#benefits

I have been looking at the lantern surgery/cancer care card and it requires bariatric surgery just to be able to get that healthcare covered.

What a joke

What kind of cr-ppy insurance is that!!!

Does VZ allow retirement-eligible employees to decline a rebadge so they can be treated as if it were an involuntary separation and retire effectively, preserving all the retirement benefits?

Hopefully someone here has first hand knowledge.

I apologize if this has been asked already, but I could not search by subject. This question is for anyone who has received their final severance pay Did you receive any information regarding Cobra once severance ended? Has anyone signed up for Cobra once your severance benefits ended? Thank you.

I was ‘laid off’ (UK) and had purchased travel insurance as a benefit. Is anyone able to provide details of the provider/group group policy number as having trouble locating.
Many Thanks.

I retired from T and I got a better deal on a cell phone from mint mobile. I went looking ...................... before they cut me off my copper land line .

You can call them to let them know you don't want to continue Cobra. Or you can just ignore the bills if you don't feel like wasting half an hour on the phone.

Has anyone in Dell's Sales organization thought about starting a union or organizing with other sales representatives?

A union helped many Amazon employees secure higher compensation and improved benefits. I'm curious if others have considered whether organizing could help address some of the issues sales employees are experiencing at Dell.

For too long, Dell has failed to treat its sales employees fairly. Many of us have gone months without receiving our full commission payouts due to issues with compensation systems. Bonus payments have been mishandled, base pay has been reduced to levels that many find unsustainable, and the list of concerns continues to grow. The company loves to share how well they are doing, but has endlessly demonstrated a lack of care for its sales representatives......

We deserve fair compensation and to be paid out correctly.Tell Dell surveys alone are not enough. It's time to build a union that advocates for employees' rights.

There is strength in numbers. I'm thinking of starting one, and I am curious if there's others that would be willing to support.

If former employees would like to help, they can help us with change petitions and obtaining national press.

Whoever had the idea to bring on a dog as the Chief Pawsitivity Officer is a genius. She’s super cute and everyone loves her. She has a fan clubs. Great distraction to the fires burning all around the Association as they lay folks off and cut back on benefits, etc.

First thank you to this community for all the early info & giving me the confidence that I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.

9 year g-n who interned and hired on. The company has changed and I’ve finally had enough.

Couple questions for this board:

• what vacation is payed out? Should I take all my comp & carryover?
• is there a practical way to negotiate the annual compensation value of the pension with new company? Pension tool not helpful
• print out any important health documents
  Any other tips?

Also, for those wanting to leave… yes it’s not the post covid market, but there are companies looking for talented employees. If you are here you are talented and will be valued elsewhere.

Ask around and you'll hear real frustration. With Gunjan/leadership, with direction, with a culture that's betting worse, high workloads, burnout.... But turnover is basically nothing. People stay for years, sometimes decades.

That's a weird combo. Usually when people are this unhappy, they leave. So what's actually keeping everyone here?

My guesses:

Golden handcuffs. Pension, benefits, tenure perks that are hard to walk away from
Grass isn't greener thinking. Assuming other places have the same problems anyway
Complaining isn't the same as job hunting. Sometimes it's just how people vent
Not a lot of comparable roles nearby to jump to

Anyone who's been here a while, what's actually kept you?

This is just a general question for retail workers, especially Sams Club workers. As a long time associate, I have never entertained the idea of leaving until the last few years. However being there for as long as I have, with established vacations, and PTO, and of course insurance, it feels as if my hands are tied and I should just su-k it up. I am not happy as to the way the direction of this company has gone, or the leadership within the walls of my store. I don't want to sound like a je-k, but I feel as if I so much better then where I am currently stuck at. That I am wasting possible untapped potential. I know that many of you probably know the feeling or may be struggling with the same internal fight. To take a leap into the unknown feels a bit scary, since I am unsure of what to go into next? But I also know that I am suffocating where I am at. And don't want my life to pass me by, knowing I could have been more. Has anyone here successfully navigated away from Sams Club? To put into context, I am a 22 year associate.

seems like they are firing mainly developers due to cost reductions / the on going climate and moving developers to India. everyone's benefits were terminated and at midnight and were given the a standard bare bones severance.

