Verizon Dispute Comes to Elk Grove

Communications workers took their labor battle with Verizon Communications to Elk Grove Thursday, staging a lunchtime picket outside the Verizon Wireless store on Laguna Blvd.

About 10 people participated in the rally, according to the Communications Workers of America, the union that represents most of the 45,000 Verizon workers currently on strike nationwide.

The union is holding rotating protests at Verizon stores throughout the Sacramento area to raise public awareness of the strike, which primarily affects workers on the East Coast. Workers walked off the job August 7, after contract negotiations failed when Verizon proposed freezing pensions and dramatically increasing employee healthcare contributions.

“We’re in bad economic times and they’re using that environment to assault the middle class and break the union at the same time,” said Robert Longer, an Elk Grove resident and vice president of CWA Local 9421. “This is not like [benefit cutbacks for] state workers. This is a private company that is making money hand over fist.”

Verizon earned $2.5 billion in profits last year, said Harry Mitchell, a spokesperson for the company. He said in order to remain competitive, the company had to decrease costs in its struggling land-line business, where most of the striking employees work.

“We’re trying to get the union leadership to get out of 1970s and enter the 21st century like the rest of the world,” Mitchell said.

The strike does not directly affect the Elk Grove store, part of Verizon’s non-union wireless arm, which it operates in partnership with Vodafone. Business seemed brisk at the store just after the picket Thursday, and a few workers there said they didn’t really understand the reason for the protest.

Nationally, the dispute has raised the question of what constitutes a decent, middle-class living in America these days. And both sides say it illustrates the chasm between the non-union wireless employees and the land-line side of the business, where workers have enjoyed union representation, and the benefits that come with it, for decades.

“They’ve tried to separate workers to enable the wireless folks to work without a union,” said Local 9421 President Lupe Mercado. “They’ve done everything they can to keep unionized wire-line folks from getting access to any of those jobs.”

Mitchell said the measures the company is proposing for its unionized workers—such as switching from company-provided pensions to 401(k) plans, in which employees bear more of the risk—are standard for unorganized employees at Verizon and its competitors.

“What we’re asking for isn’t anything unreasonable at all,” he said. “It’s for the union to share in these massive costs the same way 135,000 other Verizon employees do.”

But union representatives said replicating the conditions at Verizon Wireless within the rest of the company wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“[At the non-union stores], they don’t even know their rights under California labor law,” said Mercado. She said since the strike began, workers at stores in the Sacramento area have contacted her local about organizing.

The dispute heated up this week, with Verizon announcing they will cut off health benefits to strikers by the end of the month.