I suppose the answer will be yes, but I would like to know even further. Under what conditions can they lower the severance and lies the law dictate any deadlines in which the employees have to be informed?
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Unless you are covered by a contract that specifies your severance terms such as corporate board members or union craft people then your severance is at corporate whim. Of course they must operate within the law as well providing notice etc. as required.
VZ doesn't owe you anything, they pay severance as a HR check box of your exit paperwork, to avoid lawsuits.
Are you all implying there isn't a Bill of Rights around how many weeks they owe us? Wait, what?
The corporation, Verizon, does not care about "at-will" employees.
Union employees have assurances for compensation, pension, employee benefits, severance, retention, and terminations.
@jce- make no mistake, Verizon doesn't care if they are horrible. The only reason they offer severance is to avoid lawsuits period. It is much less expensive to give a severance then to go through litigation.
Company is not obligated to offer a severance package, so they can change it at any time. It has undergone changes/revisions in the past and there's no reason to believe they won't/wouldn't do it again at some point in the future.
Companies are not legally bound to pay severance to at will employees. Employees covered under contract must be treated based on the language of the contract (at a mimimum). In other words, if you are management, they can cut severance anytime they wish. I do believe they must give 60 days notice of layoff though, by law. That being said, most large corporations that are healthy offer some sort of severance.
If you are talking in the future I’d expect since they don’t even need to offer severance they could change it at anytime. They just offer it supposedly to attract talent or to not seem horrible and get sued so much.