'People are really responding': an interview with labor leader Bob Master.

• Author: Jaffe, Sarah
• Position: Interview

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Bob Master is co-chair of the New York State Working Families Party and political director for District One of the Communications Workers of America. He scored a major victory recently when Verizon workers won an agreement that ended a high-profile, six-and-a-half-week strike.

Nearly 40,000 workers at Verizon, the cable and telephone giant, stuck it out until the union declared victory. Workers were incensed that the company had been outsourcing jobs to low-wage contractors in the United States and abroad, demanding cuts to retirement and health care benefits, and refusing to expand fiber-optic service--a source of high-paying, blue-collar employment.

Among the gains they made are 1,300 new call-center jobs on the East Coast, first-ever contracts for Verizon wireless store employees in Brooklyn and in Everett, Massachusetts, and pay raises of nearly 11 percent over the life of the contract. The workers beat back demands from the company to cut pensions, transfer workers out of state for up to two months, and proposed cuts in disability and accident benefits.

Master sat down with me to talk about why the strike succeeded, what technology means for union jobs, and the future of labor.

Q: There's this idea that workers in unions are op* posed to technological advancement, that they're stubbornly trying to maintain old-economy jobs. But in this strike it was the unions that called for Verizon to invest in its fiber-optic technology.

Bob Master: The company always says these wages and these benefits and these work rules are relics of the era of the princess phone. They're antiques and we have to get rid of them. The first thing we say is, our members are building the most advanced fiber-optic Internet network in America, so we are not antiques.

Yes, we are serving, in New York State, almost three million people who are still dependent on copper lines. And those people deserve to have good phone service. Despite the fact that Verizon doesn't want to be considered a phone company, they actually are a regulated phone company.

But also, when it comes to the wireless workers who are allegedly on the digital cutting edge, the company says, "Oh no, we cant pay them, we can't share our giant mega profits with them. Were paying them the industry standard." So, either were antiques or on the cutting edge, but both times the executives and the shareholders are the only winners.

Were not Luddites at all. Were all about building more...