Verizon Union Members Terrorize Montague Street Residents

By on August 16, 2011 9:41 am in Brooklyn Heights

As Verizon and the Communication Workers of America slug it out in their current contract negotiations, the real losers in the battle are the residents of Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. Video after the jump.

Protesters line up everyday in front of the Verizon store at number 146 shouting, marching and causing a general ruckus. Whether you’re on their side or not, one thing is perfectly clear – IT’S ANNOYING.

One Montague Street resident writes to us:

I live on Montague Street with my husband and 3 month old son. My son’s bedroom faces Montague Street. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there is a strike going on. The Verizon “workers” continue to meet up in front of the store, which also happens to be right outside our window. They are making life on Montague Street annoyingly unbearable. My son has not been able to take one uninterrupted nap since the strike started. Protesters are sitting on my stoop (I continue to ask them to leave). I cannot open the windows, even on a nice day, because it sounds like I have a group of shouting men in my living room. I have tried to speak to them, but they not only don’t care but were incredibly rude. The police officers who stand around tell me they can’t do anything.

Is there anything anyone can do?

Our reader adds:

Verizon filed an injunction according to which no more than 10 picketers are allowed at each site of protest. Obviously the police isn’t reinforcing anything. They play their sirens in support of the picketers and stand by as they harass costumers who walk into the Verizon store.

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  • Gerry

    Mathew Parker – clutch my pearls! That made me laugh that was funny.

    In 1986 Brooklyn Union Gas was on strike for 13 weeks and Montague Street had workers chanting “BROOKLYN UNION GAS KISS MY *SS” every day and as enough time went by and the company saved millions by NOT paying the union they unlocked the door the Union came back for less than what they went out for.

    Labor in America has been weakened for decades it began when presdient Regan told the Air Traffic Controllers to go to Hell and busted that Union.

    These Verizon workers have been locked out my managment because they are greedy asking for way too much in hard economic times.

  • Tony

    I’ve known many people who’ve lived on Montague Street over the years and they’ve all told me the same thing: it’s hellish. They have to contend with garbage trucks in the middle of the night, rowdy kids, cars honking constantly, construction, etc., etc. This notion that their peaceful, serene lives have been disrupted by striking workers is absurd. Focusing on “union thugs” instead of the issues that lead to the strike is classic corporate propaganda, and I’m sorry to see so many of my neighbors falling for it. Fink should be ashamed of himself for using incendiary words like “terrorize.”

  • Montague St. Neighbor

    I think the real issue is not why they are striking or how loud they are, but why they are striking HERE and why they are taking it out on the customers?

    Why here? Why not protest outside of the corporate offices? Anyone who’s gone into a verizon store certainly knows what little power the management at each individual store has over the organization of the company.

    Why against the customers? The majority of customers who visit the Verizon store have no choice but to continue on with their business during the strike – the customers are in contract with Verizon! If your phone breaks, what are you supposed to do? Wait for the strike to end? That doesn’t solve anything. As much as I know this is because they want customers to put pressure on the corporate offices, I don’t think this is solved by harassing those customers.

    Let me put this another way – if the contractors who worked in my apartment building decided to strike against the management company, and picketed in front of our building, harassing the tenants, what good would this do? We have leases and contracts, and cannot stop paying management no matter how much we agree with the strike. Asking customers to boycott a company who’s model is based upon locking customers into contracts, is never going to be the solution.

    I wasn’t going to comment because I don’t really agree with the direction of this thread (the noise issue) but I was surprised no one (to my knowledge) brought up these points. For the record: I live on Montague Street and I’m an AT&T customer.

  • JM

    Whose being greedy. Verizon posts record profits, pays zero fed tax and demands, without negotiation this:
    The extreme concessions Verizon is seeking include:

    -Continued contracting out of work to low-wage contractors, which means more outsourcing of good jobs overseas.

    -Eliminating disability benefits for workers injured while on the job.

    -Elimination of all job security provisions.

    -Eliminating paid sick days for new hires and limiting them to no more than five for any workers.

    -Freezing pensions for current workers and eliminating them for future employees.

    -Replacing the current high-quality health care plan with a high-deductible plan requiring up to $6,800 in additional costs.

  • Topham Beauclerk

    @silliness

    To someone called silliness, perhaps everyone is silly.

  • nabeguy

    Oh Topham, you silly Freudian. If she didn’t love on Montague Street, she probably wouldn’t have had the baby in the first place. As to her moving to a quieter place, I think your argument got lost in translation.

  • T.K. Small

    This morning when I tried to log in to TD Ameritrade, the system was running exceedingly slow. When I called TD Ameritrade to complain and/or figure out if it was my computer causing the problem, they asked me whether my Internet was provided by Verizon, which is. For the first time, I am actually entertaining the idea of leaving Verizon. When I become “collateral damage” in a war between two sides that don’t give a rats ass about me, that’s where I begin to draw the line.

  • AEB

    The “love,” so apparently on Topham’s mind, is for all humankind.

  • Wineplz

    @ TK Small – are other websites and other web surfing moving as slow as the TD Ameritrade? If so, then you can probably thank the over 100 acts of sabotage for affecting your internet service. If not, then it’s something on TD’s side.

    @JM

    a response to your bullet points:

    -Continued contracting out of work to low-wage contractors, which means more outsourcing of good jobs overseas.
    ** doesn’t necessarily mean outsourcing. Line techs, splicers, installers can’t be outsourced overseas. Call centers, maybe, but not those who work on the physical layer. Now they can use domestic contractors, but if they’re willing and able to perform a job at a lower rate than what the union is demanding, or they’re offering to do work you guys refuse to do, then the company has a right to make sound fiscal decisions for the business.

