A message for new Verizon CEO – Dan Schulman
October 6, 2025
As Verizon’s new CEO, you’ll soon have many opportunities. Guiding the Company will also present many challenges. One of the first will be overseeing Contract negotiations. The current agreements that expire on August 1, 2026, will present you with an opportunity to declare how you view the workers who built and continue to build Verizon.
The chief negotiator informed the Unions representing tens of thousands of workers and retirees that Verizon wants out of the retiree Health Care business and that wages need to be leveled off.
One of your predecessors, Lowell McAdam, followed the advice of those conducting Contract Negotiations in 2016 and allowed a Strike to take place believing the Union would be broken. Verizon’s leadership cancelled workers’ Health Care, expecting picket lines to be crossed in droves as a result.
That did not happen.
What took place was Verizon losing hundreds of millions of dollars due to the Strike and the concurrent Boycott of Verizon Wireless. The view of Verizon by Workers, the actual view – not metrics reported from surveys that limited input over the years, has been less than positive.
Between 2016 and 2025 the yearly Revenue reported by Verizon was never lower than $125B annually. Verizon’s Market Capitalization has never been below $158B. As of Oct 3, 2025, it’s $183B. But you know all of that and more.
What is yet unknown is how you plan to treat those who built and continue to build Verizon.
The phrase ‘Employees are our most important stakeholder group and most critical competitive advantage. With happy employees, we can serve customers better, and when we serve customers better, regulators are happy, and if customers are happy and regulators are happy, then obviously shareholders over the medium term are happy as well.’ is obviously familiar to you.
We will find out firsthand when Contract Bargaining resumes if your words are to be believed. Will it be a partnership that benefits both Verizon and its ‘most important stakeholder group’ or will it be more of what was offered during early bargaining?
What workers do when they are here matters.
How they care for themselves and their families while they are here matters.
How they care for themselves and their families when they leave here also matters.
Those issues are inextricably connected.
They always will be.
We have 299 days until Contract Expiration Mr. Schulman.
What happens under your leadership will decide if people are truly “stakeholders’ or merely a commodity.
Only time will tell.
John D. Rowley Sr.
Business Manager
IBEW 2324
