Verizon On Strike: Thousands Join Picket Lines And Protests

Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers made good Wednesday on threats to strike, walking off the job to picket and rally outside company stores from Massachusetts to Virginia, kicking off the largest U.S. work stoppage in years.

The Communications Workers of America and the Brotherhood of Electrical Engineers, two unions representing Verizon workers, want increased job security and a bigger chunk of the billions of dollars in profit Verizon has been hauling in year after year.

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Yvonne Byers, a technician from Brooklyn who has worked for Verizon for 19 years, handed out flyers to passersby outside of a retail store in Manhattan. Around her, a crowd of CWA members held signs, yelled chants and lobbed lusty boos at people who stopped to look inside the store.

“The company is being very greedy and very stingy, so we’re not getting what we need," Byers said. "Not so much what we want, but what we need.”

Rallies and demonstrations were scheduled in six different states at 26 different company locations, according to a press release from strike organizers.

"We want a fair deal," Barry Bartley, a worker in Burlington, Massachusetts, said. "We've been in negotiations for 10 months, we don't feel the company is negotiating fairly with us. Everything in our contract they have, they seem to want to take away."

In Manhattan, the workers chanted, "What are we fighting? Corporate greed" and "No more buyin' from Verizon."

One man handing out flyers at the top of subway stairs told commuters, "Your service will be affected."

"The head (of Verizon) is making more than $1 million a year," Byers said nearby. "You can’t share? We do the work. All you do is sit there giving orders.”

Asked how long the strike will last, Byers said, "As long as it takes."

Image via Marc Torrence

Joe Lipovich contributed to this report.