Verizon may be in no rush to settle with union as workers strike

Around 2,000 Philadelphia-area Verizon employees walked off the job Wednesday morning, part of a nationwide strike by nearly 40,000 union workers at the telecommunications company. And don't expect the picket line to end any time soon, according to some local experts.

"To me, the defining quality in a strike by unionized utility employees is it doesn’t shut the place down," said Dan O'Meara, a labor attorney for Montgomery McCracken. "It's mostly maintenance workers. Certain utilities make a ton of money off strikes because the customers don't stop paying and there's no payroll expense. A utility can take a strike better than manufacturing."

Members of the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers unions demonstrated in Chinatown Wednesday morning. The last time Verizon employees went on strike was in 2011, when approximately 45,000 walked out for two weeks.

The union members and Verizon appear nowhere close to a deal right now, but Arthur Hochner, an associate professor of human resources management at Temple University, said that's no surprise.

"That’s par for the course in a strike," he said. "At least on the first day, each side wants the other to feel the pressure. I wouldn’t expect a meeting too soon."

Comcast has the franchise for Greater Philadelphia, so the majority of cable/wireless customers in the region will be unaffected. Even most Fios customers won't feel the ripples of the strike. Verizon has hired non-union replacement workers to pick up the slack.

However, Hochner said these workers are often less skilled then their experienced union counterparts.

"I don’t know if the replacement workers will have same level of skill," Hochner said. "The work is not all indoors, a lot of it is outdoors. It's just unclear what the replacements' effectiveness will be."

Hochner added that Verizon has to factor in the replacements' security since confrontations often happen on the picket line. It is nearly impossible for Verizon to destroy the union, so they will have to agree sooner or later, he said.

How far one party will concede remains to be seen, but O'Meara speculated that Verizon workers probably don't have as terrible working conditions to return to than other industries.

"I would also guess that these folks on strike have conditions that other folks would love to have," O'Meara said. "I just think Verizon comes out of sort of a monopoly model, and monopolies are able to pay employees more to have better benefits.

"But Verizon would say we’re in highly competitive business if they were here."

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal