Solidarity with Verizon strikers!

The following statement by Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for vice president, was released by the SWP National Campaign Committee April 13.

Today I walked the picket line with Verizon workers in Philadelphia, forced on strike by the bosses’ drive to increase profits. I urge fellow workers to do likewise, and to organize solidarity for the nearly 40,000 Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers members from New England to Virginia. Their fight is our fight!

Verizon is notorious for its relentless attacks against workers and their unions. They have slashed the number of union workers nearly 40 percent in the last decade, pushing more work on those who remain and outsourcing to nonunion contractors.

The bosses forced strikes in 2000 and 2011. This contract expired in August 2015 and the bosses have refused to budge. They won concessions last time and now want more — higher health care costs, cuts in pensions, job speedup, forced transfers for weeks at a time, and deeper inroads against the union. They call some 80,000 retired workers “legacy problems,” whose benefits should be slashed. Meanwhile, the company made $39 billion in profit over the last three years.

Workers here and around the world face attacks as the crisis of capitalist production, trade and profit rates deepens. The bosses want us to pay for their crisis — in jobs, wages, social benefits, life and limb.

Our most powerful weapon is our ability to stop production by militant mobilization, and to win solidarity. A fighting example can spur new labor organization and determination.

Verizon bosses say they have already trained thousands of scabs to cross the picket line. And they’ll use all the weapons at their command — the cops, court injunctions to limit pickets, and slanders in the big-business media.

For decades union officials have told workers to look to capitalist politicians, not our own class power. The working class needs our own party, a labor party based on the unions, to mobilize independent of the bosses and their parties.

A labor party would be a tribune of the people and mobilize to defend all our struggles, from strikes to protests against cop brutality and in defense of a woman’s right to choose abortion. It would carve out a road to fight to take the power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers, form a workers and farmers government and join the fight for a socialist world.

Support the Verizon workers!

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