Rand Wilson of the AFL-CIO Field staff reports on the Solidarity Rally at Verizon’s New England headquarters.

With their union contracts set to expire this weekend, thousands of Verizon employees, members of the Electrical Workers (IBEW) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), took their fight for a fair contract to the front of the company’s New England headquarters in Boston yesterday.

Contracts with Verizon covering some 45,000 Verizon employees from Massachusetts to Virginia expire Aug. 6. Despite making more than $24.2 billion in profits over the past four years, according to the union, management is proposing deep cuts in wages and benefits and elimination of job security provisions.

“I came with my co-workers to show Verizon that we are united against any attempt by management to destroy the good jobs that generations of workers before me have fought for,” says Chris Morgan, a 15-year lineman out of Verizon’s south Boston garage who lives in Quincy, Mass.

We’ve sacrificed wage increases in the past to get top quality health care and other benefits. Now is not the time to go backward.

Verizon has proposed freezing current workers’ pensions and eliminating them altogether for new hires. Management also wants to be able to contract out work to low-wage contractors, including outsourcing jobs overseas. They also put on the table plans to slash paid holidays, replace the current health care system with a lower-quality coverage with high deductibles and premiums, eliminate accident disability and reduce paid sick days.

While Verizon is demanding that workers take home less, it paid its top five executives who raked in more than $258 million over the past four years, including $80.8 million for its CEO Ivan Seidenberg, according to the unions.

Ed Fitzpatrick, president of IBEW Local 2222, told the crowd:

Verizon is insulting the hard-working men and women who built this company and made it profitable.  They want to destroy our jobs and break our union.  Well, someone has to take a stand against corporate greed and it might as well be us. We won’t go backward.

Other speakers included Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Robert Haynes, U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), Greater Boston Labor Council President Rich Rogers, Boston Building Trades Council President Marty Walsh and several other state and local union leaders and state lawmakers.