Report Highlights How Verizon Neglects Communities, Fails to Provide Good Jobs

Thomas Fraine, a Verizon Business technician in Massachusetts, is seeking to form a union.

Katrina Blomdahl, AFL-CIO Voice@Work communications specialist, highlights a new report on Verizon and its importance for working families. 

A report released today by American Rights at Work reveals how telecom industry giant Verizon Communications is using a heavy arsenal of intimidation and harassment to fight against workers who are trying to form a union to improve their wages, benefits and working conditions.

The report, Broken Promises: Verizon Neglects its Commitment to Provide Good Jobs and Quality Service, by the nonprofit labor policy and advocacy group, provides first-hand accounts of management’s abusive and intimidating behavior toward Verizon Business technicians who are trying to organize through the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the Electrical Workers (IBEW).  

It describes how Christopher Bloncourt, a technician at a Verizon Business facility in Monsey, N.Y., was disciplined and made an example of for posting a pro-union advertisement from The New York Times on an office mate’s cubicle.  

To keep an eye on the worker, the company assigned a manager to sit directly behind his desk for months. Minute-by-minute monitoring for such a long period of time was a nerve-wracking ordeal for Bloncourt. 

Says Bloncourt: 

I remember sitting in the parking lot, horrified, my stomach turning….My manager is sitting right behind me. I gotta worry if I hit the wrong key stroke. It was a horrible experience. 

Verizon faces National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearings shortly for its anti-union tactics in this and another Verizon Business location in Pennsylvania. 

Thomas Fraine, now a Verizon business technician in Massachusetts, spent 18 years working as a manager for Verizon. After retiring, he joined a small Boston firm that was bought out by MCI/WorldCom, and later, by Verizon. Although he is an unlikely supporter of the union effort, he, too, speaks out in the report. 

Even as a manager, Fraine says: 

I still appreciated what a union could do for the workforce….I saw how it’s a family and you protect one another—how you’re not just at the whim of some manager. 

He currently looks forward to the day when having a union at Verizon facilitates a productive relationship between workers and management. 

The report offers many examples of intimidating and illegal behavior, even as the penalties for such actions have been minimal. After the NLRB found that management had illegally threatened to close its Woburn, Mass., call center in response to workers’ efforts to form a union, the NLRB only required Verizon Wireless to post a notice. In an illustration of the weakness of current labor laws, the notice had to be mailed to workers’ homes because Verizon had already shut the call center down and moved the work to South Carolina.

Not only has the NLRB charged Verizon with intimidating workers individually, Verizon’s corporate structure also suppresses workers’ freedom to form unions. Verizon appears to be a textbook example of “double-breasting,” a tactic to establish nonunion businesses separate from its core union business to avoid having all of its employees enjoy the benefits and security of a union contract. Verizon has “put up a wall” separating 98,000 union members from 35,000 nonunion workers who do virtually the same work, but for less pay and benefits.

Says American Rights at Work Executive Director Mary Beth Maxwell: 

This report makes crystal clear why Verizon employees—and all hard-working men and women in this country—cannot put their trust and faith in our broken labor law system. Verizon’s  callous disregard for our labor laws shows exactly why America’s workers need the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Employee Free Choice Act would restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively by strengthening penalties for companies that coerce or intimidate employees, establishing mediation and binding arbitration when the employer and workers cannot agree on a first contract, and enabling employees to form unions when a majority express their decision to join the union by signing authorization cards.

With no effective checks and balances in place for Verizon, the company can oppose its workers at the same time it shirks its responsibility as a public utility—abandoning its most vulnerable customers for more profitable customers. In Northern New England, Verizon plans to sell its landline business to FairPoint Communication. Serious questions have been raised about FairPoint’s capacity to adequately serve the less profitable rural landline customers who depend on landlines for emergency services. Verizon wants to dump these customers in favor of more profitable wireless and large business customers in urban areas.

Verizon’s model of destroying family-supporting jobs in the name of competition is not the only profitable option for a modern day telecommunications company. In stark contrast with Verizon’s “low-road” approach to doing business, AT&T, maintains its profit levels while at the same time respecting its employees’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively.

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