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]

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.

What. Da. Fuq

[HarrySquatter]

44,000 managers? Da fuq?!!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more Da Fuq:
44,000 manages "which excludes executives in sales or crucial company roles."

That's SERIOUS WAT DA FUQ levels there. 44,000 managers that aren't considered crucial. How did you get there?

Government

[p51d007]

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"

Re:

[Cyberax]

"Non essential" in the short term. You know, like fire code inspectors versus firefighters.

Re:Government

[jellomizer]

Or hair dressers, TV producers, Management Consultants and Telephone sanitizers.

Re:

[Headw1nd]

You know who I think should be essential? The guy at the airport who delivers the lemon-soaked napkins. My flight has been delayed like twice now and we are still waiting.

Re:

[durkzilla]

Dude, you're gonna be stuck there forever.

Re:

[evendiagram]

The last person I heard complaining about "non essential" personnel was gentleman who ran a service industry business out of his home and was very, very angry that his fire extinguishers needed to be examined. Government waste and overreach by his definition. There's a large group of opinionated people who believe that it's more cost effective to only be reactive and not preventative.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

And those people should be called out for being dumb. Look at Texas for instance where building codes are quite lax. Now look at the parking garages that suffer for pancake collapse. They are literally caving in on themselves. This is a common issue throughout the country. In New York for instance where you actually have building codes those garages would be inspected every couple of years. As a result of the inspection structural defects would be recognized before the thing collapses potentially killing do

Re: Government

[diaz]

Makes me wonder why the insurance companies for these ramps donâ(TM)t require inspections every couple of years. Then the government just has to verify that theyâ(TM)re insured. Same with fire extinguishers, etc. The insurance companies have a vested interest in making sure the insured buildings are safe and up to code. If they arenâ(TM)t, jack up the rates for drop them.

Re:

[dryeo]

Insurance companies discovered a long time ago that it is cheaper to have government doing the work.

Re:

[Headw1nd]

"Essential" in the government sense means that the tasks they do are time sensitive. Can your job be put off until tomorrow? Then you are non essential. Someone at NOAA who monitors satellite readings for storms is essential, someone who chugs data and creates long term rainfall forecasts is not. Both are performing important functions, but one has a much shorter time horizon.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former Verizon employee who was laid off in 2017, most non-union employees are considered management although they may be hourly. Union employees are called "associates" who really work for the union and not Verizon.

Re:What. Da. Fuq

[jellomizer]

Almost everyone in Sales gets a Manager/VP... Or some sort of title. It makes customers who are dealing with them feel like they are dealing with someone important.
Also to note Verizon is a Union shop and most unions do not cover people in management. So They probably give a lot of poor schlubs manager titles and salaries to avoid the union.

Re:

[Ryanrule]

Firing all the PHBs?

Re:What. Da. Fuq

[hawguy]

44,000 managers? Da fuq?!!

They only have 160,000 employees, so 1 out of every 4 employees is a manager? No wonder they want to lay them off.

Re:

[Headw1nd]

Also, one assumes there are management employees left. So at minimum 25% of their staff were management.

Re:

[schnell]

Also, one assumes there are management employees left. So at minimum 25% of their staff were management.

The talk about "managers" is misleading due to what that term means at big legacy telecom companies. At any of the Ma Bell-descended companies (including Verizon), a "manager" is a salaried employee, contrasting with an "professional" (hourly i.e. union) employee. A very tiny percentage of "management" employees actually are "managers" in the traditional sense. So it basically just means that they are laying off a large number of salaried non-union workers rather than hourly union employees.

Re:

[Desler]

Maybe this explains why Verizon constantly is raising prices for worse service? Gotta pay the managers somehow?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What. Da. Fuq

[JaredOfEuropa]

Maybe the forklift driver in their warehouse is a "multilevel logistics manager". Title inflation. I did a gig for a bank once and you couldn't throw a keyboard across the room without hitting a "VP of something", but most of those weren't even what you'd consider a manager of anything.

Re:

[Desler]

Yeah I went to school with a guy who is at Goldman Sachs with a VP title. He stated the same thing that it was just a bullshit title.

