News / Economy

40,000 Verizon workers end strike after reaching deal

Tuesday, 31 May 2016 10:28 AM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 31 May 2016 10:38 AM ]

Striking workers of Verizon telecommunications giant rally in Washington, DC, April 14, 2016. (AFP photo)

Some 40,000 Verizon workers have returned to their jobs following an agreement with the company, seven weeks after staging one of the largest strikes in recent years in the US.

The work stoppage came to an end on Friday, after the workers reached a tentative deal with the phone, TV and Internet giant.

Frustrated workers, who will resume their jobs on Wednesday, went on strike in April after talks between the unions and Verizon over the company's plans to cut healthcare and pension-related benefits over a three-year period hit an impasse.

In the new agreement Verizon has pledged a 10.5 percent wage increase over four years — up from the 6.5 percent increase that it had proposed prior to the walk-off.

Verizon also agreed that no additional jobs will be outsourced overseas, while more calls will be routed to domestic call centers. This means 1,300 new call center job opportunities will be created.\ in the coming years.

Despite posting record profits in wireless business, Verizon has been losing its wireline customers and to help make up for the losses, it continues to offload some of its wireline assets and workers to countries like Mexico, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic. The company says it saved $300 million in employee costs in 2015.

“This was the major issue for my members: protecting American jobs and keeping them here at home,” said Robert Speer, the representative of Verizon’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers employees in New Jersey. “This agreement makes a lot of progress in reversing the outsourcing trend.”

The agreement was brokered by US Labor Secretary Thomas Perez and Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Director Allison Beck.

Rich Young, a Verizon spokesman, said Monday that the proposed contract “provides the majority of the changes in the contract that we were seeking, and we feel it’s a major step in the right direction.”

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