Verizon: union win

[John Gulick]

I will admit I have not been following the Verizon struggle
very closely so perhaps someone out there can enlighten me.
To what extent did/does the strike cripple firms/workers
dependent on telecom services ? I know that managers were
shifted to fill the positions of picketing workers, but
I don't imagine Verizon had at its disposal 90,000 managers.
Nathan Newman also managed small outbreaks of sabotage, such
as a striker who got electrocuted cutting a transmission wire.

A rather lopsided debate has been waged here concerning the
relationship between the Verizon struggle and wages/benefits/
conditions unionism vs. workers control syndicalism. I think
that debate has been resolved rather successfully. Another
issue which has not really been touched which relates to my
above queries is this: workers may engage in militant and
solidaristic campaigns over what some might regard as rather
"limited" wage/benefits/conditions ends, but in the process not
only become politically radicalized (trade union campaigns being
the school of class struggle and all that), but also through
withholding their labor-power unwittingly demonstrate the degree
to which capital accumulation is dependent upon their labor-power.
What to some syndicalists might appear as merely a vigorous
version of business unionism and to left-liberal advocates of
"social movement unionism" as a militant wages/benefits/conditions
struggle is then objectively both and neither. Hence the importance
of gauging the effects of work stoppages not only on the politicization
of the direct producers but also on the accumulation process.

Any comments ?

John Gulick