Re:

[alvinrod]

I think banks do it to make the customers feel more important. If you're sitting down the with VP of blah blah, you probably feel a lot more important as a customer than if you're talking to a manager, or worse yet a lowly clerk. It doesn't matter that in reality it's probably the same person (or one of the wunch) no matter what title they have.

Re:

[Do You Smell That]

Your point is fair, but just want to point out you've gone from Banker to banker. I doubt the GP of your post was referring to anyone who'd ever remotely interact with a GS client (traditionally GS haven't worked much with us normies at all, until their recent Marcus initiative) , unless that client is itself a large corporation.

Most expensive/high-level "management" / "VP" jobs in a bank will be held by people with 0 interest in the banks branches; rather they're in the back/mid/front-office operations

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't "managers". They are "management employees." Basically, at Verizon any non-exempt, non-union employee at Verizon is considered management.

Source: took my package 4 years ago.

Re:What. Da. Fuq

[hawguy]

They aren't "managers". They are "management employees." Basically, at Verizon any non-exempt, non-union employee at Verizon is considered management.

Source: took my package 4 years ago.

Calling a "non-exempt non-union" employee without management responsibilities a "management employee" seems as misleading as selling an unlimited plan with limits.

Re:

[Desler]

Welcome to Verizon.

Re:What. Da. Fuq

[commodore64_love]

I refuse to be promoted to a manager. I make enough money as an engineer doing design or testing, and (2) managers always look so stressed out. I don't need that.

Looks like I need to add a 3rd reason: Engineers keep their jobs; middle managers get laid off. (Even at JCPenney I saw this happen, when the $60,000 managers were laid off..... and then replaced with $30,000 salespeople/supervisors.)

Re:What. Da. Fuq

[Eravnrekaree]

you are certainly not immune to the H1B program or whatever they call it wherever you are from. Companies are using H1B program to lay off American engineers to be replaced with cheap Indian labor , or the offshoring trick alternatively. This is why you should demand the program be abolished and that you need to realize that there is no "labor shortage", especially not with 50% of jobs set to be automated out of existance in the next few years. The labor shortage thing is a lie to justify laying off american workers.

re: H1B

[King_TJ]

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 s

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:

[hawguy]

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.

Re:

[commodore64_love]

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.

Re:

[youngone]

Some of the many, many managers at the last company I worked at were given the title instead of a pay rise.
Either manager or "senior" whatever.

Re:

[sydbarrett74]

Exactly, plus once they slap the 'manager' label on you, good-bye overtime. They make you salaried-exempt and work you 100 hours a week for fixed pay.

Re:

[jellomizer]

That isn't too much to be expected. An effective amount of staff a manager can handle is about 8 employees. Then a higher manager needs to manage 8 managers.... So that is probably 5 or 6 levels of management

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

At a 1:8 ratio, and assuming that someone above is correct that Verizon has 160,000 employees, the 6th level of management would be a single person (i.e. the CEO). In such a structure, the total number of managers would still be barely over 20,000. You can make the math easier and get a good-enough estimate by saying 160,000 "regular" employees, who would have 20,000 direct managers, and then the next level is only 250 managers, then 32, then 4, and put 1 person at the top.

Re:

[butchersong]

Verizon and Verizon Wireless recently merged together. The non-union employees all fall under the "managers" label as well. There's a lot of redundancy at the moment. I'm sure much of it is just normal bureaucracy but much is just a result of the merger.

Re:

[suezz]

probably 1 of 3 if you don't count the union employees. the 160,000 is smaller because they are probably counting union employees.

att is doing the same thing. thee have even more employees like under 300,000 and that was before the time-warner merger.

both companies senior management are psycho. why they hire so many employees and don't make use of the ones they have is ridiculous. I guess they get their jollies hiring so many people just to let them go later. pretty sick way to run a company.

Re:

[SoonerSkeene]

At one point Microsoft had more than 100,000 middle managers and tens of thousands of "VP" positions. It's what happens when you have a shitload of money apparently.

Re:

[SimonTheSoundMan]

They must have had thousands of directors to go with those VP jobs too.

Re:What. Da. Fuq

[Lost Race]

They had so many CxO positions that they had to move to a CxyzO system.

Re:

[PPH]

Labeling people as managers just gets around overtime and other compensation rules.

