Verizon Communications has gone to court to limit picketing and protest activity among striking union workers who have been accused of taking their cause too far.

The company filed a lawsuit Wednesday in New York and won a court order Monday in Pennsylvania, and another in Delaware on Wednesday.  The company is waiting for rulings in New Jersey and Massachusetts that would force Verizon strikers to limit the number of picketers at any given location and stop blocking access to company buildings.

Relations between the company and striking workers have deteriorated significantly as the first week of the strike wears on.

Near Buffalo, two strikers were hit by a replacement worker’s vehicle.  A BB gun was fired at a worker still on the job in the Bronx.  Several incidents of pushing and shoving by both sides have also been documented.  But among the most serious incidents are acts of sabotage that have cut off landline and cell service, mostly in upstate New York.

Service was restored late yesterday to residents in Oneida County, who lost both home and cell phone service after fiber cables were cut.  Verizon has rushed out press releases decrying what they call “sabotage” and indirectly implying Verizon strikers are responsible.  The New York State Police continues criminal investigations in several upstate communities were vandalism has occurred.

Austin (Courtesy: Boston Herald; Photo by M. Stone)

Verizon strikers have also been following around replacement workers assigned to do home installations and repair work, and this has occasionally led to picketers arriving outside of customer homes where repair work is underway.

The Boston Herald reports one Quincy, Mass. mom found a circus outside her home yesterday when Verizon showed up to fix her phone line:

A Quincy mom has disconnected her support for striking Verizon workers yesterday after a group of mouthy picketers surrounded non-union repairmen and turned a phone-line fix at her home into what she is calling a “ridiculous” protest scene.

“I looked in the street and there are picketers, 10 of them or more, doing a circle around the Verizon truck,” said Karen Austin, 64, a mother of five who lives on Forest Avenue.

“Every time (the repairmen) would walk up to my house they would follow them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. This is ridiculous. Why are they picketing my house?”

“I’m not on a main street … I’m not a business. I’m a person who needed a line fixed,” she said.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WHDH Boston Verizon Sabotage in Mass 8-8-11.mp4[/flv]

Verizon alleges vandalism may be responsible for a significant service outage in Tewksbury, Mass., but union officials suggest Verizon’s claims are “straight out of the Verizon strike playbook.”  WHDH in Boston reports.  (2 minutes)

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WABC in New York watched as Verizon strikers booed anyone approaching an entrance to Verizon’s headquarters.  Company officials are seeking court orders to restrain picketing activities in five states.  (3 minutes)

Vandalism causes serious phone outages in upstate New York. (Courtesy: Verizon Communications)

Frontier Communications’ landline customers in Lewis and Oneida counties faced long distance service outages, while just about everyone in northern Oneida County is without both landline and cell phone service after fiber lines serving cell towers and landline customers were cut Monday.

The New York State Police have launched a criminal investigation into the sabotage, while Verizon Communications implies the damage might have come as a result of a strike against the company that began last weekend.

The largest outage, which cut off cell service and landlines, originated in Deerfield, where cables were severed.

Several upstate communities are facing lengthy service outages from a variety of acts of vandalism, most from cable cuts and damage to junction boxes.

Verizon has rushed out news releases regarding the damage, offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of individuals that intentionally damage Verizon cables or facilities or cause or attempt to cause physical injury to any Verizon employee or contractor.  Verizon urges anyone who witnesses sabotage of Verizon property or any suspicious activity to call 911 immediately, then call the Verizon Security Control Center at 1-800-997-3287.

Both sides of the dispute are now appealing to Congress to intervene, an action that may not bring immediate results.  Both the House and Senate are currently in their five-week summer recess.

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WKTV in Utica covers the impact of widespread landline and cell phone outages in Oneida County, upstate New York.  (1 minute)

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WRGB in Albany explores additional acts of vandalism in the Capitol District and gets reaction from striking workers about whether they were involved.  (3 minutes)

New Englandia. Upstate New York. Northern California. Carolina. Missipiana.

None of these are actual states, but based on the people we communicate with who share our interests, perhaps they should be.

Researchers at MIT’s Senseable City Lab, AT&T Labs-Research and IBM Research are revealing new research that redefines regional boundaries in the United States, using patterns of social connectedness across the country derived from anonymous and aggregated cell phone data.

The results, based on numbers called and the geographic destinations or text messages, are predictable in some places, surprising in others.

The Connected States of America (click to enlarge)

Take New Jersey for example.  The state is remarkably divided between the northern half, whose people are socially linked with metropolitan New York City, and the southern half which almost entirely ignores the Big Apple and Long Island, maintaining closer connections with southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware.

Some other highlights:

• Socially, most of North and South Carolina are indistinguishable from one-another.
• Chattanooga has more in common with Alabama and Georgia than the rest of Tennessee.
• Southern California’s sprawl is to the east, not to the north.  The influence from Los Angeles and San Diego now extends into Arizona, Nevada and even Utah.  Northern California sticks to itself with one exception — it has connections towards Reno, Nevada.
• Upstate New York, mostly above the Hudson Valley, is socially similar all the way west to Lake Erie, with the exception of Chautauqua County, which is culturally closer to Appalachian areas in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
• New England maintains close ties with the exception of northern Maine and New Hampshire, which may be closer to Atlantic Canada.
• Standalone states that mostly keep to themselves include Florida, Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.  With interest, many of those states are also politically defined as “swing states.”

The “Connected States of America” provides a more natural delineation of regions that follows relationships between family, friends and business partners.

