Verizon Union officials: "Willing to negotiate on all items"

Madison Wisconsin

The Verizon strike has started to heat up a bit since yesterday. Verizon is claiming that there have been incidents of vandalism and that “Picketing laborers prevented replacement workers from entering or exiting jobsites”, reports the Wall Street Journal. The bosses have become so used to the way top Union officials have been running strikes as 24 hour protests that they have forgotten that the object of a strike is to stop production and keep scabs from re-starting it.

What the bosses call “vandalism” which is a sort of sabotage, isolated acts of destroying property and such, tends to increase when the strategy, tactics and organization of workers is weak and the strike and the financial and personal difficulties it imposes go on forever. “The Union had instructed its members to act legally and professionally on the picket lines”, the WSJ reports Bob Master, the Union official mentioned in yesterday’s blog as saying.

The problem is that this is the wrong advice, it is advice meant for the ears of the circle of friends that he moves in, the Democratic politicians and employers that the Union hierarchy appeals to to preserve some semblance of a "professional" trade Union movement in this country. The problem is of course is that the working class, their own members tends to intervene in ways that don’t quite fit this mold.

The correct advice would be to prepare the ground for mass action, openly announce that for the strike to win and the workers’ wages, benefits and conditions to be not openly preserved but expanded it will inevitably mean breaking the law in a mass way. If any strikes appears to be heading for victory, and we can’t have a victory without reaching out to our communities, the bosses will use the police and their courts to get injunctions against picketing and all sorts of Union activity; these anti- worker laws have to be violated. This is what the bosses will refer to as “terrorism” or “mass vandalism” as they are doing with regards to the uprisings in Britain. We cannot advance our interests without mass action and a willingness to violate the law, the bosses will always use their laws to defend their interests, we have to break them. Mass action that halts production, stops the system in its tracks, reduces acts of individual sabotage and vandalism which are mostly acts of desperation on the part of workers or a failed method of struggle based on mere self indulgence by middle class types.

The Union officials leading the Verizon strike like all other strikes are quite willing to make concessions. They recognize capitalism is in a profitability crisis and want to help out. They are “Quite willing to negotiate with Verizon on many of its demands, including a requirement that workers contribute to health-care premiums” the Wall Street Journal reports to its readership, the ruling class of this country.

Rolando Scott, the president of CWA Local 1109 seems to think that it’s merely a matter of the bosses’ inability to communicate, “The ball is in Verizon’s court” he says, “They have to let us know what is important to them. We are willing to negotiate on all items.”  (Incredible isn't it? ) The problem is that Union officials like Master and Rolando have been so cooperative in the past that the bosses aren’t afraid of them; they are very confident at this point that the heads of organized Labor are completely ineffective except at suppressing genuine rank and file militancy from taking organizational form developing oppositions within organized Labor built around a program that rejects the Team Concept, seriously builds links among the youth, the communities, the unemployed and workers internationally and demands and fights for what we need rather than what is acceptable to their friends in the Democratic Party and is prepared to violate ant-workers, anti-Union laws to win them.

The problem is that Verizon “hasn’t engaged in true bargaining yet” Scott announces to the capitalist class through their press. He’s pleading with them. “Can’t we just return to the old way? Why do you have to be so mean, so greedy, we’ll give you most of what you want.”  As in Wisconsin, the Union bureaucracy is concerned that the way things are going they will soon be without a job but the the appeals fall on deaf ears.

The Union officials running the Verizon strike like all the strikes that have been defeated over the last 40 years or so have no intention of doing any of these things, not willingly anyway. As we have written with regards to auto and other defeated struggles, the building of opposition groups within the Unions around these policies and tactics is what has to be done to take the leadership of our organizations out of the hands of the existing bureaucracy whose program is based on class collaboration and rescuing the market. This can still be done in the Verizon strike and it certainly can and must be done in the workplaces and jobsites of America. This is how an alternative leadership of these organizations of twelve million can be built.

“The Union said it doesn’t disclose counterproposals outside of the negotiating table” the Wall Street Journal states. Why not?  Well, this is normally the case for obvious reasons; the strategy is all concession---damage control. The way to proceed would be to not only announce demands to their members and the working class as a whole and build a generalized movement around them. But you’d have to be fighting for something tangible to do that. It’s impossible to build a movement based around a program of concessions. “Join us, we’re fighting for increased benefit contributions, fewer layoffs and smaller pensions.”

Doesn’t have that ring to it does it?