Striking Verizon employees to return to work next week after tentative agreement

Ending a six-week walkout, about 39,000 striking Verizon employees including 4,800 in New Jersey are set to return to work next week following a tentative agreement on a four-year wage contract announced yesterday.

Details of the agreement, which was announced by US labour secretary Thomas Perez were not disclosed. Perez took the initiative on 15 May and called the two sides at the labour department to negotiate and end the strike.

The workers in nine eastern states and Washington, DC, walked off the job on 13 April, which led to the longest strike in recent company history. The agreement would need to be voted on by strikers, who were represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Both the sides said yesterday that they were satisfied with the agreement, which covered employees in the company's landline business, including FiOS Internet and TV service, as also  about 165 Verizon Wireless employees in Brooklyn and Massachusetts.

The CWA said the agreement meets the union's goals of ''improving working families' standard of living, creating good union jobs in our communities and achieving a first contract for wireless retail store workers.''

Verizon had been focusing on its mobile business and selling off its unionised wire-line unit in chunks. Verizon's wireless workers are not unionised.

According  to Verizon it had high health-care costs for its unionised workers, comprising about 30 per cent of its US workforce, which it  wanted to lower. It also wanted wire-line workers to agree to move around to different regions when needed, which was opposed by the union.

CWA president Chris Shelton said in a statement that the agreement was a ''victory for working families'' and that there would new jobs at Verizon, but in the absence of details of the contract, what the workers had gained was not clear.