May Day Strike Against the War Shuts Down
U.S. West Coast Ports
(May 2008)
click on photo for article

 

  May 2016

Stop the Scabs, Build Mass Pickets No One Dares Cross

Verizon Strike: A Fight for All Workers

Internationalist supporters joined with hundreds of Verizon workers at early morning strike kickoff rally, April 13.  (Internationalist photo)

Unite With Workers Around the World to Win!

Updated and abridged version of leaflet originally published 25 April 2016.

On April 13, almost 40,000 workers at the tech giant Verizon walked off the job after eight months of stonewalling by company execs since the contract expired last August. The walkout of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) is the largest in the United States since the last Verizon strike in 2011. Thousands of strikers picketing outside Verizon Communications facilities and Verizon Wireless stores and a mass rally of thousands in Midtown Manhattan on April 18 sent a clear message to the bosses – the workers are not backing down!

“What’s disgusting? Union-busting!” strikers chanted. Verizon bosses want to bust the union by slashing the number of union jobs (and brutally exploiting call center workers around the world), forcing field technicians into months-long relocations to service distant parts of their network, and bit by bit whittling down and eventually selling off the company’s unionized wireline business. Meanwhile they’re building up the more profitable, overwhelmingly non-union Verizon Wireless subsidiary. Company bigwigs argue that wireless is what brings home their bacon – fat profits – while wireline is a “dying business” they can no longer afford.

We say: B.S. Verizon has made $39 billion over the last three years and $4.3 billion in the first quarter of 2016 – that’s over $1 billion a month in profits! The company, the second most profitable telecommunications enterprise on the face of the planet, has accumulated enough $$$ to acquire America Online (AOL) for $4.4 billion and offer $8 billion to snap up Yahoo. Lowell McAdam, the arrogant CEO at Verizon, was paid an obscene $18 million last year, and its top five execs raked in an average of $10 million a year each over the last five years!

The Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York (CUNY) along with the Internationalist Group (IG) and Class Struggle Education Workers came out beginning on the first day of the strike to stand with Verizon workers and support their fight. Gathering outside a Verizon facility on W. 36th Street in Manhattan for a strike kickoff, close to 1,000 workers showed up ready to rumble. At 5:55 a.m., minutes before the official start of the rally, the Internationalist students marched through the crowd chanting “Victory to the Verizon Strike! You win, we all win!” Our brothers and sisters of the CWA applauded, as happy about the show of solidarity as the students were excited to be there in this important working-class battle.

Throughout the day, we traveled to pickets at a Verizon garage on 39th Street, at a Verizon Wireless store in Union Square, then down to Wall Street and ending up at a huge picket on Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn where workers cheered enthusiastically as we showed up. On April 18, over 14,000 Verizon workers took to the streets of Midtown Manhattan chanting “One day longer! One day stronger!” shutting down traffic and demonstrating their resolve to fight. Once again the Internationalists were greeted with appreciation.

  Day 1 of the Verizon strike: (above) at 6 a,m. kickoff rally in Mid-Manhattan, (below) later in the afternoon on picket line in Downtown Brooklyn. (Internationalist photos)

The “one day longer” slogan has become a standard labor chant. The idea is that unions can win by just outlasting the bosses. While holding out on the picket line is crucial, in reality it will take a lot more than that. Verizon’s wireless operation is 99% non-union, and the bosses are determined to keep it that way. Non-union service reps make barely half what their unionized fellow workers earn. As we wrote in a leaflet during the 2011 strike:

“With 84,000 non-union workers at Verizon Wireless (which company tops view as the key growth sector), it is crucial to picket out wireless installations now, and to launch a major organizing drive. This is a matter of life or death for the union.”

–“Victory to the Verizon Strike!” The Internationalist, 18 August 2011

With families to feed and bills to pay, most Verizon Wireless workers would surely join a union if they weren’t afraid of losing their jobs. The CWA and IBEW and the rest of NYC labor can help them take that step by building picket lines so big that no one would dare cross. That means going up against the state, as injunctions are already being issued limiting the number of pickets and requiring them to allow scabs through. But bold labor action can turn court orders into worthless pieces of paper.

The Verizon workers’ fight is widely popular among the working class, as shown – for example – by hotel workers helping get scabs out of several NYC hotels. Bringing large numbers of brothers and sisters from other unions to help build mass pickets can also inspire a broadening of the struggle to other sectors of labor fed up with being trampled by greedy, arrogant bosses. Meanwhile, 15,000 AT&T West workers have been kept on the job since their contract expired on April 10 – they should be brought out on strike now for a joint struggle of phone workers throughout the country!

