Verizon Pays for Folly

Bonnie Daly celebrates a back-pay award of more than $35,000 from Verizon with CWA leaders who helped her obtain it. The company fired Daly, of Local 1126 in Utica, N.Y., for misconduct in the alleged mobile picketing of a manager during CWA’s strike against the company in 2000. The local filed an unfair labor practice charge and the arbitrator ruled that the firing was unjust. Daly received back pay and health care costs for most of the two years she was not allowed to work and reinstatement to her old job. After 31 years with the company, she chose instead to retire, “because I wanted some of the younger people to have a job. Otherwise I would have stayed.”