Downsizing and Verizon Communications

Over the course of 2002 and 2003, Verizon Communications Inc. engaged in a project of shedding itself of workers that it declared "surplus," chiefly by way of layoff. Some 2,000 jobs in New England were targeted, 3,800 in New York, and 1,040 in New Jersey (Verizon to Cut, 2002; Verizon Mulling, 2003). By the end of 2003, some 12,000 were set to be eliminated (Howe, 2003). Verizon Communications spokespersons attributed the cutbacks to telecom-industry downturns in investment and Verizon's enforced subsidizing of competitive common communication carriers (Verizon Mulling, 2003). Verizon's major response appears to have been to cut jobs, which the company considered "a good part of our capital program," in the words of Dennis Bone, Verizon New Jersey President, in March of 2003, in explaining a decline in the customer base for land-line installations, hence the company's capital-investment efforts (Verizon Mulling, 2003).

How well the leadership of Verizon Communications anticipated the challenge of downsizing as change can be inferred from the terms of a 2000 collective-bargaining agreement whereby "after the

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he case of Verizon, the anticipation of lost jobs and declining job security seems to have been embedded into operations experience of workers. Verizon's attribution of its problems for workers to wireless communication competition while overlooking its own (and successful) attempts to develop wireless business is a little like the fellow who kills his parents and then laments that his mother doesn't help him any more. On the other hand, that does not appear to have limited Verizon's ability to pursue its downsizing program. But there is one thing more. In its zeal to mandate wholesale organizational change by way of downsizing, Verizon appears not to have anticipated every consequence of pursuing downsizing as the answer to shoring up resources, or, in Verizon's own formulation, of equating cutting costs with "more flexibility in contract consts" (Greenhouse, 2003). In November 2003, after when Verizon's CEO had predicted that 12,000 workers would take an early-retirement offer, 5,600 union workers and 16,000 managers said yes, with the result that the company had to take a quarterly charge against its earnings and take some pains to reassure its customer base that telecom service would not suffer (Howe, 2003). In this particu
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Approximate Word count = 1864
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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