Hundreds Rally to Block Verizon Landline Sale

A sea of red shirts and chants of "Hey, hey, ho, ho, FairPoint has got to go" filled Monument Square in downtown Portland, Me., on March 3, as more than 1,200 CWA and IBEW members shouted out their opposition to Verizon's proposed sale of 1.6 million landlines in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. FairPoint Communications has proposed to buy Verizon's lines for $2.7 billion.

Said CWA Local 1400 Vice President Anne Mussenden, one of the rally organizers, "It was fabulous to see our union brothers and sisters from every New England state who came to support us. I haven't seen people so riled up since the NYNEX strike of '89."

"It was a large, angry, boisterous crowd," said CWA Representative Paul Bouchard, who told those assembled that, "The sale is a scheme. It's an attempt for Verizon to walk out on their obligations to rural subscribers. FairPoint's a Mayberry phone company; they're coming in here with huge debt and no resources to serve the subscribers."

Mussenden pointed out that those customers are already underserved as far as high-speed data transmission: The best Verizon offers currently is DSL at 3.0 megabits and in some areas only 768 kilobits, and they're not building FIOS in rural areas.

FairPoint has become sufficiently riled by the unions' opposition that it filed a legal memo with the Maine Public Utilities Commission on March 1, seeking to limit the unions' intervention testimony to only labor and employment issues. CWA has consistently opposed the sale on grounds that rural communities in the three states would be underserved.

"FairPoint's trying to muzzle us," Mussenden said. "Our whole fight is about the promises they're making to the public, and they're bringing nothing to Maine."