Military Resistance 14D9
On Verizon Picket Line, A Demand For Dignity:
“We Built This Company”
“There’s No Alternative” “You’ve Got To Take A Stand”
“The Telecommunications Giant Has Pulled Down $39 Billion In Profits Over The Last Three Years”
“But Those Profits Are Flowing Up, To The Bigshots, Not Down, To The Worker Bees”
JESSICA RINALDI/GLOBE STAFF
APRIL 17, 2016 By Kevin Cullen, BOSTON GLOBE MEDIA
Christina Moylan is getting too old for this.
“Sixty years old, and I’m still on a picket line,” she was saying the other day, standing in front of the Verizon building in Bowdoin Square.
“But, you know, I walked a picket line for 16 weeks in 1989. I can do this.”
Moylan is one of the 36,000 Verizon workers, from Massachusetts to Virginia, who went on strike Wednesday. She started 38 years ago as a telephone operator with the company that became Verizon. She rose through the company, bought a house in Melrose, raised a family.
Hers has been one of those middle-class existences the politicians extol, existences that are going the way of the dodo.
“We built this company,” she said, pointing to the workers who walked in an oval in front of the entrance to the old New England Telephone and Telegraph Company building. “When we started, we were a family. Now? Now we’re just a number.”
The numbers at Verizon are quite good, actually. The telecommunications giant has pulled down $39 billion in profits over the last three years.
But those profits are flowing up, to the bigshots, not down, to the worker bees.
Lowell McAdam, the Verizon CEO, somehow manages to survive on $18 million a year.
Much of that compensation package is in stock shares, which gives McAdam a greater incentive, as if he needs it, to keep Verizon’s stock price high and labor costs low.
The top five executives at Verizon pull in a total of more than $47 million a year.
Verizon says it pays its average union worker $130,000 in wages and benefits.
Which sounds pretty good until you realize the company wants to replace that so-called average worker with someone they can pay a lot less and with fewer benefits.
The strike began the day after Verizon announced it would bring its high-speed fiber-optic FiOS Internet and TV service to Boston. The very people who would install that system are now walking picket lines.
Matt Lyons, 29 years on the job, walked up from the Local 2222 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers picket line on Franklin Street to Bowdoin Square the other day.
He says it’s galling to see executive pay rise so disproportionately.
He says it’s unconscionable for a highly profitable company to ship overseas the kind of jobs that long sustained America’s middle class.
“My grandmother worked for what became this company. She was a telephone operator for 50 years,” he said. “She was able to send my dad to BC High, then to Boston College. That’s what made the middle class. That was the system, and it worked. And now that system is being taken away from us. And for what? So rich people can get richer? And working people can get screwed?”
The strike that began Wednesday is the biggest one in the country since 43,000 Verizon workers walked off the job in 2011.
But in those five years, some 5,000 Verizon jobs, mostly in customer service, have sailed off to the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the Philippines.
The company wants to ship more jobs overseas, and that, along with union workers being expected to shoulder more health care costs, is a main sticking point in this dispute.
For many walking the picket lines, this is not about a union contract so much as a social compact, the idea that if you work for a company that does well, everybody gets to share in the bounty equitably.
This is about fairness, about maintaining not just jobs but dignity.
One of the things that drives the union strikers especially crazy is the company’s desire to put more technicians on the road, like journeymen, for weeks or months at a time, more than 80 miles from their homes.
The company says it needs that flexibility to be more efficient.
But what does that do to somebody’s family life?
From the worker’s perspective, the strategy seems clear: make the work-life balance so lousy that the worker quits. Then hire nonunion workers for less money and fewer benefits.
“A lot of this is about basic decency,” Lyons said.
What’s unfolding on the picket lines in Bowdoin Square and beyond is playing out across this country, where millions lie awake at night, staring at a dark ceiling, wondering if it will cave in.
This is the national debate we should be having. There has to be a better balance between taking care of workers and taking care of shareholders.
