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Verizon is Offering Buyout Packages To as Many as 44,000 Management Employees; Some IT Employees Will Be Transferred To Indian Outsourcing Firm Infosys [Update] (bloomberg.com)
Verizon Communications is offering buyout packages to as many as 44,000 management employees as part of a cost-cutting drive, potentially eliminating more than a fourth of its workforce. From a report: The offer, which excludes executives in sales or crucial company roles, is part of a four-year, $10 billion cost-reduction program that Chairman Lowell McAdam put in place last year. A Verizon spokesman declined to say how many of the 44,000 managers are expected to take the offer and leave the company. Update: The Wall Street Journal adds: Verizon notified many information technology employees that they were being transferred to Indian outsourcing giant Infosys as part of a $700 million outsourcing agreement. The pool of employees who either received the severance offer or are affected by the Infosys deal amounts to about 30% of the 153,100 employees that Verizon had globally at the end of June. "Strategically we are going to invest more in transforming the business versus running the business," materials detailing the outsourcing agreement said. As part of that pact, Verizon is transferring about 2,500 employees in the U.S. and overseas to Infosys. Those employees aren't eligible for severance payments and won't receive their 2018 bonus if they are offered a job at Infosys and don't accept it, according to materials given to the employees.
44,000 managers? Da fuq?!!
I hope they got free tickets on the B ark.
About every time there is a government shutdown, they shut down "non essential" people. NON essential? Then why do we have them in the first place? 44k of "management" I guess means middle managers, along with their "staff"
of all time if 44K people are managers.
Or maybe it's like a bank, where you get a useless title instead of a real raise...
Verizon at last has to off load its long term balance sheet obligations. The buyout maneuver takes it off the books.
Can be, just before a merger.
Managers are the people you cannot talk to, when you call customer disservice.
They are always in meetings, unavailable, on vacation, etc.
I say good riddance.
I just knew that the big corporate tax cut would be used for something good! Instead of just terminating those workers, they're severing them with actual money. Wow.
That much while doing a major tech roll out in the form of 5g? This smacks of age discrimination...
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That's why nothing ever gets done! Every employee is a god damn manager! No wonder the service sucks, they don't actually work to make the service better, they are just there to siphon the money from the customers.
Call me a cynic (it's true) but somehow I think not.
I've always wanted to be a shareholder of one of these companies that did a big layoff such as this. If the company can do the same work after then why did they have all of these employees in the first place. I'd try to bring a shareholders lawsuit against the upper management for their incompetence. By having all of these extra people on for so long it wasted a large amount of shareholder value. They obviously weren't needed so they shouldn't have been hired in the first place, or let go of when then came through mergers.
Getting a couple of these lawsuits won, which would be tricky, might stop these huge layoffs that we keep seeing.
If they're getting rid of 44k FTEs, I wonder how many of their H1B (and non) contractors they're getting rid of?
For the most part, the only thing that they do is generate activity so that they will appear to be busy - meetings, notes, diagrams, etc.
Fire all the "managers" making $100k and replace them with new managers making $75k of less. Profit!
It would be interesting if all 44,000 folks took the offer and left the company. You think customer service is bad now, wait 'till that happens.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
US customer service at Verizon is also Union. Of course most of the non-union work is outsourced to the Philippines. I know this because I had to answer customer service phone calls when the union associates went on strike in 2016.
This must be the result of California's new Network Neutrality law! See, they were right! That law is costing us 44,000 jobs!
It seems Verizon is doing as much as it can to get Trump re-elected.
InfoSys and the Indians. Takes three or four times for them to complete their work and get it done correctly. There is no savings if it takes them four attempts and they're paid a quarter of their US counterparts.
Exactly! I find it rather sad that so many people are worried enough about Mexicans crossing over to the U.S. border illegally to "steal jobs", when most of the work they'd do is "cash under the table" stuff that nobody else wanted to do at affordable prices, or migrant labor that will just be automated with machinery, moving forward, if there aren't people like them desperate enough for money to come here and do it cheaper than the cost to automate.
Meanwhile, they say very little about the H1B scam that steals real, "career quality" American jobs left and right -- often with labor that came here under false pretenses to begin with.
We are seeing actual changes in the H1B structure from the current administration, small steps that are effective in fighting the battle against the influx of foreigners that are "leveraging their paper mills" to steal American jobs. Sucks. As a whole, those groups are awful and can't do anything. The businesses they sell their services to save some money in the short term, but they are cutting off limbs to do so, and a year or two out are wallowing in misery and begin to fold.
Seems like every single little thing that's attempted to stifle the actual illegal immigration, rather than theft of jobs, is fought tooth and nail by people who have government jobs which they think can't be taken from them. Funny that. I got mine, mostly because I'm paying myself with your taxes, and I'm going to sit here and call you a racist.
