Verizon Workers Rally for Fair Deal
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Rand Wilson of the AFL-CIO Field staff reports on the Solidarity Rally at Verizon’s New England headquarters.
With their union contracts set to expire this weekend, thousands of Verizon employees, members of the Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), took their fight for a fair contract to the front of the company’s New England headquarters in Boston yesterday.
Contracts with Verizon covering some 45,000 Verizon employees from Massachusetts to Virginia expire Aug. 6. Despite making more than $24.2 billion in profits over the past four years, according to the union, management is proposing deep cuts in wages and benefits and elimination of job security provisions.
“I came with my co-workers to show Verizon that we are united against any attempt by management to destroy the good jobs that generations of workers before me have fought for,” says Chris Morgan, a 15-year lineman out of Verizon’s south Boston garage who lives in Quincy, Mass.
Boston-Area Congress Members Back Employee Free Choice Act
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| U.S. Reps. Barney Frank, Stephen Lynch and Mike Capuano joined Greater Boston Labor Council President Lou Mandarini and Vice President Patricia Armstrong in supporting the Employee Free Choice Act. |
Richard Rogers, executive secretary-treasurer of the Greater Boston Labor Council, reports on the campaign to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.
Union members from the Boston area met with members of Congress yesterday to press for quick action on the Employee Free Choice Act, a critical bill to restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.
U.S. Reps. Barney Frank, Michael Capuano and Stephen Lynch attended the meeting at Plumbers and Pipe Fittters Local 12 in Dorchester. Some 75 union leaders and activists of the Greater Boston Labor Council took part, as all three members of Congress publicly pledged their support for the Employee Free Choice Act, the first viable effort to reform America’s broken labor laws in over a generation. (U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, another Boston-area member, also is a supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act.)
