The 2011 Verizon Strike: A fight for all workers!

In August, 2011, some 45,000 workers belonging to the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in the northeastern United States went out on strike against Verizon, a global broadband telecommunications corporation.

Despite raking in $10 billion in profits in 2010, Verizon attempted to force the workers to give up nearly all the gains they've won through years of hard struggle. The multimillionaire executives who head the corporate giant want to slash wages, lower their contribution to employee healthcare, cut pensions for current workers and eliminate them completely for new hires. They have pointed to the auto industry, where workers have seen their wages and benefits ground down to next to nothing in recent years, as an example of new standards. Like their counterparts in auto, they want to use the capitalist economic crisis and mass unemployment as a battering ram against the workers in their employ.

These parasites have also made clear that they intend to do away with the union presence in their company completely. When the leadership at the top of the CWA and IBEW cravenly offered to keep workers on the job under the old contract during ongoing negotiations, Verizon forced a strike by rejecting the unions' last offer.