Workers Rally to Stop Verizon from Abandoning Rural New England

by James Parks, May 21, 2007

About 1,000 consumers, workers and community activists and a presidential candidate rallied in Portsmouth, N.H., Saturday to prevent Verizon from turning northern New England into “road kill on the information super highway.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the public utilities commissions in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine are considering a proposed $2.7 billion sale of Verizon’s rural landlines to FairPoint Communications. If all three states and the FCC approve, Verizon will be allowed to abandon all its so-called low-value residential customers in the three states, while keeping its more profitable customers, including Big Business and wireless users.

Under the deal, Verizon would qualify for a $600 million tax break and would control 60 percent of FairPoint. FairPoint is a small, highly-leveraged North Carolina-based firm that can only provide dial-up for Internet access or, at best, DSL service, a technology widely regarded as already outdated and inadequate for rural economic development.

Says Glenn Brackett, the business manager of Electrical Workers Local 12320:

If this sale goes through, New Hampshire citizens will be “road kill” on the information super highway.

Verizon employs more than 135,000 workers. Only 900 work at FairPoint, but the company says it plans to hire another 600 people in the three northern New England states and honor all union and pension contracts. There’s concern about whether the smaller company with its small staff can successfully handle the responsibilities and upkeep of northern New England’s 100-year-old telecommunications network.

One of those skeptics is Todd Lefebvre, who works for Verizon in Portland, Maine.

They say they’ll honor our contracts and wages and benefits, and they’re saying all the right things, but we don’t think they’ll be able to provide what they’re supposed to. There are 900 FairPoint people trying to pick up 3,000 Verizon jobs and 300,000 access lines? I don’t think so.

Union leaders say the sale also threatens the pay, benefits, working conditions and job security of 2,800 union members employed by Verizon throughout northern New England.

Presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) told the crowd he would hold hearings into the sale. As chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, Kucinich said he would ask both the FCC and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to closely examine the deal to determine if the agreement was in the public interest. Kucinch says: 

Rural communities would be left on the other side of the digital divide. Verizon doesn’t want to serve rural communities in the tri-state and, based on its finances, FairPoint can’t. This sounds like a deal for Verizon to shed their responsibilities to rural areas and break the unions by spinning off to a company that has had serious financial troubles and a poor track record for protecting jobs and benefits.

New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie warned:

Let’s not be fooled by the idea that a company worth only $630 million, which is borrowing heavily to buy Verizon properties three times its present size, is going to be an improvement over a firm worth $100 billion.

A growing coalition of labor and consumer groups is fighting the sale as a first step toward securing a broadband network that would guarantee “High Speed Internet For All.” To prevent companies like Verizon, which have the deepest pockets and best technology, from abandoning markets like northern New England, the groups say there must be fundamental changes in state and federal regulatory policies.

For details on these policy proposals, click here. For more information on the effort to stop the sale and create a high-speed network in northern New England, click here and here and here.

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