Poor Verizon. In contract negotiations with the Communications Workers of America and the Electrical Workers, the telecom giant says it just doesn’t have the money to settle a contract with nearly 40,000 workers from Virginia to Massachusetts. That’s why it wants to cut pay for workers hurt on the job, hit workers with big increases in health care costs and get rid of good jobs. Meanwhile, Verizon made nearly $10 billion in profits last year, and is doing even better this year. Recognizing that it’s hard to make it on just $1 billion in profits every month, CWA has launched a new website, GoFundVerizon.com, where you can donate to a new yacht for Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, a new Jacuzzi for the company’s corporate jet or a raise for top execs. Don’t worry, this isn’t crowdfunding for the 1%; the union doesn’t want you to actually contribute to this greedy corporation, just show how ordinary folks are paying attention to this struggle for jobs with justice.
Here's Today’s Labor Calendar: The transit workers’ WMATA-ville continues today from 10 am to 5 pm at the Transdev garage in Hyattsville, Maryland. Tomorrow, NoVA Labor’s precinct walks and phone banks start at 10 am at NoVa labor’s offices in Annandale, Virginia. Go to dclabor.org and click on calendar for complete details. Here’s today’s labor history: On this date in 2001, more than 3,000 people died when suicide highjackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. Among the dead in New York were 634 union members, the majority of them New York City firefighters and police on the scene when the towers fell. And in 2009, Crystal Lee Sutton, the real-life Norma Rae of the movies, died at age 68. She worked at a J.P. Stevens textile plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, when low pay and poor working conditions led her to become a union activist. Today’s labor quote is by Crystal Lee Sutton, recalling the moment that changed her life — and later elevated the lives of thousands of textile workers – and was immortalized by Sally Field in the 1979 film, “Norma Rae”. About to be fired for trying to organize, she told her supervisors she had to go back in the plant to get her purse: "I got a piece of cardboard that we used to put in our towel gift sets," Sutton said. "I just grabbed (a magic marker), and I just wrote the word 'union' on that piece of cardboard and climbed on the table. I don't even know how I got up there. And I held that word 'union' up — that cardboard — and turned it around. And people — they finally all shut their machines down."
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