With the Verizon Northeast strike going on its 10th day, and a multitude of misinformation and half-truths out on the airwaves, I felt like it was time to talk about what’s really happening in the country and reflect back on labor history. I am a 12 year Verizon employee and proud to be one despite the struggle that we associates are undergoing at the moment. I am the man in red walking the picket line with a sign and fighting for what’s fair while trying to raise a family and do the best for them that I can. I take pride in my work and try to give my company the best product I can at the end of the day. I am also a Navy veteran who had the pleasure of serving our country for 6 years.
I won’t comment on all the issues of our dispute with the company although I will say that they reach farther than simply paying a small sum for medical coverage. Our coverage was never free and we had to give up standard cost of living raises over the last the contract to keep the plans we had. We also had some of our health plans taken away recently which forced many of us to switch to cheaper policies. Under the current coverage we don’t pay a premium but offset those costs through co-pays from everything to doctor visits to prescriptions. The proposed new contract would strip away job security, certain holidays, lessen restrictions on outsourcing and contracting, trading the current pension plan for a poorer substitute, instituting a raise system based on subjective performance, and eliminate sick time among other items on the concession list. There are some misconceptions about sick time being unlimited but that is a fallacy since disciplinary measures are in place to handle abusers. There are other issues in dispute and false statements in the public eye but it would take far too long to analyze and comment on them here. I digress from the point of this editorial though.
The one thing that I find most disconcerting about our action against the company is the attitude that some of my fellow Americans have towards unions. Many say that unions belong in an age of antiquity and should vanish from their own obsolescence. Many more ignorantly depict the average union worker as obese, indolent, and entitled. Nothing could be further from the truth and this attitude has revealed how many Americans forget our own history and/or believe the propaganda that corporations have inculcated within them. Benefits like overtime pay, 40 hour work weeks, safety standards, maternity leave, paid vacations, fair living wages, seniority, job security, and health insurance would not have been possible without the intervention of the labor movement. These benefits were not given to the working class by pure altruism but rather they had to be fought for with some even giving their own lives.
It’s no secret that the decline in the middle class correlates directly with the downturn in union membership and that is an unfortunate trend. Years ago a middle class American man could own a home, a car, support his stay-at-home wife and kids, send those kids to college, and retire on a nice pension with only one income. Now we are in an age where two incomes are a necessity while the rising costs of daycare, groceries, gas, and utilities take even more away from our incomes. A big selling point of outsourcing was that it would eliminate menial low-skill jobs from America and we’d all be promoted to nice white collar jobs as a result. That turned out to be so much hot air from the corporate machine and this is where it has led us – a fight for our own survival and the erosion of our once strong industrial base in the most advanced country in the world.
Another facet of this attitude includes the questioning of why union workers have certain benefits that other workers do not. This fosters the notion in non-union employees that “if I don’t have those benefits then they shouldn’t either!” At best it’s a misguided statement and at worse it falls into a “misery loves company” mindset. The true question from them should be – “Why DON’T I get those benefits?” and that is the correct attitude to have. In times past the benefits we enjoy extended to all middle class workers but somewhere along the line thinking began to change and those perks were thought to be luxurious and only befitting for a given company’s upper echelon. In actuality, these benefits should encompass ALL Americans from the cashier at Wal-Mart to the mechanic fixing your car and it’s far from a Communist belief considering that workers ideally should earn their keep in a Capitalist system. Sadly, we attack each other’s compensation instead of turning our eye towards the top of the pyramid where the chaos and division emanates from. The amazing thing about it is that there are far fewer of them then there are of us. Divide and conquer is truly the law that guides them and it has worked wonders on the masses but will strength in numbers counteract this? Yes – but only if we are educated and recognize the deception.
As employees WE do the labor that makes a company its profit and we undoubtedly earn the pay and benefits that we merit based on that. This would be the ultimate example of wealth “trickling down” but in today’s economic climate there is a prevailing belief that American workers deserve less. This is also unfortunate and I believe that all American workers deserve their share of the pie no matter what industry they work in. Taking into account the obscene compensation that executives enjoy, in some cases more than 400% of what their average worker makes and without the restrictions of performance based pay in some contracts, this is not too much to ask.
Right now unions are the equilibrium that helps prevent the spiraling down of wages and the “race to the bottom” as some call it. Many people don’t realize that if unions are ever eradicated from the workforce there will be no standard bar or protection for the American worker and the corporations will then have an unfettered foothold in lowering the American workers’ pay even further while keeping even more for them. We fight because we can and I dream that in the future all Americans will be able to battle in the same way to get their fair share. There’s a lot on the line in this situation and all of us strikers are losing our regular wages to insure that we get what we earn and preserve our way of life. Losing this battle would be another blow to the middle class and trigger a domino effect that began in Wisconsin but originally stirred much earlier than that.
Contrary to some reports, we are not asking for anything extra in our current negotiations, only to keep what we have. Verizon is a very profitable company and our situation is nothing like Detroit, for example, and its auto workers who had to concede some of their benefits to help support the financial stability of the auto manufacturers due to the errors of their management’s decisions. It was not the union workers and their so-called lavish benefits and pay that hurt the big 3 auto makers but rather a series of incompetent decisions by upper management who then asked the workers to pay instead of bearing the burden themselves. Support for our strike has been phenomenal so far even if we have been subject to harassment on the picket lines and internet from sadly unsympathetic fellow workers. On that note I’ll end this missive with a joke relevant to the entire working class:
3 men sit at a table with a 10 cut pizza lying in the middle. Present at the table are a CEO, a Union Organizer, and an American Worker. The CEO opens the pizza box, takes 9 slices from the pizza, and places it on his plate. He then leans over to the American Worker and whispers in his ear “Hey, see that union guy over there? He wants to take a bite out of your slice!”
Paul Dunphy - CWA Local 1118