“Sister states” emerge, such as Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and Tennessee and Kentucky, among others.

Metropolitan areas often form pockets of influence that extend into neighboring states or communities; for example, Chattanooga, Tenn., is more closely linked to communities in Georgia and Alabama than to the rest of Tennessee. Pittsburgh, Penn., and West Virginia form a new “state,” while St. Louis, Mo., exhibits an expanded reach that splits Illinois into two regions.

New Jersey and California also divide into two distinct regions due to large cities. In contrast, Texas remains whole: Despite the potentially splitting influence of cities such as Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin, the researchers found that there is enough inter-city communication to hold the state together.

Here in western New York, the impact of more than two years of deep recession has delivered record high unemployment, wage freezes and cuts for many still holding onto middle class jobs.  Only now does it appear that the wage deep freeze is slowly coming to an end.

The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle notes total wages earned in the nine-county Rochester/Finger Lakes region for the first nine months of the year were up 2.2 percent over the same period in 2009, according to state Labor Department figures.

But while things are incrementally improving for worker bees, many of America’s corporate “queen bee” executives have maintained compensation packages that would leave one to believe the United States is enjoying double digit growth and a blazing economy.

CEO pay at large U.S. companies has risen from 80 times as much as rank-and-file workers made in 1970 to more than 260 times what they made in 2009.

Stock market gains — the S&P 500 index rose almost 13 percent in 2010 — and improved profitability were key reasons why many executives made more last year than they had in 2009. Of the 86 executives on the Democrat and Chronicle list for both 2009 and 2010, compensation increased for 66.

Take Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt.  He spent much of June talking up raising broadband pricing on his company’s customers, many of whom live in upstate New York.  While Time Warner has faced challenging economic results in their core cable television business, one would never know it from Britt’s newest compensation package, handing him a 25 percent pay raise and another $2 million in his non-stock incentive pay.  That’s a pay package worth almost $10 million dollars.  The D&C notes four other Time Warner Cable executives listed in the company’s proxy statement made from $1.2 million to $3.8 million.

HissyFitWatch: When contract negotiations with the local cable company get a little too heated for comfort.

The city of Troy, N.Y. has lived with an expired franchise agreement with local cable company Time Warner Cable for more than a decade.  After a shouting match erupted between a city councilman and a city economic development coordinator over its renewal, now we know why.

City officials managed to complete a tentative renewal with the cable company back in March, subject to city council review.  The agreement comes even as Verizon’s FiOS fiber to the home network threatens to provide the cable company with some competition in the region.

As part of the renewal, Time Warner has agreed to provide $80,000 to fund a Digital Technology Lab at the Arts Center of the Capital Region. It will also front $70,000 to help construct a studio for a new government channel that will deliver coverage of city council meetings, which could draw some high ratings if tensions always run this high.

Troy also gets the right to collect the maximum franchise fee allowed by law and receives a $200,000 settlement to cover alleged franchise violations that occurred under the old agreement.

One of Time Warner Cable’s biggest skeptics on the city council is Councilman Bill Dunne, (D-District 4).  He’s heard complaints about Time Warner’s prices and service from his constituents for some time, and told The Record he is “cautiously optimistic” about the potential deal, but stressed it will not be approved by the council until it is thoroughly reviewed.

Dunne suspects the cable company has made a fortune off Troy residents for years, and he wants to closely examine how well the cable company has done in upstate New York before handing them a lengthy contract extension.

Troy, New York

“I would like to see an independent auditor open up the books on Time Warner Cable … to see exactly where the money is going and how much money is being made [from Troy cable subscribers],” he told the Troy newspaper.

Some residents suspect whatever Time Warner Cable “gives” the city as a result of contract negotiations will be quickly made back in future rate increases.

“These negotiations are a sham because Time Warner Cable is negotiating with our money,” Troy resident Bill Thompson tells Stop the Cap! “If they give the city $500,000, they’ll just raise our rates to get that money back.”

Thompson says he applauds Dunne’s skepticism, and believes bringing in competition from Verizon is the only way to keep prices in check.

Christopher, during happier times.

Dunne’s ongoing concerns about Time Warner caused a fracas during last Thursday’s city council meeting, when Dunne won approval to take the Time Warner Cable franchise renewal off the table.  In its place, Dunne’s new substitute resolution forming a working group to study the proposed franchise renewal and more importantly, perform an audit of Time Warner Cable and their supporting documents.

That decision infuriated Economic Development Coordinator Vic Christopher, who had been working with Time Warner Cable and the mayor’s office to push for a speedy approval of what he felt was a well-reviewed franchise renewal agreement. When Christopher objected to the study group, and delaying the agreement in general, Councilman Ken Zalewski (D-District 6) suggested he and the mayor’s office were representing the cable company more than city residents.

That did it.

As the meeting ended, a shouting match ensued between an offended Christopher, Zalewski, and Dunne. Christopher called the city council “obstructionists” and then followed up on his Twitter account accusing the council of talking everything to death. Dunne suggested Christopher should run for office if he didn’t like the way the council represented the interests of Troy residents.

“Christopher’s petulance was an amazing spectacle to watch, especially considering nobody was directly attacking him,” Thompson says.  “He took it as a personal attack and responded in kind, and it only reinforced the notion the mayor’s office was in a hurry to get this agreement signed.”

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The hissyfit over a Time Warner Cable franchise agreement extension was caught on a cell phone camera, and the resulting video was promptly published online by The Record, Troy’s local newspaper. (1 minute)

TWC Franchise Agmt