Verizon Posts Loss Due To Workforce Buyouts > Easy Solution

reply to ualdayan

Re: Easy Solution

Most were voluntary separation NOT layoffs. Very few are eligible for unemployment.

reply to NOCMan
99 Weeks you mean... but that does NOT apply to every State, contrary to poor news reporting of the issue. A State has to have 8.5% unemployment or above to qualify for Tier 4 benefits (the last tier added in the stimulus package). Many States, the maximum is MUCH less.. some areas do not qualify for more than 26 weeks of State benefits, period.

For this reason, you are starting to hear of the "99ers", those who have exhausted 99 weeks of unemployment, and are long-term unemployed. You are starting to see some political will to add a Tier 5 extension, which has been needed for nearly 6 months. What passed yesterday was merely an eligibility date extension of the EXISTING extensions we already had in place; it added nothing new.
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-Sterling

reply to NOCMan
Employees in positions that were declared surplus were offered $50,000 plus $2,200 for every year of service and 6 months of health insurance coverage. If an employee did not take the offer they risked a future layoff. So for example an employee with 10 years on the job was paid $72,000 to voluntarily cease employment. That is where the 2.3 billion went, not unemployment.

But most of the verizon employees that took the layoff were newer employees. At ten plus years the employee was pretty well safe. Verizon thought they would have more older employees taking the bate. In realitty it back fired on them. In the end it ended up costing them a ton of money with very little benefit to them. Basically where they went into it thinking they would unload long term employees that were not as productive as the newer employees. They ended up giving money where they didnt have to.

So they boffed. As a 10 year employee, $76,800 seems like about 1 years' pay, maybe 2 years in weird areas. If job prospects are slim, like it would be for any aged employee, then 1 or 2 years of pay is not really a great deal for 1 or 2 following decades of unemployment, if the alternative is quite possibly 1, 2, or even more years of continued employment, possibly 1 or 2 decades more.

As a 2 year employee, being asked to take $59,200 to go look for work for a year, compared to being fired in 4 months and take $47,520 in unemployment for two years if you don't find work or less if you do, the $59,200 seems like a much better deal, by about 237% (assuming 1 year unemployment for $24,960).

In addition to that, in today's tight employment market (I mean hard to get work), it's much more lucrative for the best employees who have the best employment options to jump ship than the laggards, so if you give them money to do it, they'd go even faster.

Verizon should have made appropriate metrics for performance at the top and administered the tests in a supervisor-uninvolved way (i.e., go to the headquarters and take the test by the same oversight personnel company-wide). Then they would offer severance in accordance to details about the employee: find the minimum to make it desirable for the undesirable employees to leave, and don't offer anything to the undesirable employees, laying those off later.