Verizon Workers say Contract "Due" after 9 Months

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)Commuters making their way through the fog on Route 29 early Thursday morning may have thought they were hallucinating. Looming out of the fog on the highway were dozens of people. Very pregnant people. Women, of course, but men, too, bright red t-shirts stretched tight across bellies absurdly swollen by pillows. “We’re DUE a fair contract” read one banner, “TIME TO DELIVER a fair contract” read another. ”It’s been almost nine months to the day” since contract negotiations began at Verizon, explained CWA 2108 President Marilyn Irwin, holding one end of a banner and waving at passing traffic. Union members briefly struck last year but returned to the bargaining table, where “things are still really ugly,” Irwin said. Members who had already been “really frustrated” by the lack of progress have been angered by recent reports that Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s compensation has tripled to more than $23 million since last August, while the company continues to press demands for major concessions from its workers. “We’re looking at hits of at least $20,000 per worker,” Irwin said, as a mobile billboard accusing Verizon of “corporate greed” drove past, circling Verizon’s Chesapeake facility, where more than one thousand local 2108 members work each day. The action was one of several locally and hundreds across the country as part of CWA’s National Day of Action on Verizon. - report by Chris Garlock; photo by Jenny Sylvester, CWA 2108