    -Eliminating disability benefits for workers injured while on the job.
    ** No one is eliminating disability. Instead of getting full pay for 52 weeks of short term disability, they are requesting full pay for 26wks of short term disability. After the 26wks are up, they either return to work, or roll over to long term disability, as per usual.

    -Elimination of all job security provisions.
    ** you’re a little vague there unless you’re alluding to keeping non-performers. How does it help anyone to have someone on the payroll who doesn’t pull their weight or is incompetent? And don’t give the that line that every union employee is highly skilled and highly motivated because I know better, and I know there’s always at least one person in every group that doesn’t do jack while collecting their paycheck.

    -Eliminating paid sick days for new hires and limiting them to no more than five for any workers.
    ** can’t speak to the new hires, but going from unlimited sick leave (which was often abused) to 5, plus still having your personal days and vacation, is quite reasonable. I suspect that by knocking it down to 5 they’d even allow you to roll over your unused sick days, but that is just conjecture on my part.

    -Freezing pensions for current workers and eliminating them for future employees.
    ** mgmt/non-union hasn’t had a pension since 2006. the money there will continue to accumulate interest until you are eligible to use it, and the company is offering to match up to 9% on the 401k, which is extremely lucrative. Why shouldn’t you have to pay into your OWN retirement? No one is taking that money from you.

    -Replacing the current high-quality health care plan with a high-deductible plan requiring up to $6,800 in additional costs.
    ** since the company is trying to streamline the plans offered to all of us, I suspect that you’ll be offered a plan similar to what mgmt has, with a choice between a PPO and an EPN (aka HMO). My family has the EPN that costs just under $300/month, has no deductible, has no copay for well-visits, $15 copay for sick visits, $25 copay for specialists, has $75 ER copay, and has the most comprehensive coverage of anyone I know. The PPO has much lower premiums for family plans, but does have deductibles and I don’t recall the copay schedule, but was probably similar to the EPN. I can tell you right now that even after covering all my premiums and copays and such after having a baby and putting ear tubes in my older child, we paid nowhere near $6800 you quote, so I’m not sure where you’re getting that number.

  • PujolsFan05

    in the rest of the country…..verizon already is paid for performance….
    we have a limit on sickdays….we already have to carry long term disability…and were verizon union employees just like you

    these are things the union negotiated for your brothers…..

    wineplz is right almost down the line, except the outsourced call center workers do nothing but create billing issues and abuse our customers….transfer them, hang up on them, misquote prices….

    paying and firing for performance is tough in the call center environment because the company controls the goals, how the calls are routed, and they can change the field we play on any day of the week.

    anyway this is from someone who knows just like she does

    theres room on both sides to come together, but theres also a lot of us VZ workers who already took some concesions to gain long term stability, and we dont need our union brothers giving us all a bad name with the comunities their in by sabotaging our service, because in the end, we sell service.

  • http://www.PoetsUSA.com Daniela Gioseffi

    I’m with he Verizon workers against Corporate cruelty. Big corporations are holding all the big money hostage and destroying our country. We are rated 98th in the world, below much smaller and poorer countries when it comes to a fair distribution of wealth. We are 28th among developed nations in healthcare and have a higher infant mortality rate than most, and more starving children than most developed countries. We are no longer a great nation and we are completely controlled now by multinational corporations who buy our elections with huge contributions from their special interest point of view. Watch out for Gov Perry of Texas running for president as he is completely controlled by oil baron money and will do NOTHING about the devastation of climate change already upon us. When the rightwing supreme court voted with Citizens United (Karl Rove’s brain child) Versus the Federal Elections Commission, our last vestige of democracy was destroyed, as our elections are now controlled by big propaganda machines bought by corporations who are stalling the economy. We must fight to get rid of the Bush tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. Go to Public Citizens for the truth and join the battle to amend the constitution against Citizens United V. the FEC so that we can have fairer elections again. http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=183/ Do not be fooled by the name Citizens United dreamt up by Karl Rove to destroy our democracy and undo all our Federal Election Commission laws limiting corp. influence on our elections. The Verizon strikers are dong the right thing. BEAR WITH THEM! FIGHT WITH THEM for our lives and our workers rights.

  • David Campbell

    I am totally on the side of Verizon. It is unbelievable to me that in this economic climate these Verizon “workers” are striking over their Cadillac healtcare benefits paid for entirely by their employer. Not to mention pensions (which most people don’t have anymore), high salaries for largely unskilled labor etc.

    No one has the ‘right’ to a job or to healthcare. This is the entitlement mentality that the unions have perpetuated for what almost a century now? I have a job, I pay towards my health insurance, I have a 401K that I contribute to and my RAISES are based on MERIT and not automatic.

    There are a lot of people out there that would die to have a job like these Verizon union workers have. GET BACK TO WORK and SHUT UP.

    For the people complaining about the noise, the rudeness, and the picketing…Hang in there it will be over eventually…Don’t feel sorry for these people…They HAVE A JOB, they just CHOOSE NOT to do it.

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlsiLOnWCoI Arch Stanton

    Dear David Campbell, What is it that you do for a living, how much do you make a year? Is your job as important as telecommunication field workers? Probably not. Our society would come to a grinding halt without them, without you? You think they receive ” high salaries for largely unskilled labor” what do you know about what they do or how skilled it is, who are to say what is a fair salary/wage for the work they do?

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