Outside Verizon corporate headquarters in downtown Manhattan, a group of more than 40 union employees gathered wearing red shirts and placards proclaiming “CWA on Strike For Middle Class Jobs.”
Over 45,000 Verizon workers — 35,000 represented by the union Communications Workers of America, 10,000 by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — went on strike early Sunday morning when contract negotiations between the unions and Verizon broke down.
Those gathered cast their fight as larger than just one union fighting management for a bigger piece of the corporate profits. More broadly, the workers manning the picket line on Sunday afternoon perceived their struggle as being against a national effort to roll back union power and increase the gap between executive compensation and rank and file earnings — a gap that has widened in the last thirty years as union power has waned. The workers outside headquarters found a rallying cry in the attack on collective bargaining rights last winter in Wisconsin.
“What are we going to do?” Albi asks. “We live in a progressive world. Things should get better, not worse.”