Verizon To Cut 8,000 Employee And Contractor Jobs

[Purveyor]

Source: Associated Press

By Associated Press
11:19 AM EDT, July 27, 2009

NEW YORK (AP) — Phone company Verizon says it will cut 8,000 jobs from among employees and contractors before the end of the year to keep costs in line as the recession saps demand from businesses for telecommunications services.

Executives said the cuts will come from the wireline side of the business.

In recent years, New York-based Verizon Communications Inc. has balanced layoffs in its wireline business with hiring in wireless, making for a net increase.

But Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl says that will not be the case this time. He says there will be no large-scale hiring in wireless until the recession is over.


Read more: http://www.mcall.com/business/sns-ap-us-verizon-job-cuts,0,5537579.story

[Steerpike]

1. I predict

Verizon will post huge profits next quarter! Do not fear my brethren,the recovery is on it's way!

[liberal N proud]

7. That is all it is about

Profit for the stock holder!

All else is expendable

[sinkingfeeling]

2. Probably because they just took over Alltel.

[sandnsea]

3. Maybe not

My sister made the transfer from Alltel to Verizon a few months ago, so I think the people who were going to keep their jobs already got notified. I think that whole process is done, but this might still be some duplicate employees. A heckuva lot. Little Rock is going to be hurting for a while, that's for sure.

[imdjh]

4. Again?

I swear. I started out with Cellular One in 1989 or thereabouts, and it seems like I have been with every cell phone company on the planet since. But I myself only changed my provider once.

I wonder if Verizon is taking a hit from people dumping landline entirely. I did that about two years ago, and haven't missed Verizon with their "specials" and "promotional rates" which expire and then you have to call and bitch to get a decent rate etc....

[MaineDem]

6. "I wonder if Verizon is taking a hit from people dumping landline entirely."

Absolutely!

In fact, Verizon is getting rid of much of their landline service. Maine, NH, and VT landline service was sold to Fairpoint a while ago and it's been a disaster. Also Verizon's landline service in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, as well as some assets in California are being sold.

We here in Maine miss Verizon.

[On the Road]

16. Sorry to Hear That Fairpoint Isn't a Good Provider

I work on the landline side, and consumer lines losses are over 30% over the last several years. Management has gone through two 10% downisizings in the last 12 months, and nonmanagement has to go down, too.

As far as shipping jobs overseas, some internal helpdesk functions for employees go to India, but for customers it's generally stateside union employees. A number of call centers have relocated to my building in Silver Spring MD.

[bkkyosemite]

5. Soon you will read in the paper how they opened up another India or China location where they have

hired thousands at $.50 an hour.

[imdjh]

8. Verizon broadband customer service told me that they are in the US.

That was two or three years ago, and I complained that I couldn't understand the previous customer service rep whom I suspected of being in India. The CSR that I was speaking to got a little snotty in telling me that all of Verizon's CSR are in the US (and I presume therefore I am an insensitive pig for my objection that someone hired someone who can't speak clear and proper English to answer phones in an English speaking country).

I cancelled them with the landline and got cable broadband.

I can't wait until a dozen companies can be chosen with no wires at all.

[FarCenter]

9. AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, and Sprint bought most of the frequency spectrum

So there aren't going to be dozens of wireless companies.

[imdjh]

11. sorry wrong line delete

...

[pampango]

10. I see. Layoffs in the US have to be caused by/linked to the hiring of foreigners

No American company ever lays anyone off for any other reason. If it weren't for foreigners, how nice our lives would be! And how dare they compete with Americans when they have the advantage of poverty?

[imdjh]

12. How about the cultural colonialism involved in offshoring jobs?

Do you approve of that?

[pampango]

14. No. I saw enough of that in the Peace Corps. Neither do I think it is culturally

inappropriate for Indians, Filipinos, Ghanaians, or any one else to pursue careers in technology, manufacturing, finance, etc., if that is what they wish to do. They should also be free to pursue more "culturally appropriate" livelihoods, farming, ranching, and basket weaving, if that is what they want to do.