Good grief.
We need TRUMP on this ASAP and ensure they outsource only to Americans
...but someone got the decimal point in the wrong place.
Wrong. I bitch about all of it. Until the US has negative unemployment, we don't need to import ANY labor.
Mexicans do a lot of the jobs teenagers and folks in their early 20s should be doing.
Come on Verizon, finish all those FIOS installations you promised us. We know you didn't really intend a bait and switch, did you?
Wrong. I bitch about all of it. Until the US has negative unemployment, we don't need to import ANY labor.
Mexicans do a lot of the jobs teenagers and folks in their early 20s should be doing.
Back in the real world, the economy can't function with a 0 unemployment rate, around 3% is about the lowest it can do an still have a healthy economy.
Immigrants (legal and illegal) are doing the jobs that teenagers and folks in their 20's don't want to do.
Verizon is transferring about 2,500 employees in the U.S. and overseas to Infosys. Those employees aren't eligible for severance payments and won't receive their 2018 bonus if they are offered a job at Infosys and don't accept it ...the way this is written at first I thought they were saying US employees were being transferred to Infosys overseas and were not eligible for the layoff...
I've been through this "you're not laid off, you're their employee now, if you don't agree to that then you're technically quitting!"
It's absolute bullshit and usually these are important, if not crucial, employees (to Verizon anyway...)... Generally these companies will force the 3rd party to agree to employ these folks for a specific duration.
In my case it amounted to a "guaranteed" 18 months of employment which felt like a good deal at the time (considering my other former coworkers were now out looking for jobs).
Depending on how badly Verizon wants these people to stay they may offer them a bonus that can be clawed back if they leave before the end of the duration.
That said, their pay and benefits going forward are almost certainly worse at Infosys, and they'll likely face years of stagnant wages until they are either cut loose or quit while Infosys replaces their functions internally -- unless they happen to be Infosys-level folks (ie willing to be overworked and underpaid)
Leaving the company I was sold to was one of the best things I had done. In hindsight I wish I had done it quicker, staying the duration to keep the bonus wasn't even worth it.
Out of 153K global employees, they lose 44K managers. How many managers are left out of the 109K global employees?
Since bonus is tied to accepting a new job, take the job and quit right after the bonus pays out. It will also give them a few months to secure a new job.
Replacement of US IT workers w/ Indian IT workers caused so much anger, from US public in general, in recent years, but it seems some US companies absolutely don't care! (And that is even w/ US Presidential help on the side of the US public; not on the side of those US companies!)
Maybe US public should protest those companies better/harder?
I always thought, by law, if any foreign person wants a job in US, the company must prove it cannot find any US worker for that same job!
Apparently not so!!!
(If this is because of a loophole in law(s) then maybe those law(s) need to be fixed?)
Meanwhile, they say very little about the H1B scam
You have a 5-digit uid. Did you create it way back in the day and then just never sign in until today? Because every time H1B gets brought up on this site, it is always in a negative light.
Just because teenagers and folks in their 20's don't want to do it, doesn't me they shouldn't. I've had a lot of shitty jobs in my past but it was a learning and growing experience that helped me to get the much better paying jobs of today.
Centurylink did the same thing after they bought Level 3. Level 3 used outsourcing for their IT, specifically InfoSys, but even though CTL bought LVL3, their CEO became our CEO and the Level 3 way of life started to take over the CTL way in all aspects. My entire department was disolved because they sent everything overseas. We were internal support, not support on the customer side.
Itâ(TM)s a way to skirt the laws on paying overtime. If you put manager in someoneâ(TM)s title (project manager, program manager, product manager) then you can put them on salary, work them to death and not pay overtime. This is a practice that should stop; however, itâ(TM)s just as unlikely to stop as outsourcing to other countries, and expanding the H1B visa caps. All I can say is go out and vote and make your voice heard! Corporations only get away with what our elected officials allow them to get away with. F*** Infosys.
If unemployment is zero, then if you want a new employee with a good skill set you either have to poach one from elsewhere (and they have to poach one from somewhere else), not fill the position and hope in a couple of years someone comes along with those skills, and accept the loss of profit in the meantime, or train someone up, and then hope they don't move elsewhere in the Super hot jobs market. It's a recipe for wage increases that globally price US firms out of the market. So you'd just get more off shoring and a massive one goal.
Plenty of Americans who could do those jobs (of course they'd have to be paid minimum wage, which the Ag Megacorps don't want to do). My main concern with Central American immigrants is this:
- I don't like people entering my home without permission. If they ASK first, then fine, let them in (unless they are potential criminals or terrorists). For these people to just bust down the door, and enter our homeland, is ridiculous. It's breaking-and-entering without permission.
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