While the politicians dither, lying to themselves and the rest of us about what they can or will do for American workers, Tim Sullivan walked a picket line in downtown Boston.
Sullivan grew up in Lawrence. He is 37, been with Verizon for 20 years, and feels so strongly about what he’s doing that he brought his 3-year-old son Aidan and 2-year-old daughter Kennedy to the picket line. Aidan ate some Dunkin’ Munchkins while his dad picketed.
“My wife used to work here, too,” Sullivan said. “She quit to stay home and take care of the kids.”
Tim Sullivan and his wife grew up believing and buying into the whole package, the American Dream, the stable middle class.
All that stability is now so terribly shaky. “There’s no alternative,” he said. “You’ve got to take a stand.”
The sun was still high in the sky Thursday afternoon and the Verizon workers were still circling in front of the old telephone company building when a distant noise began to drift down Beacon Hill. Some guy with a bullhorn was chanting, and the crowd, hundreds and hundreds of fast food and other service industry workers demanding a $15-an-hour wage, was chanting with him.
The demonstrators, complete with a police escort, walked down Bowdoin Street and turned right onto Cambridge Street.
Tim Sullivan picked up his picket sign and walked across Cambridge Street toward the marchers, blending in with them, a sea of humanity, moving forward, slowly but inexorably, looking to obtain, or to preserve, a way of life for which they shouldn’t have to beg.
MORE:
Verizon Workers Take Over Midtown Manhattan In The Second Week Of Their Strike:
“No Worker In America Will Be Safe From This Corporate Race To The Bottom”
April 18, 2016 By Sean O’Kane, THE VERGE
Thousands of Verizon workers are in the middle of a strike across the northeast United States, and today members of two unions — the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) — took to midtown Manhattan to keep the work stoppage going.
The striking workers chanted, whistled, and used noisemakers inside a barricade that occupied the entire bus lane on 42nd Street between 6th Avenue and Broadway. A stage was set up at the front of the queue, just around the corner from Times Square. Dennis Trainor, the vice president of CWA District 1 (which represents Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York) led a rotating cast of speakers.
“They try to make it look like we’re the greedy ones,” a hoarse Trainor yelled into the microphone. “We’re not ashamed of our average $74,000, or the benefits that we have. We earned them!”
The striking workers mainly deal with landline operations and FiOS installations, and the dispute centers around the way Verizon has treated these employees. Verizon has been outsourcing call-center jobs and pushing workers to relocate across the country for months at a time, the unions say, all while the company increases its focus on its wireless business and continues to push self-serve digital customer service.
“If a hugely profitable corporation like Verizon can destroy the good family-supporting jobs of highly skilled workers, then no worker in America will be safe from this corporate race to the bottom,” Trainor said last week in a statement that announced the strike.
These issues have been on the table between the two sides since the workers’ contracts expired in August of 2015, and today Trainor continued to enumerate what the two sides are at war over. Trainor said Verizon is trying to remove job security from the negotiations, as well as diminish the company’s accident disability plan and retirement benefits. “So you can see why we don’t want mediation,” he shouted.
“The company is making ‘yooge’ profits,” he continued, echoing Bernie Sanders’ affectations. He then celebrated the fact that Sanders walked with the striking workers earlier in the day.
Today, the CWA and IBEW members and supporters were, at times, very loud and angry, but the mood was light. Tour buses and trucks (including at least two FDNY firetrucks and an ambulance) honked horns and waved in support.
The most heated exchanges occurred in the middle of the block, where some of the strikers found themselves directly in front of a Verizon Wireless store. Every person who went in or out of the store was met with scores of boos, but the tension calmed each time someone stopped to ask the workers why they were striking.
(The store largely remained empty, and the employees remained inside.)
It’s unclear how long the strike could last, but there are signs that it will stretch on for a while. Bob Mudge, Verizon’s president of wireline operations said in a statement that the company has “trained thousands of non-union Verizon employees to carry out virtually every job function handled by our represented workforce — from making repairs on poles to responding to inquiries in our call centers.”
