VERIZON Company offers voluntary severance to managers

The company expects thousands of its managers to accept the buyout deal.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Verizon Communications has offered a voluntary severance package to all of its 74,000 nonunion management employees, part of a bid to slash costs as rivals and rival technologies nibble away at the company's core telephone business.
The buyout package, offered to managers two weeks ago and confirmed Tuesday, comes less than a month after Verizon averted a strike by its 78,000 union employees with a five-year contract that failed to produce many of the cost-saving provisions sought by the company.
Verizon had mentioned employee buyouts as a cost-cutting measure last week, when the company warned investors that it would not meet profit forecasts for the remainder of 2003.
The package
Company spokeswoman Sharon Cohen-Hagar said Verizon expects "several thousand" managers to accept the package, which includes two weeks of pay for each year of employment up to 35 weeks, plus a bonus ranging from $15,000 to $30,000. A typical manager may earn $75,000 a year in salary, or about $1,400 per week.
A separate buyout offer will be made to at least 12,000 retirement-eligible union technicians and call center operators upon ratification of their new contract, possibly next month. That accord brought concessions on employee health-care expenses that the company estimates will save $500 million, but the deal preserved long-standing protections against layoffs and nonconsensual transfers to different cities or regions-- provisions which Verizon had been determined to eliminate.
In issuing last week's profit warning, Verizon said it expects to record a charge against fourth-quarter earnings to cover severance expenses for any employees who accept a buyout.
Like many traditional telephone companies, Verizon is beset by a litany of forces that are eating away at its core business of connecting voice calls to homes and businesses.
Regulatory battles
In addition to technological alternatives like mobile phones, e-mail and Internet-based phone services, Verizon has lost some major battles in the regulatory arena. A recent ruling by the Federal Communications Commission ensures that rivals such as AT & amp;T and MCI will be allowed to sell their own residential phone service by leasing local lines from Verizon and the other Bell monopolies at attractive rates set by state regulators.
Although Verizon has slimmed its union work force in the past with severance deals, the management buyout offer is the first of this magnitude at least since Verizon was created in 2000 through the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE, Cohen-Hagar said.
The managers will have between today and Nov. 14 to decide whether they want to accept the severance deal. Those who accept the offer will end their employment Nov. 21.