Verizon's cruel layoffs

To the editor:

Verizon’s recent move to lay off more than 13,000 workers — the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history — is yet another egregious example of corporate executives sacrificing hard-working employees at the altar of the sacred stock price.

To announce these massive layoffs as we enter the holiday season is downright cruel. Contrary to what corporate bigwigs might think, we’re not just talking about numbers on a balance sheet here. We are talking about families who are now suffering.

Some people initially assumed this would only impact offshore call center workers. That is far from true. These layoffs took an axe to high-performing managers, engineers, technicians and more. Many of these vital workers had been filling the void of two or even three workers previously let go during COVID.

Our organization, the nonprofit Association of BellTel Retirees, advocates for the protection of the earned pensions and benefits of more than a quarter million retirees of Verizon, AT&T, Frontier and the companies now merged under those corporate umbrellas.

Fortune 500 companies like Verizon, Amazon and UPS are sadly using AI as a convenient excuse to restructure.

Since retiring as a cable splicer for Verizon, I have witnessed the erosion of our pension benefits and the spinoff of our pensions to private equity investors and annuity providers. Verizon offloaded 41,000 management pensions in 2012, then repeated the act with 59,000 management and union pensions in 2024.

Those pension risk transfers and the recent layoffs share the same root cause: modern leadership care more about shareholders than employees or customers.

It’s time our leaders in government stood up to these corporations and said enough is enough. We must stand up for what we are owed and, more importantly, what we earned over many decades. And our former employers need to honor both the labor contracts and workforce agreements that we labored under throughout our 30- and 40-year long careers.

Thomas Steed

Steed is chairman of the Association of BellTel Retirees and a former union organizer for CWA Local 1120.