of an "external event," i.e., circumstances beyond its control, "such as recession, fierce competition, the telecommunications slump and the substitution of wireless service for land-line service," reducing the need for employees (Greenhouse, 2003).
In that connection, a leader of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers cited the company's own longtime practice of downsizing, in particular "emphasizing its wireless business at the expense of the traditional land line units where IBEW members have had a dominant presence" (Verizon Cut, 2003). In July 2003, a federal arbitrator ordered Verizon to reinstate several thousand jobs that were said to have been improperly terminated (Greenhouse, 2003), agreeing that the company had initiated process changes inhering in job loss. However, in August 2003, a new contract was negotiated that essentially appears to have strengthened the ability of the company, in negotiations with labor, to structure downsizing offers in order to decrease the payroll (Davidson, 2003).
The big picture of the downsizing processes at Verizon is that effective labor negotiations were one of the principal mechanisms exploited by Verizon leadership in order to accomplish the objectives of a decreased payroll. One observer hostile to corporate strategies vis-à-vis labor declared that the contract "paves the way for large-scale downsizing" (Davidson, 2003). That, in turn, suggests that Verizon leadership had a strong grasp of the need to forestall future objections to layoffs on the part of unions interested in job security for their membership, by embedding protections against such objections into the black-letter collective-bargaining agreement.
A much-cited article by Thomas Hickok, which appears to be available only on the Internet and whose provenance or publication
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