Verizon Communications is on track to gradually cut up to a quarter of its workforce, and has now offered 44,000 employees “voluntary severance” packages, while also outsourcing many information technology jobs to India’s Infosys, Ltd., in a deal worth an estimated $700 million.

The Wall Street Journal received confirmation from Verizon this afternoon the company is seeking to reduce its workforce to cut $10 billion in costs and invest in its forthcoming 5G wireless network.

Analysts claim Verizon’s new CEO Hans Vestberg chose the voluntary layoff route in part to send a message to investors and Wall Street before the company embarks on a costly upgrade to its wireless network. Wall Street generally dislikes and downgrades companies starting large, long-term spending projects. By cutting its workforce and other expenses, Verizon hopes to offset some of the sting of that spending to appease investors.

To entice employees to retire, Verizon is offering three weeks’ pay for each year of service up to 60 weeks. But not every employee will qualify for the offer. About 2,500 Verizon workers employed in the company’s IT department have been notified their jobs are being transferred to Bengaluru, India-based Infosys, Ltd., where they will continue work for Verizon as outsourced contractors. Verizon has notified affected workers they do not qualify for the current voluntary severance offer and will lose their 2018 bonus if they refuse to accept a position at Infosys.

In all, about 30 percent of Verizon’s 153,100 employees have either been offered early retirement deals or are facing an involuntary transfer to Infosys. Affected employees are being told Verizon is investing “more in transforming the business versus running the business,” which may suggest additional outsourcing and third-party contracting arrangements may be forthcoming.

Infosys has a controversial record in the United States. The company has been accused of forcing high-paid American workers to train their low wage foreign replacements, often arriving from India on the H-1B visa. Those workers typically remain in the U.S. for about a year and temporarily manage job functions that eventually are transitioned to workers back in India or other developing countries.

Verizon claims it expects up to 1,000 workers to accept the voluntary severance offer, but has not indicated whether additional forced layoffs may follow.

Verizon has dramatically downsized since 2011, when it employed 195,900 workers — shedding more than 42,000 employees in the last seven years.

The founding family of Cablevision is suing Altice USA, the company that acquired the suburban New York cable operator in 2016, for violating terms of the merger and committing fraud after laying off staff at Optimum’s News 12 operation.

This week the Dolan family — the founders and original owners of the suburban New York City cable system, filed a lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court after learning the notorious budget-slashing executives at Altice laid off dozens of workers, with plans to cut many more, despite a merger commitment to maintain at least 462 workers at the news operation and accept financial losses of up to $60 million until 2020.

News 12 is unique in the downstate New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut area where Cablevision provides cable service, delivering “hyper-local” coverage of news events across individually programmed regional news stations, each targeting a different service area. News 12 was among the first cable operator-created local news operations, founded in 1986 by Cablevision founder Charles Dolan.

Over the next three decades, News 12 launched several unique channels to serve customers:

• News 12 The Bronx/Brooklyn (shared studios/talent, but branded individually to each borough)
• News 12 Connecticut
• News 12 Hudson Valley
• News 12 Long Island
• News 12 New Jersey
• News 12 Traffic and Weather
• News 12 Westchester

Originally exclusive to Cablevision, News 12 has since been licensed for viewing by cable customers of Charter Spectrum, Comcast, and Service Electric across the Tri-State area. Altogether, News 12 reaches about three million viewers in the region.

The lawsuit is an effort to preserve the legacy of News 12 in light of Altice’s legendary reputation for layoffs and budget cuts.

Charles Dolan

“Unfortunately for the employees of News 12, Altice has disregarded its solemn promise to operate News 12” as promised, the lawsuit claims. “The purpose of today’s lawsuit is to enforce Altice’s contractual commitment to stand by the employees of News 12. The Dolan family intends to hold Altice accountable for commitments Altice made at the time of the sale and to protect the quality programming News 12 provides the community.”

The lawsuit alleges Altice USA already laid off 70 News 12 employees in 2017 and notified the Dolans last month it would begin laying off additional workers beginning this week, including popular News 12 anchor Colleen McVey. McVey is a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The fate of News 12 was a key issue for the Dolan family during merger talks with Altice. At one point, the family demanded News 12 be spun off as an independent entity not controlled by Altice because of fears the company’s cost-cutters would decimate the news operation. Ultimately, the merger agreement contained language forbidding Altice from laying off News 12 staff except in certain circumstances. The Dolan family claims there is no justification for the layoffs. Altice disagrees, claiming the suit has no merit.

