In a Recession, the Corporate Giants (like Verizon) Come out to Play, in a Cowardly Way!

On Sept. 4 Verizon (VZ) announced they would increase quarterly dividends by 7%.  Great news for shareholders, whom have already received $2.5 billion in dividend payments through the first half of 2008.  The following day, Verizon Wireless quietly informed their employees in St. Louis that they would close the call center on Nov. 7th, eliminating their 341 jobs.

The headlines on the same day revealed 84,000 jobs lost in the U.S.  What is another 341 jobs cut in the grand scheme and who will really notice?  Well, I, for one, did take notice.  All of the jobs cut belong to real people with real families.  Many of those people happen to be former colleagues of mine and some are among my closest friends.  In a recent post, I mentioned a friend that was fired from Citibank while imminently expecting twins.  Her husband is a manger at the Verizon St. Louis Call Center.

There was no mention on the Verizon Corporate website or the Verizon Wireless websites.  Obviously, to Verizon, firing people is not news, just business as usual.  In a statement to the St. Louis Business Journal,   Brenda Hill, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless said “Verizon hopes they apply for other internal positions,”.  She failed to mention that the internal positions are located in Lincoln Nebraska!

Under the cover of tough economic times, even the companies that are making HUGE profits can get away with lay offs, price hikes and many other unnecessary measures without criticism.  The “corporate cowards” wait for the right time to do their dirty work then blame it on the economy, while only making it worse.

Most of the 341 employees are stockholders as well, but I would bet they’d rather have their jobs than an extra 12 cents per share!

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Business News Gets Personal

Gone are the days when Business and Financial news existed primarily to inform investors in near real-time how much money they’ve won or lost on their investments.  Recently, business and financial news stories have crossed over to the mainstream and are making headlines in a big and bad way.

When I was in the US a few weeks ago, the evening news was dominated by lines of desperate people camped out in front of IndyMac in California to withdraw their money from the failed bank. Those images belong to another era, circa. 1929.

Last week in a suburb south of Boston, 53 year old Carlene Balderrama committed suicide just an hour and a half before her house was scheduled to be foreclosed and sold in auction.  Her suicide note instructed her husband and son to use the life insurance money to pay for the house. Continue reading »

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Top 10 reasons I didn’t blog on vacation

I’m back to work after a few weeks off, but was that really a vacation?  Every summer we visit family and friends in St. Louis, but does it really count as a vacation?  We always feel like we need a vacation to relax afterwards, unfortunately our Visa and Gap card statements are compelling reminders not to book another trip. Continue reading »

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