The West is responsible, to some degree, for lessening the allure of the agrarian life style that most Third World countries lived with for centuries. If we had never visited, traded with, offshored to, or imported from these places, perhaps they would be content with the cultures that their ancestors lived with. That "cat" is out of the bag, in my opinion. Indians and Chinese in large numbers don't want stay in or go back to the past. While their histories and cultures are rich, there has always been poverty for the masses. Filipinos, Kenyans, and many others look at the accomplishments of India and China and see a model for their own development, rightly or wrongly.

Would you approve of protecting them from offshoring, on the grounds that we are protecting their cultures from change, even if the country chooses to adopt an economic model that includes the benefits of offshoring and the potential risk to their own culture?

[imdjh]

15. I wasn't talking about technology per se.

I was talking about the fact that offshore call centers constitute a large block of "good (relative to ditch digging) jobs" which go to people who can speak English in a country where the ability to speak English is already a social class marker in a post-colonial society.

Mind you I have no objection to English being or becoming the universal language of Earth, I view its evolution as a sort of cultural natural selection due to its adaptability, precision, and phonetic character. It exists as it does today due to cultural aggression and migration which is why it's an aggregate language of great precision and phonetic character. English has the largest vocabulary in common usage of any language to the best of my knowledge. It's been a while since I had to write a report on it.

[bkkyosemite]

13. Let me tell you where I am coming from. IBM is where my husband has retired from as a manager. They

were the only one who profited big time a few months back in this mess of an economy. Why? Because they laid off many American citizens to re-hire oversea's where the wage is a tenth of what it is here. They laid off here to hire there. Most companies are doing exactly that. This has nothing to do with my feelings about foreigners. It has to do with the lies and deceit these corporations are getting away with while they replace our workforce with a labor force from a third world coutnry where wages are so low that profits can be made off their backs literally. And our people have not jobs or haven't you noticed.

[pampango]

17. The question is "How do you keep a poor person from taking your job?"

In the US we keep many poor uncompetitive for many technical or professional positions by means of, among other things, ineffective urban and rural school systems that leave them unprepared and unmotivated to compete many for a "good" job. The day someone is born in Mississippi, on a reservation, in rural Arkansas, they are as smart as any of us. By the time they are 20 they are unprepared and unmotivated to compete with the middle class for professional jobs. We don't need laws to keep them from competing with us, the "system" does it. If we are ever able to deal with our educational inadequacies, there may be 50% more people prepared to compete with us for a job as an engineer, teacher, doctor, programmer, etc. You can imagine the pressure that will put on professional compensation and job availability.

When the subject shifts to the poor overseas, for many, many years the Third World has been "unprepared and unmotivated" to compete with us. (The world was a much smaller place in prior generations. People lived their lives as they had for a long time and international trade had little to do with it.) We didn't have to worry about competing with the poor of the Third World. (Mao, Stalin and many others were quite good at keeping their people from interacting with the rest of the world. We didn't worry much about exports from China or the USSR back in those days.)

In the last few decades China has opened and unavoidably, given its population, become a factor in the rest of the world. India has done the same and is a major factor for the same reason. In these and many other countries they have an abundance of prepared and motivated people itching to compete with their counterparts in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, etc. Therefore, in order to restrict competition from overseas, many feel that changes in the law (visa restrictions, tariffs, quotas, etc.) are the only recourse. It's ironic that using the law to restrict competition from the poor is acknowledged to be a terrible idea if it is directed at the poor in the US, but quite acceptable to some if it is directed at the poor in another country. (For better or worse my time in the Peace Corps "ruined" me when it comes to convincing myself that one person is worth more than another based on where they were lucky or unlucky enough to be born. I realize that is not "patriotic" or even politically astute. You can't win votes from foreigners, so standing up for them does not good in domestic politics.)

[notadmblnd]

19. Fair trade not free trade

The problem is they're not competing with Americans. They are being exploited by the corporate world and it's their poverty that feeds the system. Do a little reading on modern day slavery. People in India selling their children. Indonesian fishermen being held in bondage in India is also common. In China, workers from rural areas are housed in company dormitories, forced to work long hours seven days a week. Children as young as eight being kidnapped in countries in Africa and forced to be soldiers. And the sex trade. Whether kidnapped or sold, these children are forced into miserable lives. These very common practices are not competition, it is slavery. The illicit trade and exploitation of people as a business, will overtake the illicit drug trade within this decade. This is why we need to work together to demand fair trade.

