Freedom Line Blog

Updating yesterday’s comment on the Verizon landline employee strike, in which the union up and walked away from negotiations, picketing workers are now alleged to have vandalized company equipment.  Strikers have also openly admitted stalking and harassing other Verizon workers during service calls.  According to striking technician Richard Aulicino of CWA Local 1109, “We cannot stop them from doing their job, but we can harass them while they are on the job.”

Stay classy, union thugs.  Sounds like a guy who truly cares about his trade or his job.

And some people wonder what could go wrong with proposed card-check legislation, which would eliminate the secret ballot in union elections and allow union representatives to stalk employees even at home?

Yesterday, the union representing 45,000 northeastern and mid-Atlantic Verizon Communications employees walked away from the negotiating table and went on strike.  So what’s the problem?  Unsurprisingly, the union simply refuses to acknowledge today’s fiscal and technological realities.

It’s no secret that traditional copper wire communication – the division of Verizon in which the striking employees work – is a declining industry.  In many homes today, a copper wire telephone looks like a quaint throwback to a bygone era, just as a dial phone looked 30 years ago with the arrival of push-button phones.  That helps explain why wireline services are a declining part of Verizon’s business, and why most of Verizon’s profits come from wireless, not wireline, communications anymore.  Stated simply, cellular phones and Voice over IP (VoIP) provide more advanced services more competitively.

Yet the CWA and IBEW refuse to acknowledge reality, and refuse to negotiate any attempt to share healthcare costs.

Other Verizon employees, including those in its fast-growing wireless phone and high-speed Internet divisions, already share a portion of their healthcare costs.  In fact, 130,000 Verizon employees already do.  This is simply a fact of modern life.

Across America, every employing entity in the United States is adapting to today’s economic and technological environment.   Cities are dropping police and fire departments in favor of coordinating with adjoining cities.   States are reviewing their employment practices and work rules to more accurately reflect the pressures of lower revenues and higher pension costs.   Major companies are re-tooling not just their factories, but their production methods and business lines to more closely adapt to changing customer demands and new technologies.  To that end, every business – from the smallest mom-and-pop stores to the largest telecommunications companies – must deal with the ever-growing cost of health care.  Most Americans recognized long ago that individuals have to help bear the burden of growing healthcare costs.  For its part, Verizon can hardly be said to be abandoning its employees’ healthcare needs, as the company spends about $4 billion per year on healthcare for employees, retirees, and their families.

So it is no small irony that wireline workers’ unions are least interested in evolving to allow their employer to continue to provide high-paying, long-term jobs to their employees and excellent services to their customers.

The U.S. airline industry is slowly recovering from a worldwide recession and severe downturn in travel volume, and hasn’t completely righted course since the catastrophic 9/11 attacks.

So what do you if you’re a labor union representing employees of that struggling industry?  Threaten to strike and kill it off for good, apparently.

In recent weeks, union bosses representing airline employees are demanding pay increases and costlier benefits, even as the economy continues to shed jobs and unemployment remains stubbornly high.  They may also strike for the first time at a major U.S. carrier since 2005, despite rising fuel costs as summer approaches.

Few things illustrate the dramatic distinction between workers’ interests and labor unions’ interests than the unions’ continuing destructive behavior.  They have nearly killed the domestic automobile industry through decades of unsustainable demands, and states such as Michigan decay while employers hire in friendlier states.  Big Labor’s apologists like to argue that they provide better jobs and benefits to everyday workers, but the sad truth is that they kill jobs or drive them overseas, leaving unemployed workers and decaying communities to pay the price.

Hopefully, union leaders and the everyday workers whose livelihoods they control will regain sobriety rather than do to domestic airlines what they did for domestic automakers…