Improving workers’ lives will always require workplace action


On Tuesday, news broke that Verizon would return to the bargaining table with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). The renewed negotiations could bring to a close the largest US strike in five years, which has seen nearly forty thousand workers — mostly landline technicians but also some call-center and retail employees — walk out for more than a month.

At stake are the potential outsourcing of call-center jobs to the Philippines and Mexico, the implementation of forced overtime, the assignment of employees to other cities for months at a time, and the increased use of non-union contractors.

We’re not in the robot future yet — we still need skilled workers.

The landline workers who are striking are not part of a “shrinking world.” Though it might appear that everything operates on the Cloud nowadays, telecommunications companies still need physical infrastructure to support their wireless and web services. Verizon just doesn’t want to pay for the infrastructure, or the skilled work it takes to build and maintain it.

The Wall Street Journal admits this outright, writing: “Verizon isn’t even looking to shed jobs. It is merely seeking more flexibility to manage its workforce, such as consolidating under-used call centers and the ability to hire more outside contractors.”

Verizon wants to either do this as cheaply as possible (which is dangerous, and probably harmful to the customer) or eventually get other, non-union contractors to do it and just sell the product.

The union is the chief obstacle standing in the way. Just as manufacturing was never a “dying industry” — just one that capitalists found more useful when performed elsewhere by lower-paid workers — Verizon’s line technicians will have some work to do for the foreseeable future.

We still need strikes, and unions.

Gimein writes that the “greater hope in the labor movement these days comes not from the picket line but from legislative efforts such as the union-backed minimum wage initiative Fight for 15.”

This is a bizarre leap of logic. Fight for 15’s goals might be legislative, but its primary tactic has been — wait for it — strikes. To be sure, many on the Left have criticized Fight for 15 for prioritizing media optics over worker organization. But Gimein’s argument is almost precisely the opposite.

As he writes: “The way forward now is less in getting people to join unions and more in taking seriously the question that Sanders raised: what can be done for the millions of workers who don’t have a union and never will?” Yet even when it comes to carrying out the kind of legislative action Gimein prescribes, it’s very hard to advocate for workers, union or non-union, if you don’t have some unions around.

The legislative route is a dead end.

Part of Gimein’s argument seems to be that because CWA members comprise a small slice of the Verizon workforce, this makes them irrelevant and their decent pay and work conditions, perhaps, unfair.

But what the striking workers lack in numbers they make up for with their strategic position. As Verizon’s sole unionized beachhead, CWA members will play a pivotal role in spreading unionization to the rest of the company’s ranks — the wireless and retail side in particular.

A strike defeat would forestall, if not foreclose, the possibility of organizing these workers — giving Verizon free rein to cut wages and attack working conditions. It would also make organizing harder in the retail industry more broadly, relegating millions of people — disproportionately women and people of color — to desperate poverty.



https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/verizon-strike-bernie-sanders-new-yorker-picket-line-negotiations/

Unions are highly skilled at striking, bankrupting their employers and putting themselves out of work!