Negotiations between the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and Verizon for a new contract have been proceeding, at best, slowly, and yesterday union negotiators decided to set a strike deadline of 12.01 am tomorrow night. While both sides say they have been "making progess", the list of unresolved issues is a long one.
[A]ccording to union officials, some critical issues remain unresolved, including healthcare and retirement security and wages. Union workers last went on strike for 10 days in 2000, when a three-year contract expired, union officials said. In 2003, when the next contract expired, negotiations were extended and an agreement was reached.
But the list is actually longer than that. The CWA website "Strike News" says that the real issues have to do with making sure jobs in the future are part of the union structure.
Union negotiators reported progress in marathon bargaining sessions with Verizon the last couple of days, with a special focus right now on a range of jobs issues including subcontracting and bringing new and future work into the bargaining units.
The speed at which Verizon is shifting from copper to fiber technology makes it clear that we must negotiate a contract that secures new work and the jobs of the future. The company does understand that without progress on these issues at the bargaining table, we have no choice but to move to the street.
So along with ensuring that present members are properly protected with regard to two of Corporate America's favorite targets of theft - employee's health insurance and pensions - CWA is looking forward to trying to keep the company from making new jobs non-union. That's smart because that's where the battlefield is today.
Not to say that unionizing non-union jobs isn't important but the technological landscape is changing so fast that new job descriptions often don't fit into the old structure, leaving companies lots of room to declare that the new jobs are in new departments and the employees that work them are therefore not part of the union structure in the rest of the company. It's a way of disembowelling a union, weakening or even eliminating its presence as more and more jobs get categorized as non-union.
This is one of the strategies corporations have earmarked for the future, so of course they're reluctant to give it up in advance. I suspect it's much more of a sticking point than either wages or retirement pay, probably about equal to the health insurance issue, the latter because of the expense and the former because they'd lose a prime weapon for reducing the union's power. A good deal of that power has already been taken away with the sub-contracting dodge, where corporations hire outside non-union companies to do work that used to be done by union members (how "outsourcing" began). And let's face it, a company with almost $$$100BIL$$$ in operating revenue doesn't need to be paying starvation wages to skilled workers.
In any case, negotiators are working around the clock this weekend to avert an actual strike and we'll see what happens.
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