Thread regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

I've been part of network ops for 18 years and have had a visit to our switch from HR no more than 3 times.....the company has, is and will always be a joke....

HR is going on a phishing trip!

This is not a big deal. Its just a PR campaign where HR employees come to the stores to smile and shake all the reps hands to make them feel special. This is nothing new. It usually happens when upper management starts realizing that morale is low. It will be appropriate timing since the new iPhones will be coming out in a few weeks.

@1oej, it was not always this way and, eventually, when the scales get too ridiculously lopsided, a righteous person will once again rise. Bernie Sanders tried to but faced massive unfair and underhanded shenanigans from his side, and was likely cheated out of his rightful nomination because a certain Dem opponent thought it was a coronation rather than an election, and foolishly believed she was appealing to blue collar workers, who ended up abandoning the Dems in droves in key Union states, IMHO.

Read on:

Theodore Roosevelt and the Square Deal:

“...In the 1890s, American capitalism had fallen into the hands of a gang of oligarchs, the so-called robber barons, abetted by a corrupt class of political bosses. They conspired to oppress the legitimate interests of people running small businesses and farms, and to deny decent working conditions to the ordinary working man. Their greed fueled a political reaction in the form of populism. Its most effective champion was William Jennings Bryan who captured the presidential nomination of both the Democratic Party and the Populist Party in 1896. He promptly launched a crusade against banks, insurance companies, railroad companies and the East Coast capitalists who controlled them.

American capitalism needed to be saved from itself. Unless it could be tamed, and its worst excesses checked, there was a risk that it would be overwhelmed by a political revolution from the populist left. This was the key insight that drove the career of one of the United States’ greatest leaders, and my own political hero, Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt’s career nearly didn’t happen. He became President by accident. Reactionary opponents of his policies as New York State’s Governor wanted to get him out of the way and successfully maneuvered to have him adopted as sitting President Mackinley’s candidate for Vice President in the 1900 election. But on 6th September 1901, President Mackinley was assassinated, and Theodore Roosevelt, aged only 42, became President of the United States.

Roosevelt was no socialist. He was a Republican, who believed in the importance of dynamic privately-owned businesses to a thriving economy and a free society. But he saw that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few unscrupulous men was undermining the moral standing, and political sustainability, of capitalism itself. Accused of populism by his Republican opponents, Roosevelt said “I do not believe it is wise or safe for us as a party to take refuge in mere negation and to say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that our attitude should be one of correcting the evils, and thereby showing that whereas the populists, socialists and others really do not correct the evils at all…that we Republicans hold the just balance and set our faces as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other.”

Under the popular slogan ‘a Square Deal’, Roosevelt launched one of the most significant programs of economic reform that any President has ever overseen. Using the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, he stopped some of the most rapacious anti-competitive practices of large railroad companies, oil companies and banks. He also introduced legislation to protect consumers from unsafe food products and set up the Departments for Commerce and Labour.

Protecting the natural world against the depredations of unbridled capitalism was central to his vision. As President, he established one hundred and fifty national forests, fifty one federal bird reserves, four national game preserves, and five national parks – and protected approximately 230 million acres of public land.

In his second term as President, Roosevelt advocated the introduction of a federal income tax and a federal inheritance tax, an employer liability law for industrial injuries affecting employees, and a limitation of the working day to eight hours for federal employees. None of these measures made it onto the statute book while he was President but he started the ball rolling. Versions of them would go on to be enacted by his successors, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

For me, Teddy Roosevelt is the ideal leader. An irrepressible optimist, he was convinced that most people would work hard and make the most of the opportunities put in front of them if they were given a fair crack at the whip. His restless energy and enthusiasm powered the progressive causes that defined his presidency. But they also fueled a brusque impatience with those in his own party, whose instinct was to defend the status quo and protect the interests of privilege, whatever the cost to others, or to society’s overall wellbeing.”

In the "eventual" I will be paid in full and retired. I could leave now but choose to earn for a few more years as I am a bit young to leave, so it is not some "pipe dream" but a reality barring death and then my family will prosper. If one does not choose representation because of fear or that it wont matter in the "eventual" they will never get anywhere. When the pioneers of wireline first demanded representation they to could have feared the "eventual" but instead made a positive and profitable impact on that "eventual" for themselves and others. There will always be a battle between those with and without. Is that a reason to give up because you will eventually lose? Maybe for you or your kind not I or mine.

"The company will do as they wish to the unrepresented."

And to the "represented" eventually. Corporations tell the US government what they can and can't do -- not the other way around.

It is to late to unionize. It should have been done 20 years ago. It is like putting up sand bags before a hurricane instead of constructing a sea wall a decade earlier. The company will do as they wish to the unrepresented.

It’s going to happen eventually. Sooner the better. That way I get the settlement package so I don’t have to quit.