Well know where all this derp, derp, yay v-team stuff is coming from now. The head of the snake! He says it's going to be a 3 month strike.
VZ CEO at today's J.P Morgan Media, Technology and Telecom Conference
Lowell McAdam
Yes. So we have been out on strike now for 42 days. Those of you that were probably greeted on the way in this morning by a few cheers or encouraging us we are under a bit of a gag order now so I can’t say a lot about negotiations. I just will say that the Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez has been very helpful in the process, so we do appreciate that. The impact of the strike is probably what people are most interested in here.
Our goals are to get our costs a bit more in line, we are obviously more expensive from a wage and benefit than our competitors are, but we also realize we can’t change this overnight for our employees is not fair to them, so we’re trying to get that a bit more in line. We need to have a lot more flexibility if you’re coming in and building up a force to build Boston you need to have the ability to move that force around, so of course flexibility is the other major issue for us.
As far as impact to the Company’s bottom line, the way I think about it is the first three months of the strike you’re doing a lot of training of new people to temporary workers to do the work and so your costs are up from a pure cash perspective because you’re not paying the wages and you’re somewhat offsets, so cash is relatively neutral.
The second three months of the strike is where your productivity goes up and we’re actually well ahead of that. Our managers are doing a super job out there, they’re covering the installation and repair load all of our call center activities are frankly running as well are better than they do normally. We have pushed off installations or doing a lot of installations, but we’re not doing the same volume that we have before.
So we won’t be driving similar numbers in second quarter that we would in first from an installation perspective. So the overall impact just depends on how we come out of the contract because we will get some concessions and then how long it goes. So when it’s done we will make sure to communicate with our investors about what the overall net-net impacts are.