Quick question. We are salary employees, we have recently been required to work holidays with only a 15% diff, if the holiday fall on the weekend. If it falls during the week we get no additional money. Also we are required to stay late, people are missing lunches and breaks to get all the required work completed. However if there is no work in the queue we are still held to the same production metrics. Now we have recently found out that if for some reason we have a loss of power or internet access, we must flex the hours or take pto. It seems like the salary benefits only favor the company and leaves the employees with no work life balance.

25 union members who are collection reps just got the vtp (voluntary termination pay) to leave the company. This is up to 104 weeks pay depending on seniority. This is only the beginning. It is expected that more will be surplussed until all union workers in Leg T are gone. Luckily for them however, they get a generous package to move on, thanks to the union negotiated contract. The payout, including money and medical, dental and vision benefits is much better than the severance pay that low level managers get. Too bad for them. Sooner or later, we'll all be laid off.

How long does employee discount on phone last after getting laid off?

Not left vs right. This is up vs down.

1. The “manager” title with no direct reports. Federal labor law excludes supervisors from union eligibility, so titling people into that bucket without giving them real authority shrinks who’s even allowed to organize. In a store that’s two assistant managers and a store manager who can’t organize while the reps under them can. Go up the chain and it never stops. District manager can’t. Senior director can’t. VP can’t. It is not accidental who ends up on which side of that line.

2. Coordinated response when union talk starts. Extra staffing so people can “take time off,” sudden one on ones to “hear concerns,” the moment a store shows organizing interest. That is a known playbook, not something that happens organically.

3. The “one unionized store” comparison. “See, nothing’s different, they just pay dues.” That is not proof unions do not work. It is proof one isolated store has no leverage. Power comes from density, not outliers. Funny how those stores rarely get closed while unionized.

4. Reorgs as the vehicle for cuts, not the goal. The org chart does not change because the new structure is better. It changes because headcount needed to shrink and restructuring is the mechanism. “Right sizing” language usually means the number came first and the chart is just catching up.

5. Benefits eroding slowly enough that no single year feels like the moment. Vacation accrual caps shrinking. Tuition assistance cut in half. Stock and incentive programs trimmed. Healthcare costs climbing. Pensions that used to exist for a subset of employees, gone for new hires. None of it happens all at once, so it never feels like a breaking point. It just feels like death by a thousand cuts. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets written into a contract instead of quietly decided for you year after year.

6. Pay secrecy norms. Talking about your raise percentage, your review score, or your pay band feels taboo, even though discussing wages with coworkers is explicitly protected activity.

7. “Family” language. Reframes an adversarial labor conversation as disloyalty to “the team.”

8. The word “union” itself gets the stigma, not the concept. Strip the label and it is just organizing together for bargaining power. People used to have real leverage in the workplace. Now the default is asking nicely for more while getting handed less.

9. The designated fall guy. Bring in a leader on a short runway whose whole job is the unpopular cuts. Once the hard part is done, a successor comes in and gets to be the relief, thank god it is not like it used to be, while the structural cuts already happened.

10. Manufactured internal strife. Departments blaming each other instead of recognizing everyone is on the same side of this. Division between departments is a lot more useful to leadership than solidarity across them.

11. “Savings” from layoffs are often not real savings. Convert corporate stores to franchise and the labor cost doesn’t disappear, it shifts to an indirect operator while the company still takes its cut. Lay off tenured people and rehire for the same functional need at a lower rate, and headcount looks similar in six months but the average cost per employee dropped because tenure and its pay got reset to zero. That’s not reduced need for labor. That’s wage suppression using a layoff as the delivery mechanism.

