Here's How Verizon Is Trying To Make Peace With Union Workers

Verizon Is struggling to negotiate with its union workers.

Irrespective of the efforts made by Verizon Communications, the company’s worker union known as CWA and IBEW has called for a strike recently. The wireless carrier is trying hard to negotiate with the union that voice for almost 40,000 employees via the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services. However, the union does not seem interested in negotiating with them.

The company was anticipating a strike call initially after which it took several measures to retain its operations even when a strike takes place. For the past 10 months, the workers union and management have been discussing the terms. However, no viable conclusion has been reached as of yet. The union workers have finally decided to go on a strike today.

Mr. Bob Mudge, the President of Verizon Communication’s Wireless Operations mentioned in a press release, “Let's make it clear—we are ready for a strike.” He further added, “With any sort of job action or disruption to our business, our primary goal is to ensure our customers can count on the critical communications services that they pay for and we provide. I want them to know that will happen.”

Verizon Communications Inc. has stated that it is ready to negotiate with the FMCS if they are willing to extend the strike call. The union has now made its decision, thus it will now come up with a way to implement the strike readiness mechanism.

The company is planning regarding a strike since 2015 as it gears up its non-union workers to take charge of the operations in case the union workers go on a strike. In compliance to the company’s contingency plan, they have already trained thousands of its workers to replace the union workers in case a strike takes place. They have also worked on a contingency as per which they will now assign workers to various regions throughout the country to replace the union workers.

The tasks which will now be taken by the non-union workers encompass repair and maintenance of copper networks, customer service, and internal and external network plant management. The training of employees for this purpose was conducted mostly at the company’s training center situated in Northern Virginia. This training center is devoted to train the company’s non-union workers in case of an emergency situation.

Marc Reed, the chief administrative officer at VZ mentioned in a press release that the company is not happy with the strike and regrets the decision made by the union workers. This move has impacts on all of Verizon employees. Mr. Reed believes that by calling a strike, the employees will not be able to solve the problem in hand. Moreover, it does not even benefit both the parties.

The wireless network carrier has vouched to offer its consumers with smooth services even in the strike period. Sadly it is difficult to implement and easier to make claims since the implementation of non-union workers to takeover is not a piece of cake. The non-union workers do not have specialties in the domain they have been assigned which is resulting in a lag. Both the parties need to negotiate so that the inefficacies can be dealt with easily.