Search News
For the Media
For media inquiries, call CWA Communications at 202-434-1168 or email comms@cwa-union.org. To read about CWA Members, Leadership or Industries, visit our About page.
Website Gives Voice to Verizon Employees Angry Over Pension Loss
Washington, D.C. -- The Communications Workers of America and the Pension Rights Center have created a new website to give management and non-represented workers at Verizon Communications a way to voice their outrage about Verizon's assault on their retirement security, and to keep public attention focused on this disastrous decision.
The goals of the campaign are to direct media and public attention to Verizon's action and to help Verizon employees express their concerns and mobilize to persuade the company to reconsider the terms of its decision.
Through the site, www.verizonretirementwatch.com, Verizon employees and their supporters will be able to tell the world how the company's action threatens their future by betraying the promises Verizon made to thousands of employees.
The site includes information on executive pay and benefits – the supplemental plan covering executives that will not be frozen – and sets up an ongoing forum for employees and others to talk together and send a message to the company. It also provides specific information as to how the changes will affect employees of various ages and service.
Verizon has said it will freeze all pensions of management and non-represented employees at the end of June 2006. That could mean a loss of 21 percent, or more, of an employee's pension security. Union-represented workers at Verizon, covered by national agreements negotiated by the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, will continue to be covered by an on-going defined benefit pension plan.
CWA President Larry Cohen called Verizon's action, like that of IBM and others, "a chilling signal not just for current workers who have lost their retirement security, but to the future generation of workers who will be penalized before they ever start their first job."
"In the United States, increasingly, workers are required to bear the costs and the risks for their retirement and health care security. Today, they're also forced to pay the costs for the bad business decisions that push companies into bankruptcy, like United Airlines and Delphi, not to mention the misdeeds of corporate lawbreakers whose actions have wiped out 401 (k) retirement savings at companies like Enron, WorldCom, and others," he said.
"That profitable companies like Verizon, with fully funded pension plans, can freeze benefits is outrageous, even by the "Gilded Age" standards of today's executives," Cohen stressed.
The goals of the campaign are to direct media and public attention to Verizon's action and to help Verizon employees express their concerns and mobilize to persuade the company to reconsider the terms of its decision.
Through the site, www.verizonretirementwatch.com, Verizon employees and their supporters will be able to tell the world how the company's action threatens their future by betraying the promises Verizon made to thousands of employees.
The site includes information on executive pay and benefits – the supplemental plan covering executives that will not be frozen – and sets up an ongoing forum for employees and others to talk together and send a message to the company. It also provides specific information as to how the changes will affect employees of various ages and service.
Verizon has said it will freeze all pensions of management and non-represented employees at the end of June 2006. That could mean a loss of 21 percent, or more, of an employee's pension security. Union-represented workers at Verizon, covered by national agreements negotiated by the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, will continue to be covered by an on-going defined benefit pension plan.
CWA President Larry Cohen called Verizon's action, like that of IBM and others, "a chilling signal not just for current workers who have lost their retirement security, but to the future generation of workers who will be penalized before they ever start their first job."
"In the United States, increasingly, workers are required to bear the costs and the risks for their retirement and health care security. Today, they're also forced to pay the costs for the bad business decisions that push companies into bankruptcy, like United Airlines and Delphi, not to mention the misdeeds of corporate lawbreakers whose actions have wiped out 401 (k) retirement savings at companies like Enron, WorldCom, and others," he said.
"That profitable companies like Verizon, with fully funded pension plans, can freeze benefits is outrageous, even by the "Gilded Age" standards of today's executives," Cohen stressed.