Huge strike rally of 14,000 striking CWA and IBEW Verizon workers floods the streets of Manhattan, April 18.  (Internationalist photo)

Memories of how the 2011 strike was abruptly ended to the company's advantage are bitter, with strikers at two Man-hattan picket lines telling us they want to make sure that doesn't again. “Our local was the only one that voted 'No' back in 2011, but now we all have to oppose any kind of settlement like what happened that time,” one steward told us. Picketers at a Man-hattan garage said the company “really went after us after the 2011 settlement.” Strike committees elected by the union ranks would be an important part of opposing any attempted sellouts promoted by the labor bureaucracy.

Across the country and the world, huge corporations and financial institutions are reaping massive profits at the expense of the workers whose labor built those fortunes. As CEOs and capitalist top-dogs gorge themselves on the accumulated blood and sweat of those who make the global economy run, working women and men can barely scrape by, if that, with the left-over scraps from the capitalist feast.

The parasitic denizens of boardrooms are slashing wages, gutting pensions, junking health care and busting unions. The bought-and-paid-for politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties they hire (with huge campaign contributions) to run their government impose crippling austerity and funnel huge swaths of the African American and Latino populations into prisons and graveyards. All in the name of “healthy” profit margins. “You can drink lead-poisoned water,” exclaims the gluttonous capitalist, “the champagne is for us.” 

In order to stop this assault, what’s needed is militant class-struggle unionism and working-class politics. That means first of all a break with the Democratic Party which sells itself as the “people’s party” of American capitalism. This is even more crucial in this election year, when Democratic candidates are grandstanding with strikers. On the first day of the strike, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spoke at Verizon strike rallies. Clinton talked about the need to preserve “good-paying jobs with real job security.” Does she mean like the $5 a day that women garment workers in Haiti make at the sweatshop in an industrial park that as Secretary of State she set up by stealing money from earthquake relief funds?

Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton go to Verizon strike picket lines, April 13. The Democratic Party defends the interests of Wall Street and capital. We need a class-struggle workers party to fight for a workers government.  (Photos: Reuters)

Clinton is a known enemy of labor – she was for a number of years on the Walmart Board of Directors, which refuses to pay its workers a living wage, forcing them onto food stamps and Medicaid. “Fighting for us” is her campaign slogan – sure, if by “us” she means her Wall Street backers and the capitalist class. So what about Bernie Sanders who has been endorsed by the CWA and got applause with his speeches against “corporate greed” and the  “billionaire class”? Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist,” is actually a liberal candidate in the thoroughly capitalist Democratic Party.

The starting point of actual socialist politics is for the working class to break from all capitalist parties, and build its own workers party to fight for a workers government. As for Sanders, he cites the police (!) as an example of what he considers a “socialist institution.” The idea that police are “fellow workers” is shown to be a dangerous illusion as they “do their job” of escorting scabs, arresting pickets, and gunning down African Americans with impunity.

Speaking to the April 18 Verizon strike rally, Sanders railed against “sending jobs to low-wage countries, throwing American workers out on the street.” An article in the New York-based Labor Press of the same date goes on about the company “sending American jobs offshore,” making sure “American jobs stay in the U.S.A.,” etc. Verizon CEO McAdam also piously talks about preserving “American jobs.” This flag-waving only serves the bosses. Workers are right to oppose shutting down their jobs, but call center workers who are being super-exploited in Philippines, Mexico and the Dominican Republic are the allies, not the enemies of Verizon workers here. We all have a common enemy: the capitalists who live off our labor and see workers of all nations as nothing but beasts of burden to make their profits. As an Internationalist sign at the strike kickoff rally said, strikers should “Unite with Workers Around the World to Win!”

In order to successfully fight and defeat the onslaught of profit-gougers like Verizon it is necessary to break with the Democrats and all bourgeois politicians and parties. It’s also necessary to oust the bureaucrats who chain the unions to the bosses’ parties while shoving sellout contracts down the throats of the workers and refusing to employ the tactics that can actually win strikes.

“But that would be illegal,” is the comeback of a bureaucracy that weakens the unions by bowing before laws limiting picketing, banning the union shop, union hiring halls, secondary picketing, plant occupations and the rest. If a labor tactic works, you can bet your bottom dollar it will be ruled illegal, as unions themselves were until workers seized the plants in the 1930s in the sit-down strikes, which were also outlawed. As we wrote in our leaflet during the 2011 strike: “The saying is true: labor’s gotta play hardball to win – playing by the bosses’ rules is a losing game.”

In order for that to happen the working class needs a class-struggle leadership, a leadership with the program and determination to not only stand up to Verizon but also to take down the whole capitalist system and replace the dictatorship of Wall Street with the rule of the working class, here and throughout the world.

Victory to the Verizon strike!

Mobilize unions in NYC and nationwide to beat Verizon!  

Unite with workers around the world to win! ■