One more thing worth saying plainly. Not every union is a good union. Organizing does not automatically mean your interests are protected. Corruption can creep into any institution, including the ones built to fight for you. That does not make the underlying idea wrong. It just means accountability does not stop once something is organized, it just shifts to a different table. Our own FIOS and wireline employees are already organized through CWA. It’s not a foreign concept here.

Now let’s talk about “the company isn’t making money”

Verizon has reported a profit every single year since at least 2001. Not one loss year, through the 2008 financial crisis, through COVID, through every merger. 2020 net income was $17.8 billion. 2021 was $22.1 billion, the highest of the decade. Those were not sacrifice years where the company ate a loss to protect jobs. Those were some of the most profitable years the company has ever had.

2025 net income was $17.6 billion. Dan Schulman’s 2025 total compensation was $34.3 million, on a new contract that includes performance equity worth up to $59.5 million more. The six highest paid named executives combined made about $120 million in 2025, and that’s only the publicly disclosed portion of the leadership team.

Where does the profit actually go? $11.5 billion in dividends paid to shareholders in 2025. A $25 billion stock buyback authorized on top of that. Buybacks don’t hand cash to executives directly, they buy shares on the open market mostly from large institutional holders like index funds and pension funds, while propping up the stock price for everyone who keeps holding. Compare that to the severance cost of the November layoff of 13,000 people: $1.6 to $1.8 billion, a one time charge that’s smaller than what gets paid out in dividends alone in about six or seven weeks.

Yes, some of the money goes back into the network. $17 billion in capital expenditures in 2025. That’s real and legitimate. But that number is also being cut for 2026, down to $16 to $16.5 billion, because the heavy build phase is mostly done. Meanwhile the buyback authorization just grew.

If someone tells you layoffs are happening because the company can’t afford to pay people, that claim does not survive contact with the company’s own numbers.

So what’s the actual moral here

This was never about whether the company can afford to treat people well. It’s about a choice, made over and over, about where the money goes. And the tools used to make that choice feel inevitable, the misclassified titles, the reorg-as-cover, the stigma on the word union, the vague streamlining language, all serve one purpose: making a distributional choice look like a structural necessity. Making “we decided you get less so someone else gets more” sound like “there wasn’t enough to go around.”

US union density peaked around 1954 at roughly 35% of all workers. Today it’s about 9%. Most people in this workforce right now grew up hearing “we don’t need a union, look how well we’re treated,” during a period when that was actually true. That belief never got re-examined as conditions changed underneath it. We’re applying an old conclusion to a reality that no longer matches it.

Is it going to be perfect if we organize? No. But right now we’re fighting each other instead of the actual problem, and giving away power for free in the process. Density is the only thing that turns this from a list of grievances into actual leverage at an actual table. We’re all in the same boat here, just on different floors. What would it take to stop having this conversation store by store, department by department, and start having it together?

Does anyone know or from last round know this. If you take the severance, for example if I get paid out for 20 weeks, do I still qualify for six months unemployment or will it be six months minus the 20 weeks that Verizon paid me severance for?

Who's winning, who's losing?

Why is no one talking about how bad the new plan is with United Healthcare? I don’t know what I did to make Abby hate me so hard but seriously this is the insurance company we have a contract with?!?!

Has anyone that applied for the VSP received a call from Fidelity to talk about their 401K

I was thinking of switching to an HSA next enrollment. Are we allowed to transfer our funds from the employer-sponsored HSA to a different service provider (like Fidelity)? I've never had an HSA so I was curious about the process.

Curious if anyone has received their 401k settlement deposit. If so, are you still an active employee, or are you a past employee with a still-active Empower 401k.

I want to make sure I maximize all the benefits ford has to offer before I give notice. Use recognition points , wellness account reimbursement, etc.

What do you recommend doing? Any other tips before telling my boss?

