Dear CEO Vestberg,

We are frontline workers at Verizon Wireless. We have worked tirelessly through perhaps the worst crisis our country has faced. Every day, we juggle the needs of our employer, our customers and our families. COVID-19, as you know, is still raging across the country -- and we continue to put ourselves at risk by coming in to work.

As dedicated workers at Verizon Wireless, we have serious concerns both about the stores’ current safety standards, and about several big changes currently taking place at Verizon Wireless.

Verizon Wireless needs to do more to ensure that the store environment is safe. Managers need to actively enforce mask rules. Employees should not have to police customers and repeatedly ask them to pull their mask up over and over again. Frontline employees were told that due to Covid, transactions would be “touchless.” This needs to be consistently enforced. We are still touching phones to do transfers, or touching cards when the touchless systems fail.

We are still in the middle of a pandemic. We can’t act like things are back to normal. At the beginning of the pandemic, stores were closed on Sunday. We believe stores should remain on the pandemic schedule. The pandemic is already out of control, what will it look like when we’re working seven days a week with longer hours?

Announced changes for retail workers threaten to make a bad situation even worse. The drastic alterations to our commission structure will mean far less take-home pay for many of us. We are alarmed that over 80 stores are being shut down. And we are extremely upset that essential pay has been taken away.

You publicly promised that Verizon won’t turn its back on employees during this moment. We applaud you for taking this stand and we ask that you:

—Restore our essential pay, our commissions, and your pledge to stop closing our stores.
—Take measures to address all of our safety concerns.
—Be transparent and consistent.

Remember our company’s core values—its commitment to its customers and its employees.

We are frontline workers and we are essential.