[pampango]

20. The problems in India, China, and the US are real and not to be denied.

Every country, including the US, has patterns of employment abuse. They may be less frequent, severe here than in a Third World country, but they exist. In spite of the problems that exist in China, I believe that the Chinese people think that they are better off now than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Given the abuses they experienced under Mao, they probably have a higher tolerance for an imperfect system that they feel is making their lives better rather than an imperfect system that did not do that. As most countries develop, including the US, abuses and conditions that were tolerated in an early stage of development become intolerable and working conditions improve.

I agree with you on the value of fair trade. Does it mean, though, that we don't trade with any country with which we have issues regarding working conditions, wages, and unionization or that we use our trading power to enhance the development of poor countries in a way that improves the wages and working conditions of their workers? I assume Bush and the repubs would favor unrestricted trade with any country, no strings attached, with no goal of improving the lives of the people in those countries. On the other hand, given Obama's remarks in Ghana about keeping the West's markets open to the goods of African countries (and by extension, other poor countries), he seems to believe that our market can help alleviate poverty and make life better in the Third World.

[notadmblnd]

21. It doesn't work that way.

once the people have come to the point that they demand their universal human rights. The companies pack up and move on to some country more desperate. This has already happened in places like Mexico and Malaysia. I don't know what's worse; never knowing a middle class lifestyle or having it, then having it taken away?

[pampango]

23. Thanks for the lesson on "how it works". I suspect that China, India and others

look more to South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore (not to mention Japan, Germany and the whole of Europe after being flattened in WWII) where it did "work that way". You can't sell anything to people with no money nor can you manufacture goods for sale to such a market.

If you're saying that there are no guarantees and that a little relative prosperity in a poor country can be yanked away if a country relies too much and for too long on the benevolence of multi-national corporations, then I agree with you. "The way it should work", and has for some (above), is for a country to take that initial burst of "prosperity" that comes from mnc's using your "cheap" labor and use it to establish domestic markets and corporations that can sell into the newly "prosperous" domestic market so that your continued development is not dependent on being a source of cheap labor for mnc's.

The problem in many poor countries, devastated by war, colonization, corruption or other reasons, is that there is, obviously, little purchasing power from the population since they are so poor. It is difficult to establish a domestic corporation there that will sell to a market with no money. I have no idea how Obama visualizes the problem, but I would hope that international trade can bring enough money into a depressed economy that it will create a domestic market that domestic companies can sell into, so that development becomes self-sustaining.

As they were faced with in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Europe at this point it is up to the mnc's to decide whether to move on to other countries or stay in the country and change their business model. If an mnc moves on to another country to use their cheap labor, we'll see if that country is able to use the temporary increase in wages and employment to create a self-sustaining economy or whether it will rely on the benevolence of the mnc too much and for too long and suffer the fate you referred to.

[Hannah Bell]

22. must be why 30,000 chinese rioted over layoffs & killed a steel executive.

"things are better!"

old boss = new boss

[dembotoz]

18. the movement is from landlines

from articles on the cuts, landland folks are getting the axe.

i would not anticipate layoff in wireless.
that is growing

i would not anticipate layoff if fios
that is growing

i would not anticipate layoff in internet
that is growing

cuts will be in traditional landlines

from a service perspective, i am sure they are wanting to migrate
as much of the landline business to voip as possible.

That is what is happening at ATT.

shit they are even putting multichannels of phone service on dsl.--and if that
doesn't scare the begebbers out of you.......
Cable ain't any better, particularly if you are looking for buisiness apps.

I DO wonder if a large number of the layoffs will come from the areas they are shedding, like my home state of wisconsin. Perhaps cutting employees was part of the deal with Frontier who is buying those lines. Verizon clains they will do a better job than they did when they screwed those poor smucks that ended up with fairpoint.

time will tell