I understand that if you accept severance over time instead of a lump sum payment, you can keep your medical/dental/vision benefits. Does anyone know if those are going to be the same rates as when I was employed or will it be at the higher COBRA rates? Trying to determine if I should just lump sum it and go on my spouses benefits

When do we receive PSP need to buy a couple of shoes for my kids at Nike store

Does Bill prefer Freddie?

Definitely an excellent move my HR, thank you.

Has anyone successfully negotiated or countered the severance offer? If so, did Humana accept your counteroffer? I’d also be interested in hearing what you negotiated (such as additional pay, extended benefits, or other terms) and whether you felt the process was worthwhile.

Do you people pick between these two or get your own Healthcare plan? Which ones if you do? What is this bullsht about meeting a high deductible with UHC not covering a tiny percent until you meet the deductible?? What a clown show.

I didn't realize you could convert the group life &/or AD&D insurance after severance into a Whole Life policy or port to term life / AD&D policy via MetLife. I always thought those coverages were just benefits available while you're employed and once you're gone you're done and gone.

For the life in particular, what made you choose Whole or Term? Did you compare rates with other carriers? For me personally, I don't think I'll qualify for anything else with anybody else because of medical condtions, so the whole conversion is making some sense, even if I can't compare rates.

I guess I could call Big Lou.

Has anyone taken the Nike paid COBRA coverage? I signed up for it today but it's alarming that in the Wageworks system it says "participant paid" and I'm on the hook for a $2400 monthly bill to cover everything for the 4 members of the family. Are we supposed to pay and get reimbursed or does Nike pay directly? If they pay directly how long does it take? Kaiser let us know that we are canceled and we're wondering how long before we're reinstated.

since Leadership has seemed to have completely f*ck this up, what are some benefits you think would incentivize you to stay?

for me, it's the PTO policy. 18 days use it or lose it is ridiculous. and not getting another week until 8 YEARS of service?

how about 23 days to start, with flexibility to carry some time over. change the years of service requirement to earn an extra week.

and... as for the Directors and above not having a PTO bank? reel that in, 'cause my Director takes off a minimum of 8 WEEKS EVERY YEAR. clear abuse of the policy.

The People Office Support Centre is a perfect example of technology replacing service without improving the employee experience.

Tickets get passed between multiple people, questions go unanswered, and then the ticket is closed. I recently waited 30 days for a response to a benefits and retirement query and still did not get an answer.

We used to have local contacts you could call or meet with to resolve issues. Now we’re expected to search AI articles, raise a ticket, and wait in silence. It’s “computer says no” dressed up as transformation.

If this is part of Bob’s AI strategy, it isn’t working. AI should support people, not replace them. Bring back accessible human HR support that takes ownership and actually helps employees.

Will the Cobra coverage only apply for medical? Will vision and dental be covered?

It is rather interesting, almost funny, that when we're surplussed, union workers actually get more than managers. The termination pay for union workers is more than severance pay for managers and the ongoing medical, dental and vision benefits are much better for union workers than for managers. We're all going to eventually be laid off - that's inevitable - however when that day comes for each of us, union workers are for sure better off than managers.

Seriously? First they take the pension away now the biweekly deposits to make up for the pension is going away? Is the goal to make your employees as unhappy as possible?

Looking at how much it’s costing to pay out severance, I wonder how long they’ll keep it up before making significant changes to it.

As of October 1st, all telecommuters who have company paid home internet, or company reimbursed home internet, will be losing that benefit... because why not, right?

"We recognize this change may have an impact on some employees. To help you prepare, we are providing more than 90 days' notice before the policy takes effect."

https://www.inc.com/georgia-fearn/63-percent-of-workers-from-this-group-do-not-file-for-unemployment-benefits-heres-why/91361014

Can someone tell me if they received insurance during the displacement was it Cobra? how long did you have it? and did Wells pay their part of the insurance?