Verizon strike is fight for all workers!

The following statement was released April 27 by Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, and Osborne Hart for vice president.

Workers on strike at Verizon need your support and solidarity. In a multimillion dollar ad campaign run daily since the strike began, Verizon bosses want you to turn your back on the workers. Verizon claims they get “outstanding compensation,” “exceptional retirement benefits” “very reasonable” health insurance and “numerous perks.” And that the company has “put a fair offer on the table.”

Don’t fall for it!

Verizon bosses say they want a deal that “positions our wireline business for success in the digital world” and that makes “changes to legacy constraints in our contracts.” Translation: Verizon wants to keep speeding up the work pace, disregard job safety, reduce health care benefits, cut wages by using more contractors to increase their profit rates and fill the owners’ bank accounts.

This is not just a fight for union workers at Verizon. The strikers are fighting for all of us. If Verizon gets away with this it will encourage other bosses to do the same. Workers across the country have a vested interest in mobilizing the broadest solidarity possible.

The fight by construction workers for job safety in the face of increasing numbers of deaths on the job will gain strength if Verizon strikers, who face similar conditions, can push their bosses back.

Fast-food and Walmart workers fighting for $15 an hour and a union also have a stake in this fight. Every blow the bosses deal to our fellow workers is a blow against us. Every victory by our brothers and sisters puts us in a better position to move forward and would boost the fight to organize the unorganized.

Other unionists face concession demands from their bosses, who seek to make us pay for the deepening crisis of capitalist production and trade.

Members of the Utility Workers Union of America Local 1-2 at Con Edison in New York just voted to authorize a strike in the face of that company’s attempts to push through further cutbacks. Their contract expires June 25.

We call on our fellow workers: Join the Verizon workers’ picket lines and demonstrations. Take up collections for their strike funds. Invite strikers to speak to your union meetings or to your neighborhood association and other community groups.

The Verizon strike shows both the power of working people in action and that our struggles would be even more powerful if we had our own party, a labor party based on our unions, instead of relying on bourgeois politicians who claim to be “friends of labor.”

An injury to one is an injury to all! Solidarity with the striking workers at Verizon!