Re:

[tsqr]

You don't have to call people "managers" for that, in California at least. Here, if you're classified "salaried/exempt", the company is exempt from paying you for overtime even though you're not a manager in title or in fact. Interestingly, you still get paid by the hour if you put in fewer than 40 hours per week.

Re:What. Da. Fuq

[tlhIngan]

You don't have to call people "managers" for that, in California at least. Here, if you're classified "salaried/exempt", the company is exempt from paying you for overtime even though you're not a manager in title or in fact. Interestingly, you still get paid by the hour if you put in fewer than 40 hours per week.

It's probably not for salary/exempt people specifically, but more for non-union people. Unions are funny things, and for the most part, if you have a company, there will be both workers in the union and workers not in the union. The people not in the union (excluded and generally prohibited from joining the union) are management. So if you're classified as a "manager" you can't join the union, even if you're doing exactly the same thing the union guy is doing. (It also means if the union goes on strike, as management, you cover their duties as manager).

That's how it generally goes - they may have classed the non-union employees as managers to keep them from getting ideas and joining the union

Re:

[Algan]

Management employees. Meaning anyone not in a union.

B ark

[cascadingstylesheet]

I hope they got free tickets on the B ark [wikia.com].

Verizon mush have the most screwed up org chart

[bobstreo]

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...

Re:

[alvinrod]

Or they've just been around a long time and promoted people into management instead of having some kind of dual ladder that allows people to be promoted as engineers or other roles. People come and go, but the management tends to stick around well past the best by date or gets promoted into yet another rung of middle management. One day they wake up and it's seven layers of management between anyone making a decision and anyone who can actually carry it out and a fun game of telephone in between. I'm sure t

Managed pension buyout move

[ElitistWhiner]

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.

Re:

[bernywork]

They sold the FIOS division?

Re:

[110010001000]

Bankruptcy? Verizon made $20 billion in net profit last year. What assets have they been dumping? They still have FIOS. What are you talking about? They pay a good dividend too.

Re:

[Desler]

But only management. The plebes are just told to fuck off.

How does a company eliminate

[rsilvergun]

That much while doing a major tech roll out in the form of 5g? This smacks of age discrimination...

Re:

[Desler]

Gotta fund the exective bonuses somehow.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but not the way you think. I work for one of the big four telco's and everyone in a lvl3 or 4 Eng position is over the age of 40 half over 50 (yes I'm in Eng).
You do not leave important things like mimo/massive mimo/DC's to a bunch of kids and no one wants to supervise them long enough get get them up to full self sufficiency.

This is just normal business all the telco's do it every decade or so. Offer a buy-out during a re-org and if you don't hit your numbers then the dreaded layoff happens.

Are they passing that savings on to customers?

[Rick Schumann]

Call me a cynic (it's true) but somehow I think not.

Re:

[Desler]

Of course not. These savings are always passed on to executive bonuses and shareholder dividends.

Re:

[Desler]

It's a more likely way than expecting your Verizon bill to go down.

Re:

[No Longer an AC]

I fully expect my bill to go up because of this.

I've always wanted to be a shareholder

[CanadianMacFan]

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

Managers are (mostly) a waste

[OneHundredAndTen]

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.

Mybe they will be replaced with lower paid folks

[Streetlight]

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.

Blame Network Neutrality

[MobyDisk]

This must be the result of California's new Network Neutrality law! See, they were right! That law is costing us 44,000 jobs!

Verizon as Trump campaigner

[manu0601]

It seems Verizon is doing as much as it can to get Trump re-elected.

fuck ...

[Hugh Jorgen]

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I have this measured:

My 55+ year old employee, who makes 4x what the offshore people do, produces the equivalent work with higher accuracy 5x faster than my offshore employees do.

It's still going because the offshore guys aren't done with the first set of work while I'm on round 5 with the 55+ of giving him more. Since I'm still measuring the 5x is getting wider per day.

Maybe it was supposed to be 440 managers...

[Kris_J]

...but someone got the decimal point in the wrong place.

Selling employees

[Anonymous Coward]

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 q

How many managers left?

[misnohmer]

Out of 153K global employees, they lose 44K managers. How many managers are left out of the 109K global employees?

People will just quit in 2019

[misnohmer]

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.

US Companies Still At It!

[Anonymous Coward]

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 b