Thousands of Verizon workers strike, looking for job security
By Bianca Buono
@BBuonoABC6
Nearly 40,000 Verizon employees walked off the job Wednesday morning. They’ve been working without contract for almost a year and say they’ve had enough.
"I did this in 1989 when we were out for 17 weeks. It hurts every single time and it never stops hurting. We’re only doing this because we need to,” said Stephen Drew who’s been with Verizon for 28 years.
The striking workers say that all they want is security to know that their jobs and benefits are safe.
"Without that with the company having the ability to just send our work overseas whenever they feel like it nothing else really matters,” said David Fontaine who’s been with Verizon for 17 years.
A spokesperson for Verizon told ABC6 that 80 percent of the employees already have job security protection, and all they’re trying to do is make sure the new contracts reflect the new technologies workers deal with.
"What we need the union leaders to understand is that we are not operating in an environment where there are payphones and rotary phones, which is what a lot of these union contracts, when a lot of these union contracts were written,” said Kevin King, a spokesperson for Verizon.
"We feel we’ve made concessions in the areas of health care to try to help the corporation as they’ve asked however they’re not meeting our critical needs which are job security and stopping off shoring and outsourcing of our work,” said Edward Blackburn, the business agent of Local 2323.
For the past year, Verizon has been training thousands of non-union workers to fill in and the company says they’re well-equipped to handle customer needs; but striking workers say that regardless of how well these fill-ins have been trained, customers will be affected.
"I would imagine they’ll experience some longer hold times than they would normally for customer service. The big important part of this though is you’re going to get somebody who’s not as experienced. You gotta remember we built this network,” said Fontaine.
Workers striking in Providence say they are prepared to hold their picket lines for as long as it takes.
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