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For nearly 100 years, D&E Communications has served the people of eastern and central Pennsylvania from its headquarters in Lancaster. But the company founded in 1911 by William F. Brossman, an area farmer and fertilizer distributor, never saw its centennial after being snapped up by Windstream Communications in a $333 million dollar deal.
What Brossman planted so long ago brings a bountiful crop of benefits for the top five former executives of D&E and the plowing under of 70 percent of D&E’s other employees, who are being shown the door between today and April 9th.
The Winners
Four high-ranking executives had provisions in their contracts with D&E that required the company to pay six-figure payments should the company be sold. Thomas E. Morell, Albert H. Kramer, Stuart L. Kirkwood and Leonard J. Beurer are offered the stacks of cash as an incentive to get them to stay with the company, even as hundreds of others don’t get that choice.
Former D&E CEO James W. Morozzi gets a consolation prize of $942,000, not including benefits.
The Losers
D&E employees will be let go with considerably less (perhaps a cardboard box to hold their possessions as they are escorted from D&E buildings.)
Windstream filed papers months ago with the state Department of Labor and Industry detailing the slashing of D&E’s workforce, declaring most redundant and no longer needed, providing some of the “cost savings” that fuel these telecommunications deals.
For Lancaster County, as many as 270 of D&E’s 340 workers will be abandoned. For eastern and central Pennsylvania as a whole, 500 jobs will be reduced to 200 or less in Ephrata and Birdsboro. What made D&E “local” to Lancaster County and this part of Pennsylvania will be no more. Local customer service and support call centers are also being eliminated — transferred to existing Windstream centers in Cornelia, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina. Customers who have paid their D&E bills in person at the company’s Birdsboro office will have to make other arrangements — they are weeding out that service as well.
So which do you like better: more people employed or lower rates on DSL service? Because from what I can find D&E was a publicly traded company (far gone were the days of farmers and their telephone companies) with a bunch of rural LEC lines, some CLEC phone lines, 1/3 of the phone lines running DSL, and a few thousand video customers. Releases say that D&E’s fastest internet speed was 10 Mbps. Windstream’s is 12 Mbps, which costs $40 with a phone line, $45 without. Upload speeds may have been better on D&E but those are the facts I found;… Read more »
What would I like better? More executives jailed for economic treason. Executive compensation confiscated and redistributed to laid-off workers. Golden parachutes smashed with axe handles. Merry freaking Christmas.