The best part about being a “job creator,” as the Republican Party likes to call big business, is that you get massive tax breaks handed to you, despite the din of protests by the majority of Americans. The other best part? Republicans don’t seem to care whether or not you actually create more jobs with that stolen money! As Ars Technica reports, Verizon, best known for never coming through on promises made for billions in tax subsidies, will once again do the opposite of what it promised.
Verizon is parting ways with 10,400 employees in "a voluntary separation program," despite the Trump administration providing a tax cut and various deregulatory changes that were supposed to increase investment in jobs and broadband networks. The cuts represent nearly seven percent of Verizon's workforce and were announced along with a $4.6 billion charge related to struggles in Verizon's Yahoo/AOL business division.
This is not exactly a shock or a surprise. Verizon has already been very transparent in its absolute conviction in pocketing the tax break windfall it received this year, courtesy of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The only time over the last decade that Verizon came close to completing work or anything benefiting the public, after receiving tons of public money, was this past March. That was when it agreed to a settlement to do some of the work it had actually promised to do years ago, and then just decided was too hard to do—but it liked the money, so it kept that.
The parting of ways here comes after Verizon purchased the assets of Yahoo! and AOL in 2017. From that communications infrastructure it built Oath, which was to be a big push for the telecom giant into the advertising and television programming industries. Since Verizon isn’t spending any of that tax cut money on its business expansion, people need to get cut loose.
Verizon said in the filing Tuesday that it last assessed the Oath brand's goodwill at $4.8 billion. Writing off $4.6 billion of that means Verizon now values Oath — including AOL and Yahoo subsidiaries like Yahoo.com, AOL.com, the Huffington Post, MSN and TechCrunch — at just $200 million on paper.
That doesn't mean Oath is actually worth only $200 million in cash — Oath said it still has about $5 billion of real assets remaining. On the other hand, Verizon calculated that, after taxes, the write-down would knock $4.5 billion in real money off the company's income in the fourth quarter, which ends Dec. 31.
According to Ars Technica, Verizon offered “voluntary buyouts to 44,000” of its employees in September, and received agreements from the 10,400 that are leaving. Half of those employees will leave by the end of this year, while the rest will leave by the summer of 2019. Verizon says it will be saving money with these layoffs, as well as from “other headcount reduction initiatives.” That’s a really complicated way of saying that it will be laying more people off.
The winning never ends!