That's all this latest rumor is about. You buy a company, you get a chance to get rid of redundant positions, and somehow the number of such positions is always huge. As if not all of them are redundant, but were somehow marked as such because, why not use the opportunity to the max?
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@ka
Maybe the execs and some management for KDL were against handing their “keys” over to WS. I do remember there being an issue with turning their books over to them. But, I can tell you that most, if not all, field employees, were ecstatic that we got picked up by WS because KDL paid what they called salary 50, or something like that. So before you could get paid at an overtime rate, you had to clock 50 hours for the week. It was crazy how creative we got to clock 50 hours by eob Wednesdays. So techs reporting 60-70 hours a week was normal and my supervisor at the time never questioned my time sheet. When the stain came along, they turned our salary into an hourly rate, plus, by that time, I was one of two people in the state and I got 1 hour of on call pay for each week day and two hours for the weekend days. Every day until Paetec came on board. They were the beginning of the end for WS, imo. They had way too much ancient equipment providing dial tone and a ton of techs to install and maintain it. Even their fiber network was cr-ppy and constantly getting cut. One time I responded to a cable cut to find out that someone cut out a 200 ft section from one pole to another and we didn’t find the missing chunk.
@fx I remember those day all too well. None of those acquired folks were happy. KDL, P-Tec and Nuvox were especially resistant. The ones that were left after 50% got RIF'd, were assimilated. Fun Story: One of the KDL folks that got RIf'd activated the Halon system in the data center area.
@b8 this is exactly what was happening during the Iowa Telecom, Nuvox, KDL, Paetec, and Earthlink acquisitions. There was no real strategy there except 'buy other people's customers so our subscriber decline doesn't look so bad'.
Problem was Paetec was REALLY big and Windstream had to loan them 450 million dollars just so they could stay solvent until the deal closed.
As someone in accounting at the time we saw how cooked their books were.
That was sorta 'the end'. Then USF reductions by federal and state governments started getting bigger and compensation for intrastate/interstate voice started going away and we were hurting.
The rest of the story has been told.
It is also how a company covers up the real “loss” of customers they are having… buy another company then they will tout “we are growing our fiber customer base at record pace!” When really the customer counts grew only because of the acquired company customer counts being added in and compared to customer counts prior to the purchase…when without the purchased company they would still be losing customers….It is all “Smoke and Mirrors”. Buckle up… all they care about is their bottom dollar… not any of us.