“Altice USA remains committed to offering meaningful news coverage, enhancing our news product for our local communities, and growing our audience,” an Altice USA statement said. “Under Altice USA’s leadership, News 12 remains the most viewed TV network in Optimum households. This achievement reflects the uniqueness of News 12’s hyperlocal content and the high value viewers place on news that is tailored to their neighborhoods. Local news has never been more important, and we’re proud that News 12 continues to be a trusted source of news and information in the communities we serve.”

AT&T has laid off more than 16,000 employees since 2011, eliminating thousands of customer service positions while transferring others to cheap offshore call centers where some employees earn less than $2 an hour.

The company is rapidly closing call centers and consolidating others in hopes of wringing “deal synergies and cost savings” out of its operations, including DirecTV, acquired by AT&T in 2015.

Altogether, AT&T has closed 44 call centers, according to the Communications Workers of America (CWA), over the last seven years. Four call centers have been closed so far this year, including one in Harrisburg, Pa., that cost 101 jobs, some employed for over a decade. Many other call centers are being radically downsized, but have not yet been closed.

Betsy LaFontaine, a 30-year veteran at an AT&T call center in Appleton, Wisc. told The Guardian her call center has been slashed from 500 employees to less than 30 today.

“They’re liquidating us,” LaFontaine said. “This is not a poor company. On the shoulders of all its employees, we’ve made the company extremely profitable.”

AT&T took over this DirecTV call center.

While workers in Pennsylvania were offered new jobs if they were willing to move… to Kentucky, other workers would have to be willing to move overseas to keep a job with AT&T. As a cost saving measure, AT&T is offshoring an increasing amount of its customer service operation to India, Mexico, and the Philippines where it pays some English-challenged workers less than $2 an hour.

The savings from layoffs and offshoring are helping AT&T buy back shares of its own stock to help investors grow their stock portfolio’s value. The company has spent $16.45 billion on buybacks since 2013, including $419 million in the second quarter of 2018, the most AT&T has spent on buybacks since 2014.

AT&T has also banked at least $20 billion in savings from the Trump Administration’s corporate tax reform program. CEO Randall Stephenson was among the country’s biggest backers of the Trump tax cut program and was a principal member of the Business Roundtable lobbying group, which heavily lobbied Republicans to pass the measure.

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, AT&T actually paid an effective tax rate of just 8 percent between 2008 and 2015, despite recording a profit in the United States each year, by exploiting tax breaks and loopholes. But the thought of paying even less was appealing to Stephenson.

When the measure passed, AT&T’s chief financial officer John Stephens shared the good news with shareholders.

“With the passage of tax reform, we see a significant boost to our balance sheet, reducing $20 billion of liabilities and increasing shareholder equity by a like amount,” Stephens said.

Stephenson

AT&T promised if the Trump Administration passed tax cuts and reduced the corporate tax rate to around 20%, AT&T would create 7,000 new middle class jobs paying $70,000-80,000/year. The CWA argues AT&T instead laid off an estimated 7,000 workers. AT&T disputes this, claiming the company hired 8,000 new employees in the United States so far this year and 87,000 over the past three years. AT&T also claims it promised to pay $1,000 bonuses to 200,000 employees over the next year, tied to the tax cuts. In fact, AT&T’s unions negotiated the bonuses with AT&T before the Trump Administration’s tax reform was passed.

For AT&T employees, mass layoffs come without warning. Managers at the Cleveland call center repeatedly calmed employees that its call center, open for decades, was not targeted for closure. Until it was in 2011. Most employees were laid off or offered positions in Detroit, a city two hours away.

Employees feel insecure, despite recruitment campaigns that stress AT&T is a company where stability is part of the job. In reality, an out-of-state executive can decide to close call centers and other AT&T facilities without ever having to face the employees being laid off. Many of those laid off face the prospect of competing in job markets where single, younger employees are willing to accept much less and do not have the same financial obligations veteran AT&T workers have to their families.

AT&T has increased investment in network upgrades with some of its tax savings, but much of that work is farmed out to third-party contractors. AT&T’s much larger investment is in mergers and acquisitions, acquiring Time Warner (Entertainment), Inc., for $85 billion.

Critics of the tax cut plan predicted the money would be spent on almost everything but job creation and investment.

“They can either create new jobs and capex for expansion or they can create greater shareholder wealth through dividends and stock buybacks. There are some other issues to consider, but that’s the main line of reasoning why corporate tax cuts incentivize buybacks and dividends,” Fran Reed, regulatory strategist at FactSet told US News & World Report.

