Not left vs right. This is up vs down.
The “manager” title with no direct reports. Federal labor law excludes supervisors from union eligibility, so titling people into that bucket without giving them real authority shrinks who’s even allowed to organize. In a store that’s two assistant managers and a store manager who can’t organize while the reps under them can. Go up the chain and it never stops. District manager can’t. Senior director can’t. VP can’t. It is not accidental who ends up on which side of that line.
Coordinated response when union talk starts. Extra staffing so people can “take time off,” sudden one on ones to “hear concerns,” the moment a store shows organizing interest. That is a known playbook, not something that happens organically.
The “one unionized store” comparison. “See, nothing’s different, they just pay dues.” That is not proof unions do not work. It is proof one isolated store has no leverage. Power comes from density, not outliers. Funny how those stores rarely get closed while unionized.
Reorgs as the vehicle for cuts, not the goal. The org chart does not change because the new structure is better. It changes because headcount needed to shrink and restructuring is the mechanism. “Right sizing” language usually means the number came first and the chart is just catching up.
Benefits eroding slowly enough that no single year feels like the moment. Vacation accrual caps shrinking. Tuition assistance cut in half. Stock and incentive programs trimmed. Healthcare costs climbing. Pensions that used to exist for a subset of employees, gone for new hires. None of it happens all at once, so it never feels like a breaking point. It just feels like death by a thousand cuts. This is exactly the kind of thing that gets written into a contract instead of quietly decided for you year after year.
Pay secrecy norms. Talking about your raise percentage, your review score, or your pay band feels taboo, even though discussing wages with coworkers is explicitly protected activity.
“Family” language. Reframes an adversarial labor conversation as disloyalty to “the team.”
The word “union” itself gets the stigma, not the concept. Strip the label and it is just organizing together for bargaining power. People used to have real leverage in the workplace. Now the default is asking nicely for more while getting handed less.
The designated fall guy. Bring in a leader on a short runway whose whole job is the unpopular cuts. Once the hard part is done, a successor comes in and gets to be the relief, thank god it is not like it used to be, while the structural cuts already happened.
Manufactured internal strife. Departments blaming each other instead of recognizing everyone is on the same side of this. Division between departments is a lot more useful to leadership than solidarity across them.
“Savings” from layoffs are often not real savings. Convert corporate stores to franchise and the labor cost doesn’t disappear, it shifts to an indirect operator while the company still takes its cut. Lay off tenured people and rehire for the same functional need at a lower rate, and headcount looks similar in six months but the average cost per employee dropped because tenure and its pay got reset to zero. That’s not reduced need for labor. That’s wage suppression using a layoff as the delivery mechanism.
One more thing worth saying plainly. Not every union is a good union. Organizing does not automatically mean your interests are protected. Corruption can creep into any institution, including the ones built to fight for you. That does not make the underlying idea wrong. It just means accountability does not stop once something is organized, it just shifts to a different table. Our own FIOS and wireline employees are already organized through CWA. It’s not a foreign concept here.
Now let’s talk about “the company isn’t making money”
Verizon has reported a profit every single year since at least 2001. Not one loss year, through the 2008 financial crisis, through COVID, through every merger. 2020 net income was $17.8 billion. 2021 was $22.1 billion, the highest of the decade. Those were not sacrifice years where the company ate a loss to protect jobs. Those were some of the most profitable years the company has ever had.
2025 net income was $17.6 billion. Dan Schulman’s 2025 total compensation was $34.3 million, on a new contract that includes performance equity worth up to $59.5 million more. The six highest paid named executives combined made about $120 million in 2025, and that’s only the publicly disclosed portion of the leadership team.
Where does the profit actually go? $11.5 billion in dividends paid to shareholders in 2025. A $25 billion stock buyback authorized on top of that. Buybacks don’t hand cash to executives directly, they buy shares on the open market mostly from large institutional holders like index funds and pension funds, while propping up the stock price for everyone who keeps holding. Compare that to the severance cost of the November layoff of 13,000 people: $1.6 to $1.8 billion, a one time charge that’s smaller than what gets paid out in dividends alone in about six or seven weeks.
Yes, some of the money goes back into the network. $17 billion in capital expenditures in 2025. That’s real and legitimate. But that number is also being cut for 2026, down to $16 to $16.5 billion, because the heavy build phase is mostly done. Meanwhile the buyback authorization just grew.
If someone tells you layoffs are happening because the company can’t afford to pay people, that claim does not survive contact with the company’s own numbers.
So what’s the actual moral here
This was never about whether the company can afford to treat people well. It’s about a choice, made over and over, about where the money goes. And the tools used to make that choice feel inevitable, the misclassified titles, the reorg-as-cover, the stigma on the word union, the vague streamlining language, all serve one purpose: making a distributional choice look like a structural necessity. Making “we decided you get less so someone else gets more” sound like “there wasn’t enough to go around.”
US union density peaked around 1954 at roughly 35% of all workers. Today it’s about 9%. Most people in this workforce right now grew up hearing “we don’t need a union, look how well we’re treated,” during a period when that was actually true. That belief never got re-examined as conditions changed underneath it. We’re applying an old conclusion to a reality that no longer matches it.
Is it going to be perfect if we organize? No. But right now we’re fighting each other instead of the actual problem, and giving away power for free in the process. Density is the only thing that turns this from a list of grievances into actual leverage at an actual table. We’re all in the same boat here, just on different floors. What would it take to stop having this conversation store by store, department by department, and start having it together?