According to Phil Wilson, the CWA doesn’t have near the muscle today that it had back in 2000, when 85,000 Verizon employees went on strike. With a smaller employee base and only about half as many union members going on strike, Verizon doesn’t seem to have difficulty keeping up with the workload. “Strikes are all about leverage. If Verizon can continue operations with replacement workers—and it looks like they can—then the CWA has no leverage and they won’t get anything,” said Wilson in a recent article posted by the Society for Human Resource Management. Wilson continued, “This is why strikes are rarely effective today. Companies are often able to perform at least as well during a strike—many perform better—which takes away all the leverage from the union.”
