by the CWA in 2014. Now, as a direct result of the strike, these workers have finally won their first contract, timed to expire with the wireline contracts and the contract of 100 wireless technicians who were already CWA members. This common expiration date backs up the handful of organized wireless workers with the leverage of the entire unionized workforce. Union tops say they “plan to build on this foothold” to unionize the wireless workers. In fact, if this Rottweiler of a company is to be kept at bay, every wireless worker must be organized, making all of Verizon a union shop. The future of the CWA and IBEW at Verizon is on the line.

But the strategy of the union bureaucrats is to rely on the agencies of the capitalist class enemy and its state, including mobilizing votes for Democratic politicians who would putatively appoint “pro-labor” officials to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). After the 2000 contract, union officials touted a “neutrality agreement” with Verizon that supposedly ensured that the company would not interfere in organizing efforts. But the bosses are never neutral when it comes to profits, and Verizon flouted that agreement from day one. After nearly 16 years of “neutrality,” the unions have managed to organize fewer than 200 wireless workers. It took a strike to win a contract for the wireless store workers, and it will take unions flexing their muscle and relying on their power and organization—not appeals to the capitalist government and the bosses—to organize and win decent contracts for Verizon’s 70,000 wireless workers.

The success of the Verizon strike demonstrates that the only way to repel the vicious attacks of the capitalist bosses is through class struggle. This point was underscored on the first day after the strike ended, when workers at multiple garages returned to work wearing the CWA’s signature red T-shirts instead of regulation Verizon gear. The color red is meant to memorialize CWA chief steward Gerry Horgan, a member killed on the picket lines in the 1989 strike when the daughter of a plant manager hit him with her car (see “CWA Striker Murdered on the Picket Line,” WV No. 484, 1 September 1989). Acting as if the recent strike had never happened, Verizon managers demanded that the workers take off the shirts. Instead, they walked out.

However, if the union tops have their way, that militancy will be channeled into stumping for the Democratic Party in the presidential elections. The pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy has time and time again pushed the strategy of electing “friend of labor” Democrats who, once in power, would supposedly act in the interest of the workers. In reality, this strategy has served to demobilize the power of the workers and their unions, resulting in one defeat after another and helping to lay the basis for the decimation of the unions.

Union officials timed the strike to coincide with the April primaries in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast. Last year, the outgoing president of the CWA, Larry Cohen, became a senior campaign adviser to Bernie Sanders. Months afterward, the CWA endorsed this capitalist politician who is touted as “socialist.” Both Sanders and Hillary Clinton stated that they supported the strike, though Clinton’s “support” was far more muted. Now, with the Sanders campaign folding, union members will be told that they must mobilize to defeat Republican reactionary Donald Trump at all costs—i.e., to vote for Clinton. But reliance on the Democrats, or on any capitalist party, is a losing strategy. The Democratic Party is a bosses party no less than the Republicans. Democratic claims to be the “friends of labor” are merely aimed at hoodwinking working people into supporting a party that represents the interests of the capitalist exploiters.

CWA and IBEW officials expressed gratitude that Obama’s labor secretary, Thomas Perez, and federal mediators got Verizon to negotiate with the unions. In fact, Perez only intervened because the strike was hurting Verizon’s bottom line. Despite months of preparation by the company, including training a scab army of 20,000 managers and non-union workers, the strike began to bite a few weeks in. The scabs did not have the skill sets to do the work of the strikers, and Verizon ran up a backlog of installs, new orders and customer complaints. The profit-hungry giant burned through cash reserves. With the strike hurting Verizon, Perez moved to broker negotiations to end the labor action and prevent further damage to the company. All the actions of the mediators were in the long-term interests of Verizon investors and the American capitalist class as a whole.

Or take the actions of the NLRB early on in this strike. When CWA pickets at hotels, backed up by Teamsters and honored by Hotel Trades Council members, caused scabs to be evicted from New York hotels from which they were being dispatched, the NLRB got a federal judge to slap the CWA with a picket ban. The capitalists’ labor boards, along with their courts and their cops, are on the side of the bosses. Having Democrats in power does not change this basic truth.

Speaking to Jacobin (15 June), CWA political director Bob Master told a rather telling joke: “Remind us never to go on strike again unless it’s a week before a contested New York primary when a socialist is running for president.” In reality, it was the defiance and resolution of the 39,000 striking workers that staved off Verizon’s anti-union assault. Picketers remained determined to fight and win, despite having their health insurance cut off by the company and experiencing up close and personal the scabherding by the police, for whom strikebreaking is a job description.

The political program of the union bureaucracy is based on the lie that there is a “partnership” between the workers and their capitalist class enemies. At bottom, these misleaders promote the myth that capitalism can be “fair” to working people, and that companies like Verizon should give workers their “fair share.” But capitalism is a system of production for profit, and that profit comes from the exploitation of the working class. That’s why Verizon has been determined to scuttle organizing efforts of its wireless workers: the weaker the unions, the lower the wages and benefits, the greater the profits.

The company did not win this battle. But as American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, who played a key role in the 1934 victory of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, observed in 1936, any settlement between the employers and the workers “is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power” (see Notebook of an Agitator, 1958). The four-year contracts between Verizon and the unions represent such a truce between two forces whose interests are irreconcilable. Skirmishes between the workers and the bosses will continue, whether there is a piece of paper with signatures on it or not.

What’s key is the relative strength of the opposing forces, and this depends in large part on the leadership of the unions. The track record of the CWA and IBEW labor bureaucrats is written in the contracts themselves, each of which preserves the core of previous settlements. Like many labor agreements, they carry a no-strike clause forbidding labor action until the contract expires. This shackles the membership’s ability to defend itself, and the workers should fight to scrap it. Even when contracts expire—along with their no-strike clauses—the union bureaucrats try mightily to avert strikes. When Verizon workers went on strike in 2011, the labor tops sent them back to work after two weeks without a contract. When the last contract expired in August, the workers were itching to strike but the union misleaders held them back until April. This time around, the workers were brought back to work before voting on the contract, or even seeing it.

The union tops point to the promised creation of 1,300 new union call center jobs, which were won in exchange for granting management more flexibility in routing customer calls. Assuming the company even creates these jobs, they will come with a big asterisk. In the 2003 and 2012 contracts, the CWA and IBEW negotiators made concessions that created a second tier for new hires. At the time, Verizon was not hiring. But now new jobs will fall into the second tier. New hires will not enjoy the same job security provisions as existing workers. Even if they make it to retirement, they would not receive retiree health care—instead, getting a stipend—nor would they get the defined benefit pension that retirees who were on the payroll in 2003 get. The bureaucrats have built in the basis for corrosive divisions in the ranks, which will be an obstacle to future organizing. What is vital is for the unions to fight for equal pay and benefits for equal work.

America’s union movement can only be rebuilt through persistent, clear-eyed class battles waged against the bosses, with no illusions in the capitalists’ parties and their state. It will be in the course of such battles that union militants will be able to forge a new, class-struggle leadership in the unions. Such a leadership will be crucial in the building of a workers party that fights for a workers government, whose task will be to expropriate the capitalist exploiters and build a planned, socialist economy. Those who labor must rule!