In the last five years, we went from nearly 120k employees to just under 90k. When is it going to stop? Is there a goal to reach or do they just plan to keep cutting indefinitely?
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@gx here. Correction, that was sometime after 2013 for the wireline/wireless merge, not 2008.
@dc I had 42 years when I left the company. It was a good run, but glad I was able to retire. I was even around long enough to get a decent pension buyout as a mgt employee. I remember the good old days. Post divestiture I ended up in what was then Bell Atlantic and lived through the Nynex merger, the GTE merger, the Vodaphone buyout, the Fairpoint and Frontier spin offs, mergers I don't even remember, the outsourcing, all the layoffs, etc. My service prior to 2000 was awesome, but from 2000 on everything started going downhill, especially when they brought the Wireline and Wireless employees together on the corporate side somewhere around 2008. I feel bad for today's employees. The only good thing about being an employee anymore is the decent compensation and the better than average benefits. But you have to wonder how long those will last. And look at the cr-p you have to put up with to get it. I check in here from time to time out of morbid curiosity as I spent my entire career here. God speed V-teamers. What a stupid term. lol
Yes. The CEO is airing for a $500m golden parachute.
They want young and cheap or offshored labor. And a few execs to get spotlights in fortune or runners magazine mere months before they themselves are fired. Oops I mean they retired. Yeah that’s it. Love the honesty from my work family! The hilarious thing is they thought vsp would inspire older people to leave. In contrast, people fed up with horrible leadership and constant reorganizations left in their early or mid careers.
@ca you've been on the payroll for 44 years?! What are you, the Highlander? :)
I have some colleagues close to 30 but that's insane!
@cb hah, no sh-t sherlock. S/he was saying what used to be, not forecasting what it will be
If you look back in time, Hans' deep thinking (many meetings and interviews) ... his target was anywhere from 45-55k employees. Now, will that happen ? Who knows.
@ca Those days are long gone and that will probably never happen again.
@a9 You must have started in 2000 following the GTE merger. I can beat that. I started pre-divestiture and at that time AT&T was this big:
At the time its breakup was announced in 1982, AT&T (the Bell System) was the world's largest private company, employing nearly 1 million people. The workforce was so large it was exceeded only by the U.S. federal government.
Thete is only one number the rent a CEO /Vz Executive cares about..$100M bonus in 2 years.
The beatings will continue until morale improves!
@aa I think we’ll be down to 75k this year
Yea, cause the id--ts on here know the answers to that question!
the goal is to become a desert landscape like in Mad Max
Their Target is to reduce to 68k
By 2030 my feeling is we will probably be down to 75k employees but if they divest/close will be a lot lower
@OP LOL you are a newby, when I started with the company we had 262k employees, it is part of the V culture. Welcome to the thunderdome.
Executives good, employees bad
@OP It is a shrinking business, market share. Issue, excessive debt, plus higher interest rates, are neither good for this type of business to keep pace with buildout and future wavelength upgrades.
Also, operating costs continue to be greater, salary, compensation, and employer benefits.
Lastly, need to maintain the corporate dividends, where the dividends which need to be increased every year.
There is no "absolute zero" target number. There may be targets/percentages for specific RIFs, but there will never be a time where they say, "well, that's it, we can't cut anymore". They will always go to that well in the name of cost cutting, when all of their other cost cutting plans don't achieve the promised results - which is almost all the time.
The number is 4:
CEO
CFO
General Counsel
and a dude to manage all the AIs