Verizon Business Activists Address Global Organizing Forum

When leading Democrats in the U.S. Congress, including Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), sponsored a December forum on global action to restore workers’ rights to organize, they included real experts, grassroots activists who know the sting of having the deck stacked against them when they try organize their co-workers.

Dave Rogol, a technician with Verizon Business, the company’s nonunion subsidiary, was one of the grassroots experts attending the forum a day after International Human Rights Day, Dec. 10. 

It has been over a year since Rogol, who works in Charlton, Mass., and the majority of his 300 co-workers in New England and New York signed cards to be represented by the IBEW or the CWA. Since then, Verizon has poured its resources into stopping them from establishing a bargaining unit. Weekly e-mails from the company, “spread half-truths about the union,” says Rogol, a former employee of scandal-ridden WorldCom and then MCI, purchased by Verizon two years ago.

 “I thought after all we went through, Verizon would finally treat us as decent human beings and take the high road, but they did the opposite and—in their first year of ownership—froze our wages like at MCI,” says Rogol, who wrote a letter to Verizon’s CEO and received a phone call from the company’s human resources department advising him that he was being paid “the market rate” for his work.

Rogol was invited by Steve Smith, an IBEW Membership Development Department organizer who retired from Verizon after 36 years to assist in organizing efforts at Verizon Business. The day before the forum, more than 200 trade union leaders from the U.S. and 63 countries met at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., the first time such a large group of high-level trade union leaders from around the globe have gathered to develop ideas and strategies to enhance cooperation across borders in organizing.

Rogol and John Lindner, a Verizon Business technician from New York who is working with the CWA to organize his co-workers, attended a small meeting with Kennedy and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. Following the meeting, Lindner, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, addressed the forum.
“My country called me to serve, telling me I had to fight to protect freedom here in the U.S.,” he said.  “Imagine the irony of returning home, and finding that my freedom to join a union is being denied.”

Rogol said he was glad to see leaders of Congress concerned about the fate of America’s workers, but was disappointed that the United States has fallen behind many other nations in honoring the rights of workers to organize. Unionists from other countries, says Rogol, are aware of what Verizon and other companies are doing and are concerned that American corporations are exporting their anti-labor policies to other countries.

Those policies include one-sided campaigns against labor organizations. Verizon, for example, holds workshops urging employees to respect diversity. “But they are disseminating just one point of view about unions,” he said. Rogol said he is deeply appreciative of the support that Verizon Business technicians are receiving from IBEW and CWA bargaining unit members at the company.  “Without them, we wouldn’t have a chance,” he says.