Verizon workers from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and Communication Workers of America (CWA) have been working without a contract since August 1st.
Verizon is a very profitable company. Last year it earned $9.6 billion in profits, but the ceiling on the exploitative needs of the one percent extends at least to the moon. They still want to cut union workers’ pensions, healthcare benefits, take away workers’ job security and create more repressive working conditions. These conditions are opportunities for PLP to advance revolutionary politics among these strategic telecommunications workers, so one day we can control them!
The IBEW and CWA are no friend of the Verizon workers. The role of unions under capitalism has become to cut backroom deals instead of fight back.
The unions have responded with demands like a sixteen percent wage increase over three years (VZ CEO Lowell McAdam got sixteen percent in one year), substantial pension increases and to regain the health benefits that workers lost in the last contract.
While there is a threat of a strike, most workers currently have mixed feelings about it.  Whenever workers go into a contract battle with bosses, we do so chained in arm and leg restraints.  The laws, the courts, the media and all the power of the corporate state try to keep us from using tactics that could quickly bring the enemy to its knees. This circumstance makes even the most radical of workers contemplate the effectiveness and usefulness of a strike. This is what many Verizon workers are doing right now.
Institutionalized passivity and class collaboration are two of the primary characteristics of the US union movement. Most union leaders “lead” by misdirecting and stifling the anger of the rank and file. By focusing struggles around narrow demands like pensions and healthcare, they surrender the potential to use every contract fight as an opportunity to build a class-conscious working class.
We all need to survive, so raises in pensions, healthcare and wages are certainly important issues. But capitalism is the cause of these cuts, as increasing automation in the industry has dropped the rate of profit, forcing the Verizon bosses to cut pay and benefits, lay off workers, and force one worker to do the job of two or three. In every sector of the U.S. economy, bosses are also cutting back to prepare for bigger imperialist wars on the horizon.  Wage slavery and the global profit system need to be abolished and strikes and contract battles should be seen as opportunities to create conditions that allow the workers living through this experience to understand that the only way to secure a future for ourselves and our families is to fight for all workers everywhere in the world to have the same guarantee.  
While the union bosses treat strikes as a publicity stunt, Verizon workers armed with revolutionary politics could make it a school for communism. While the union strategy is to try to gain sympathetic coverage in the capitalist press, this is an opportunity for PLP to inject itself into the struggle. The capitalist media is as much a part of the bosses’ state as these labor unions, and our struggle is to make CHALLENGE the voice of the Verizon workers.
PLP supports the Verizon workers in their struggle, and calls on them to recognize the incredible power they hold. Here in the northeast are the main switching stations where all calls and internet traffic—both wireless and wireline-- are routed. This includes the vast amount of electronic financial transactions and much of the trading on Wall Street. To occupy and shut these offices down would not only send a message, it would shake bosses all over the world and be an inspiration for workers everywhere. This would be an incredible advance!
PLP argues that we workers produce the economic value and we should make the decisions on how it is used. We fight for a society where the working class is in charge – communism – and invite the Verizon workers to join us in building a mass international party for communist revolution. With telecom workers inside using our skills to shut down the systems that allow the profits to flow through the network and fellow workers outside surrounding the buildings, we no doubt would have the raw material of an insurrection that could rock the foundation of the capitalist economy. We have the power.