A typical job offer to work in an AT&T call center. Starting salary is $22,880. Maximum pay is $37,518.

History tells the rest of the story. In 2004, a one-time tax holiday to repatriate foreign earnings temporarily cut tax rates from 35% of 5.25%.

“The primary use of the repatriated funds was to increase shareholder payouts, particularly stock buybacks, rather than increase firm investments such as capital expenditures, research and development spending,” said Stephen J. Lusch, associate professor of accounting at the University of Kansas.

In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found the 2004 tax break did not deliver the promised benefits of increased employment and investment. In fact, the largest recipients of the tax break downsized and collectively fired more than 20,000 employees, while enriching shareholders and executives:

U.S. Jobs Lost Rather Than Gained. After repatriating over $150 billion under the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act (AJCA), the top 15 repatriating corporations reduced their overall U.S. workforce by 20,931 jobs, while broad-based studies of all 840 repatriating corporations found no evidence that repatriated funds increased overall U.S. employment.

Research and Development Expenditures Did Not Accelerate. After repatriating over $150 billion, the 15 top repatriating corporations showed slight decreases in the pace of their U.S. research and development expenditures, while broad-based studies of all 840 repatriating corporations found no evidence that repatriation funds increased overall U.S. research and development outlays.

Stock Repurchases Increased After Repatriation. Despite a prohibition on using repatriated funds for stock repurchases, the top 15 repatriating corporations accelerated their spending on stock buybacks after repatriation, increasing them 16% from 2004 to 2005, and 38% from 2005 to 2006, while a broad-based study of all 840 repatriating corporations estimated that each extra dollar of repatriated cash was associated with an increase of between 60 and 92 cents in payouts to shareholders.

Executive Compensation Increased After Repatriation. Despite a prohibition on using repatriated funds for executive compensation, after repatriating over $150 billion, annual compensation for the top five executives at the top 15 repatriating corporations jumped 27% from 2004 to 2005, and another 30%, from 2005 to 2006, with ten of the corporations issuing restricted stock awards of $1 million or more to senior executives.

T-Mobile USA and Sprint have agreed to a $26.5 billion all-stock merger, creating the second largest wireless company in the country with 70 million customers, rivaled only by larger Verizon Wireless with 111 million customers and potentially-third-place AT&T with 78 million.

The merged company will keep the T-Mobile name and its maverick CEO, John Legere. The board will include SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who took control of Sprint several years ago but failed to change its status as the fourth largest carrier in the country.

“This combination will create a fierce competitor with the network scale to deliver more for consumers and businesses in the form of lower prices, more innovation, and a second-to-none network experience – and do it all so much faster than either company could on its own,” Legere said in the statement.

T-Mobile’s owner, Deutsche Telekom, will control 42% of the company, with SoftBank retaining a 27% ownership stake.

This is the third time Masayoshi has attempted a merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, first failing over regulators’ antitrust/anti-competition objections during the Obama Administration, and a second time over arguments about which company would ultimately control the merged operation.

Wall Street is likely to applaud the deal because of the major cost savings the merger would bring. Tens of thousands of job losses are likely at both companies, delivering significant savings.  Sprint has already slashed its workforce from 40,000 in 2011 to fewer than 28,000 today in a series of cost cutting moves. T-Mobile is bloated by comparison, with 50,000 employees as of 2017, leaving much room for layoffs. Overlapping coverage areas could also be consolidated to reduce equipment and cell tower expenses.

Investors are also concerned about the future rollout costs of 5G wireless technology. Reducing the number of competitors offering the service would allow for higher prices and faster return on investment. But company officials are promoting the merger with claims it will accelerate the deployment of 5G networks and attract new investment. Both companies have complained about profit-draining competition, so removing one competitor to leave just three national choices for wireless service will allow carriers to boost prices and ease price wars. Executives have also worried that as the wireless marketplace gets saturated with smartphones for everyone, growing the business in the future has become a major challenge.

Legere

Consumer groups are reading between the lines of the business case for the merger and argue the reduced competition that will result will lead to higher prices, less aggressive competition and upgrades, and big layoffs. Most observers expect activists will seek to block the merger on anti-competition grounds.

“Unlike good wine or a good movie, this long-rumored deal only gets worse with age and repeat viewings. No one but T-Mobile and Sprint executives and Wall Street brokers wants to see this merger go through. Greed and a desire to reach deeper into people’s wallets by taking away their choices are the only things motivating this deal,” said Free Press policy director Matt Wood. “What we know about the wireless market is that customers actually win when mergers are blocked. That market has been relatively competitive in recent years, but only because the FCC and DoJ signaled they would block AT&T’s attempted takeover of T-Mobile in 2011, along with T-Mobile and Sprint’s several previous attempts to combine.”

