Thread regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

June 1st: Faced with increasing political pressure, an SEC investigation, and paying unemployment for thousands of workers Verizon finally caves.

@sdu any idea of the percentage for reductions?

"This was a service, a commitment to service , not a throw away job that seems to prevelant today. "

This. Times a billion.

Somewhere along the lines someone decide to make a turn from service industry into a fast-buck-greedy-no-tomorrow corporation and yeah...welcome to Verizon. You won't enjoy your stay, unless you're at the very highest tier of management.

Very sad indeed.

EWA here.. I would like to see the guys and gals get back to work asap. I don't care for what I am seeing in our group. We just were given orders to send any outstanding work we had prior to the strike to our Cushman and Wakafield counter parts. I'm pretty upset about this. 2 weeks ago I was told that any outstanding work we had we would still have the ability to fulfill. Now it's being taken out of our hands. The work wasn't critical so nothing that needed to be handed off so soon.

Hey kid right out of college

That's the problem you millennials are these corporations dreams. You freely give up any hope of a pension, even though you will regret it at retirement age. Don't you know that the highest paid people at Verizon have a pension? And that goes for a lot of companies. You young people bought into this bullshit mentality all to the detriment of working people everywhere

Somehow I think the trend to push everyone into colleges has resulted in a dumming down of your generations

And the reality is when your working a job, a real job where you are physically active and then have forced or voluntary OT there's not much time for schooling. Even if you did, why would you? A career at the telco is just that- a career. A career that people where proud of. Even managers walked around with leather cases with the bell system emblem on it. This was a service, a commitment to service , not a throw away job that seems to prevelant today. Talk to the old people who's phones your are fixing. I always found them to be wise, they will tell you how it used to be. They probably will tell you how much better America was compared to the bullshit we have today.

We'll make the $$ back when we sell Wireline to Frontier without most of the union. All going per the plan.

OP here....ummm...it's the internet, not a scratch pad. Go back and look. BTW you'll see it was not some sort of prediction post. It was just milestone dates. Even though that was all it was, the comments indicated none of it would come to pass. Again, not physic readings...just dates that the corporate whores laid out and followed through with.

RIF's were already planned in 1Q16 for mid yr in VES, however can only imagine that # has grown due to amount of cash being paid out in OT, Per Diem and T&E, even with the grant money/kickbacks/writeoffs the company gets from govt during a strike.

You are the Oracle! Of course you posted anonymously. Back in 1968, I predicted the NY Mets would win the World series in 1969.

mbf-THANK YOU!! Finally someone who understands that a tech company is going to think like a tech company. The whole concept behind the union mentality as it relates to the current CWA pension and job security/common loyalty is not reality for my generation. I'm EWA right out of college and can't even fathom the 'reality' that someone worked at the same business for 20 yrs while bitching about the working conditions instead of just taking the education that they give out via tuition reimbursement and professional certifications and making my own way. I took the interview and the job because VZ HAS tech opportunities that i can parlay into starting a business, not because I wanted to work at a phone company. Now I'm fixing old ladies' phone lines???

Absolutely agree. Current generational thinking is in shared rather than owned. Uber, AirB&B, Citybike, no ownership of cars, houses, etc is the new normal. The same goes for flexible business. Give out the tools to do it yourself instead of paying for service. The old model is dead. With that goes any company/customer loyalty relationship...thus a company cannot have an antequated model of entrenched employees with future guarantees...Union stuff.

Is this the same guy that said strike will end after ny primaries? strike will end on day 14 so union doesnt have to spend any strike money.. strike will end before end of month so benefits wont be lost..(oh by the way the company called meeting on that thursday was pre planned so union could save face and say "see we won")

Next useless and wrong prediction?

Wireless side of the company will be down sized 20 pct by the end of the year . Wireless saturation most programming ,IT , network engineering going to be done out of the country remotely , Internet of things, replace as many Americans as they can , face it , it's over in this place ,so make all the $$ that you can while on EWA cause when we get back we will be chopped up also.

May 12: A drunk & totally sauced Jed Clampett-clone from redneck Florida (the pride of Lowell & Mudge's contingency plan) crashes into a picketer on the way to spray Windex on the coax-end in order to fix a pixelation issue. HAPPENED.

It has less to do with EWA and more to do with quarterly results. They ramp up RIFs before each quarterly result so they can take salaries off the bottom line. Technology makes it a reality that less workers are needed to perform tasks, even if that means that the end user gets a worsening experience. When it comes to the basic consumer it's still the best in a pissed in pool, do as long as surveys show they are better than competition they show up as winners even though the overall industry results get worse because all major players keep getting worse, and as far as the real cash cow which is the large enterprise customers they have grown accustomed to the fact that account teams and individual customer support via non-revenue generating team members is a past-generational model that no longer exists in a commodotized market. It's a pay for service economy, and the old model doesn't fit.

Depends on the contract that gets signed. Expensive one is paid for by management RIFs. If union costs are gone from the Business, that probably pleases Wall Street for a while.

@wzg - probably a good strategy. They are already preparing for a RIF -- open reqs are being closed and hiring freezes are starting which are 100% consistent with a coming RIF.

Some people on here keep talking about RIFs hit the EWA members after a strike. Does anyone know if this is seriously the case? I'm in wireless so I'm not as worried, but I have an awful lot of cohorts that are out on EWA right now.

As an EWA person I hope the union holds strong. I know the company has no loyalty just like I have no loyalty to them, I've been maxing out my tuition assistance every year, and I've been a beast on certifications that they are paying for, so much like the union folks I've prepared for the inevitable (sack in my case, prolonged strike in their case), so I'm going to opt to stay on EWA and bank while I can. Same boat, different life preservers.

A transfer from long island to pa is like getting laid off

U can take a leave of absence no pay for the period u suppose to be in pa

I agree, and I hope, union holds strong.

The point was to get their candidate, Sanders, some air time. They also wanted to push for unionizing Wireless. The point wasn't to get a better contract for current members.

Strike to show solidarity in losing money together

They can get some token concessions from vz and claim that they now seem serious about negotiations. It's all about saving face for the union bosses. The question is whether mediation is really still on the table from a Corp seemingly hell bent on restructuring without a union presence.

"***NEW Milestone date May 27: union stewards rumbling about this date as one union might agree to mediation on so that after the 48 hr grace period members can get back in order to get mem day holiday pay."

No way no how.

See you around on May 28th. Or 31st.

If they agree to mediation, which was offered by the company before the union walked off the job, then what was the point of the strike and all the lost wages?