Verizon workers protest its sale Employees fear jobs will be cut

BURLINGTON, Vt. – Chanting “stop the sale,” Verizon employees from Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire joined fellow workers to protest the company’s sale to a North Carolina company.

They fear their jobs are on the line if the sale of the landline business in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont to FairPoint Communications Inc. goes through. But if any one of the three states rejects the sale, the deal is dead.

“We want to get the folks of Vermont to understand what’s going on if this subservient company takes over,” Meg Collins of Taunton, Mass., said Saturday to a crowd of about 200 people. “Vermont will be left behind.”

FairPoint hopes to close the $2.72 billion deal to buy Verizon’s northern New England assets in January, if state regulators agree. It is promising much more widely deployed broadband Internet access, solid basic phone service and 600 new jobs, in addition to the roughly 3,000 currently employed in the region by Verizon.

Workers said many of them will lose jobs and pensions and questioned whether FairPoint will be able to maintain the service Verizon provides or meet Vermont’s goal of expanding high-speed Internet access to all by 2010.

“We don’t think FairPoint is big enough to run the company. I think they’ll run this thing right into the ground,” said Jim McDonald, a 32-year Verizon employee from Norway, Maine.

Forty percent of Vermont’s Verizon customers currently do not have access to broadband service, legislators say.

Legislative leaders have requested stepped-up scrutiny of the deal, including a review of FairPoint’s ability to expand broadband.