Wood notes that because of fierce competition from Sprint -and- T-Mobile, their larger rivals AT&T and Verizon have been forced to reintroduce popular unlimited data plans, cut prices, and get rid of onerous multi-year service contracts.

“The notion that this deal would produce better wireless services is a flat-out fiction. We’ve seen the results from the tax cuts and other destructive deregulation in the Trump era,” Wood added. “The combined entity here would just use this deal to line its own pockets, pay down the massive debt these companies carry, and reward shareholders with more stock buybacks. It would fund further acquisitions of content companies, too, as wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T rush to join the race for targeted advertising revenues built on privacy abuses like those already built into Facebook’s and Google’s ad models.”

So far, the Trump Administration’s record on mergers is mixed. The Justice Department has shown surprising resistance to blockbuster corporate telecom mergers, and is currently suing AT&T and Time Warner, Inc. to unwind their merger proposal. But Trump’s FCC has bent over backwards in favor of mergers involving the administration’s political allies, notably Sinclair Broadcast Group’s local station acquisitions which have received favorable treatment from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

“The legal standard for approving giant horizontal mergers like this is not whether Wall Street or President Trump and his cronies likes it. Communications mergers must enhance competition and serve the public interest,” said Wood. “This deal would do just the opposite: It would destroy competition, eliminate jobs and harm the public in numerous irreversible ways. So unless Ajit Pai wants wants to add yet another blemish to his already disastrous tenure at the helm of the FCC, the chairman should speak out and show us he’s willing to do more than rubber stamp any harmful deal that crosses his desk.”

The merger is expected to get significant regulatory scrutiny.

After 10 months of negotiations between Frontier Communications and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) over the phone company’s job cuts, 1,400 Frontier workers in West Virginia and Ashburn, Va., walked off the job Sunday.

The Communications Workers of America claims they have been unable to reach an agreement on a fair contract with Frontier despite three extensions. The original contract expired in August, 2017. The CWA claims their members have waited long enough and called a strike.

“We have been very clear throughout the bargaining process that our top priority is keeping good jobs in our communities,” said Ed Mooney, vice president of CWA District 2-13. “Going on strike is never easy. It’s a hardship for our members and the customers who we are proud to serve. But the job cuts at Frontier have gone too far — we know it and Frontier’s customers know it. It’s time for Frontier to start investing in maintaining and rebuilding its network in West Virginia.”

The CWA claims Frontier has let go of some of its most experienced technicians while outsourcing an increasing number of jobs to outside contractors. Frontier has also cut over 500 jobs in the area since 2012 and has announced a plan for additional layoffs this month. The union claims Frontier’s customers are suffering too.

“We’re taking a stand,” said Johnny Bailey, president of CWA Local 2226 in Bluefield. “Customers are waiting way too long to have their problems resolved, and too often we’re back fixing the same problems over and over again. Frontier is leaving West Virginia behind. The network has been neglected and there are just not enough experienced, well-trained workers left to handle the service requests.”

According to CWA, complaints filed with the West Virginia Public Service Commission have increased steadily over the past three years, rising 69% from 639 in 2014 to 1,072 complaints in 2017.

“The complaints at Frontier have risen so high in the last few years it is has gotten to the point [… where] we are embarrassed by the product that we have to serve,” said Jeff Anderson, president of CWA Local 2004, which covers large parts of north-central West Virginia, including Harrison, Marion, Monongalia, Taylor, and Doddridge counties. “In some areas we have good service but we beg for that and we ask the company and we will do anything we can to get our people better service cause ultimately that is what keeps our jobs.”

Frontier countered the company is already extremely generous with its workforce.

“Frontier is one of West Virginia’s best employers,” the company said in a statement. “Average annual wages for the Company’s union employees exceed $64,500, and more than half of all union employees earn more than $75,000 per year. For comprehensive family medical coverage, most employees pay less than $150 per month for family coverage, with no annual deductible and low co-pays. Including employee benefits, the Company’s average employee cost per CWA member is more than $100,000.”

Frontier said it has activated its strike contingency plan, which will require Frontier’s management, outside contractors and Frontier employees from other areas to handle service calls and other tasks formerly done by striking workers.

Customers can expect to encounter Frontier’s picket lines in several places: