CWA Local 1111

CWA Reaches One Time Enhanced Off Payroll Offer With Verizon

CWA Districts 1, 2, 13 & IBEW New England and New Jersey have been meeting with Verizon Management since last Friday to discuss an enhanced off payroll offer. The Union broke off talks with the Company a couple of weeks ago because the Company refused to abide by our contract and talk about such subjects as contracting to reduce the surplus to save jobs as they are bound to do by our contract.

An agreement was reached on a one time enhanced off payroll offer. The highlights are as follows:

After reading Verizon’s Good Friday message, it would appear that the leadership of CWA and IBEW is just dead set on denying its members Verizon’s generosity. Can the Union’s be so heartless?

Well, nothing can be further from the truth. The Unions are willing and even anxious to help reduce Verizon’s so-called “surplus” by financially assisting those who, for whatever reason, wish to leave the payroll. However, we cannot agree to leave 15% of the work groups out of this special offer. Nor, can we agree to assist Verizon in its attempt to eliminate such a large number of employees while the Company continues to contract work in violation of our contract.

Over the past month CWA and IBEW met several times with Verizon to discuss what appears to the Unions as a “headcount reduction scheme”. In fact, confirming the Unions’ suspicion, Verizon’s spokesperson told the Unions “even if we brought all contracted work back in house, we still need to cut 12,000 employees”.

CWA and IBEW met with Verizon with the hopes of finding a way to accomplish three things:

It was the Unions that proposed raising or eliminating the 30-year cap on calculating the IPP/ISP payments (Verizon’s final proposal raised the cap to 40 years) and providing the additional bonus ($40,000) to all employees accepting the IPP/ISP, not just those hired before August 2003 as Verizon’s original proposal called for.

At the final meeting between the Unions and Verizon, the Company representatives sat there empty handed and closed mouth when it came to addressing alternative ways to reduce their (real or inflated) surplus. When the Unions raised concerns about the potential for increased contracting with a reduced employee base, they were met with silence. When the Unions raised concerns about increased customer complaints over long intervals for service repairs and installation, we were met with silence. When the Union raised concerns about offering a “one-time” enhanced voluntary leave package to only 85% of the unionized work groups, they were met with silence.

Verizon claims that its $23 billion investment in FiOS was to “lay the foundation for future success and employment.” How does eliminating 12,000 jobs translate into future employment? It is this and similar confusing statements that have left the Unions wondering what is truly going on here. CWA and IBEW entered these discussions in earnest; trying to find a way to relieve a declared surplus. The Unions’ proposals were intended to provide financial incentives to employees who wished to leave the payroll, especially more senior employees. This, we believed, would help secure employment opportunities for less senior employees. The Unions also proposed ways to insure future job security by eliminating dependence on contract labor. Verizon was not interested in any work returning to core employees.

The whole-sale elimination of 12,000 jobs, as proposed by Verizon, appears to leave one key element in a prosperous company out of the equation - the customer. Only by increasing the number of satisfied customers will our jobs truly remain secure today and in the future.

CWA remains open to improvements in the IPP/ISP and Pension Plan. But, Verizon must demonstrate its intention to secure future employment for its employees and not just make empty statements about it.

September 17, 2009, 4:11 pm

Verizon Boss Hangs Up on Landline Phone Business

By Saul Hansell

Roll over in your grave, Alexander Graham Bell.

David Becker/Reuters Ivan Seidenberg

That was in effect what Ivan Seidenberg, the chief executive of Verizon Communications -– one of the largest descendants of the old Bell System — declared this morning.

Speaking to a Goldman Sachs investor conference, Mr. Seidenberg said Verizon was simply no longer concerned with telephones that are connected with wires.

All traditional phone companies are suffering because many customers are canceling their landlines in order to use phone service from their cable companies or simply to rely on their cellphones. Speaking earlier at the Goldman conference, Randall Stephenson, chief executive of AT&T, and Ed Mueller, head of Qwest Communications, both talked about seeing a day when their landline businesses would stop shrinking.

Mr. Seidenberg said that his “thinking has matured” and that trying to predict when the company would stop losing voice landlines “is like the dog chasing the bus.”

In other words, that snipping sound you hear around copper phone lines is just going to get louder.

This prospect, however, doesn’t rattle him.

Not only does Verizon control the largest mobile phone company in the country, it has also largely moved away from copper wires. Verizon is selling off most of its operations in rural areas and is spending billions to wire most of the rest of its territory with its fiber optic network, or FiOS.

FiOS, of course, offers voice calling as well as video and Internet service, but from now on, traditional phone service will be more of an add-on than the centerpiece of Verizon’s offerings to consumers (much as voice service is treated today by cable firms).

“Video is going to be the core product in the fixed-line business,” Mr. Seidenberg declared. And the focus will move from selling bundles of video and landline to video and cellphones, he added.

By converting most of its landline operation to FiOS, Mr. Seidenberg said Verizon had a new opportunity to cut costs sharply. FiOS uses the decentralized structure of the Internet rather than the traditional design of phone systems, which route all traffic through a tree of regional, then local offices.

“We don’t look any different than Google,” he said. “We can begin to look at eliminating central offices, call centers and garages.”

Mr. Seidenberg said that he was just beginning to work through the implications of this and that he planned to reorganize the company in order to emphasize this strategy. He told investors it may take a year or two for the financial impact to be apparent.

Mr. Seidenberg criticized himself for not seeing this sooner. “I could have done a better job of accelerating the idea that fiber creates productivity opportunities,” he said.

But Mr. Seidenberg also talked of the psychological lift he had gotten from finally escaping from the shadow of the legendary Bell.

“Once I shed myself of the burden of chasing the inflection point in access lines and say ‘I don’t care about that anymore,’ I am actually liberated,” he said.

Frontier Buys Verizon Operations

Verizon Boss Hangs Up on Landline Phone Business