Techs Tell Verizon Business Execs: Keep Your Promises

Angered that Verizon Business has been hiring entry-level technicians at higher rates than are being paid to more senior and higher-ranking workers, and the increased the use of outside contractors in New England, 63 Verizon Business techs urged the company's top executives to halt the practices and make good on their promises to begin addressing the workers' concerns.

"Many techs are frustrated that the company has begun to hire techs from the outside as Tech IIIs at a much higher rate of pay than employees who have worked for the company for years," the techs wrote this week in a certified letter to John Killian and Bob Toohey, Verizon Business's president and vice president for human resources. To add insult to injury, the company has been requiring its experienced technicians to train inexperienced new hires who are just starting out and being paid at higher rates of pay.

"This is unfair, especially to the techs who have shown years of loyalty to the company," said the letter signed by each of the technicians, who work at company locations in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

The techs also asked Killian and Toohey to live up to promises that the company had made immediately after they began agitating for a union. In captive audience meetings, management urged the workers to give the company "a chance" and promised that it would take care of any concerns that they had.

More public officials are adding their voices to the many calling on CEO Ivan Seidenberg to respect workers' right to organize through card check. Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley urged the CEO to allow the workers to organize "without management interference, harassment or intimidation" and to honor card-check as the company had done "in past organizing campaigns." Rochester, New York, Mayor Robert Duffy asked Seidenberg to give the workers "the freedom" to organize by card check or NLRB election, and the county executive for St. Louis County, in Missouri, Charlie Dooley, urged the company's top executive to "allow your employees to assemble with as little hindrance as possible."