MILITARY NEWS
OOPS!
http://www.armytimes.com/story/military/2016/04/21/army-launches-investigation-into-airborne-humvee-mishap-video/83333714/
Pentagon Brass Lied To Congress About Military’s Handling Of Sexual Assault Cases:
“There Was Not One Example Of A Commander ‘Insisting’ A Case Be Prosecuted”
21 April 16 By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, The Washington Post
Since 2013, lawmakers have tried to pass a bill that would reform key parts of how the military justice system deals with sexual assault, but during key stages of the legislative debate, the Pentagon misled Congress by “cherry picking” information, later disproved, about a hundred cases, according to a report released by a watchdog group Monday and provided to the Associated Press.
At issue is the Military Justice Improvement Act, or MIJA. The bill, championed by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), aimed to change how the military treated sexual-assault cases by basically removing unit commands from the judicial process that decided whether cases should move forward. Under the bill, independent prosecutors would make that call.
Proponents of the bill said the change would prevent military commanders from dismissing or slow-rolling cases, while critics of the bill said it would undermine the military’s hierarchy.
During testimony to Congress, Navy Adm. James Winnefeld, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that if the bill passed, fewer sexual-assault cases in the military would go to trial.
Winnefeld reiterated his point in a follow-up letter to lawmakers. He claimed that between 2010 and 2013 there were 93 instances of civilian prosecutors refusing to take certain sexual-assault cases, prompting military commanders to insist on taking them to court-martial.
According to Army and Marine Corps documents obtained by the group Protect Our Defenders through Freedom of Information Act requests, it turns out that Winnefeld’s claims, echoed by at least four senators, were largely untrue.
Protect Our Defenders is a nonpartisan group that supports the MIJA bill.
Out of 81 of the 93 cases, “there was not one example of a commander ‘insisting’ a case be prosecuted,” the report says. “In each case, military investigators or military attorneys requested the case from civilian authorities.”
“VA Has Been Systemically Shredding Documents Related To Veterans’ Claims”
“Destruction That Could Result In Loss Of Claims And Evidence, Incorrect Decisions And Delays In Claims Processing”
Apr 16, 2016 by Dianna Cahn, Stars and Stripes
Department of Veterans Affairs investigators conducted spot checks at 10 veterans benefits offices around the country and came to a disturbing conclusion: The VA has been systemically shredding documents related to veterans’ claims -- some potentially affecting their benefits.
The VA Office of Inspector General conducted the surprise audit at 10 regional offices on July 20, 2015, after an investigation into inappropriate shredding in Los Angeles found that staff there was destroying veterans’ mail related to claims, according to an OIG report released Thursday.
Investigators arrived unannounced at regional offices and sifted through 438,000 documents awaiting destruction as of 11 a.m. Of 155 claims-related documents, 69 were found to have been incorrectly placed in shred bins at six of the regional offices: Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Reno, Nev. There were none at Baltimore, Oakland, San Juan and St. Petersburg, Fla.
Investigators determined that two of the 69 documents affected benefits directly, nine had the potential to affect benefits and the rest would not affect benefits but were required to be in the claims folders before destruction and were not there.
It was enough, the report said, to conclude that not only were the problems systemic, the impact could be serious.
“The potential effect should not be minimized,” the report concluded. “Considering that there are 56 (VA regional offices), and if weekly shredding is conducted, it is highly likely that claims-related documents at other VAROs are being improperly scheduled for destruction that could result in loss of claims and evidence, incorrect decisions and delays in claims processing.”
The findings were the latest in a stream of mishandling of veterans care and benefits at the beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs. The VA has been embroiled in scandal since the spring of 2014, when revelations emerged that the appointment wait list at the Phoenix VA Medical Center was so long that managers had manipulated the schedules to cover up delays. Patients had languished for months and in some cases years awaiting treatment. Some of them died before receiving care.