36,000 Verizon workers go on strike | Hacker News Reader

36,000 Verizon workers go on strike

money.cnn.com

28 pointsgriff198618 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11487742

A family friend works at Verizon, in an office job (I think it's some sort of finance, but I'm not sure). She is not in the union, and currently not striking, so she says VZ has her out in the field doing work on towers until the strike is over. I couldn't believe it, but apparently they have at least some untrained workers going out in the field up on the poles.

I work for AT&T in an office job; a lot of non-union employees got trained last year in the event of a strike that never happened. This happens every few years; the WSJ wrote an article on it in 2012 (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023040720045773236...). The general consensus was that none of us would actually be able to fix anything with the amount of training we received; my understanding is that it's a combination of regulations (we need to be able to say that the network will keep running in the event of a strike) and a bargaining chip (although to be honest, if I were the technicians working out there in the field I wouldn't be scared of us).

I'm pretty sure Mexico, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic have a bigger need for jobs than the US.

Are you saying Verizon has a moral responsibility to provide jobs to Mexico, the Philippines and the DR?

Verizon has no moral responsibility to provide jobs anywhere.

Yeah, because of the exact 'free' trade policies which propelled this offshoring:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/mexican-farmers-agr...

So not just outsourcing, these are people being imported specifically to replace workers at domestic call centers for less money?

Who the hell wrote laws to allow that? How can companies claim they cannot find local workers?

>> these are people being imported specifically to replace workers at domestic call centers for less money?

Where did you read this?

I don't think this situation is about it, but I've heard of that being done with a loophole/abuse of the H1B system. Tech jobs will be posted for a fraction of what they would normally pay, not receive any applications, and then companies will apply for H1B visas to import low cost tech workers willing to take on long hours at low pay for the chance to get an American citizenship.

original link http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/13/technology/verizon-strike/

has nothing to do with h1b/disney, numbersusa is anti h1b site.

Also, title is misleading. They are not 'foreign workers' if they are working in their own country.

numbersusa.com is a pretty openly xenophobic website

I figured that out when I read "Verizon has been increasingly granting these jobs to foreign workers who lack the skills to help customers with their technical problems.". If they couldn't do the job they wouldn't be hiring them, "Did you restart the modem?", yes, "I'll send a tech out" isn't that technical of a gig.

who cares? their readers certainly don't! ;)

Their slogan certainly seems to indicate that.

yip. it's as obvious as it could be

It'd be better to say they are off shoring the jobs, but the result to the many low and low middle income workers affected is that their jobs would be replaced by even lower waged PH and MX workers.

Ok, we changed the url to that from https://www.numbersusa.com/news/verizon-workers-strike-prote... and the title from "Verizon Workers Strike in Protest of Foreign Workers".

The post also appears to be a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11487742.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com