Thread regarding American Electric Power Co. Inc. layoffs

This is an excerpt from The Columbus Dispatch dated Jan 21st, 2025.

According to the SEC's order, AEP controlled Empowering Ohio's spending and did so to "further American Electric Power's own interest." It said Empowering Ohio contributed a total of $1.2 million to organizations associated with Householder.

The order also noted that in March 2020 an AEP employee and the company's then-CEO Nicholas Akins met with Householder for lunch at AEP headquarters. At that meeting, Householder discussed an initiative to revise Ohio political term limits that would have allowed Householder to remain speaker for an additional 16 years.

After the meeting, Akins suggested the company consider whether Empowering Ohio should support the initiative.

"A few weeks later, at the direction of the American Electric Power Employee, Empowering Ohio contributed $500,000 to a newly-created 501(c)(4) organization associated with Householder to support the term-limit initiative," the order stated.

In its Friday release, AEP stated that the SEC found the company violated federal securities laws in connection with its relationship with a "social welfare organization."

AEP corporate actively and financially supported political and economic terrorism against the citizens and taxpayers of Ohio and the federal government knows it and they only paid a $19 million fine.

@1r0y+1qB6FXi3 and then you have the likes of George Soros born 2930
Carl maybe bad but at least we're not dealing with the the like that are actually
under the barrel.

Carl Ichan was born in 1936. And he's still raiding.
It's amazing how these evil freaks live so long. Must be part of the pact with Satan.

I really don't think we are out of the woods yet, there are always a bunch of looming stories of state-level congressmen drafting legislation to do something about the rates. Everyone I talk to says they are being crushed by their AEP electric bill. Many people say their electric bill is more expensive than their mortgage payment. There is a huge amount of anger and frustration among our customers and we are starting to attract government attention over this.

By keeping IT remote, it helps them underpay the IT folks who don’t want to live in Columbus. People will take the terrible salaries from AEP, if they can stay at home while doing it. Imagine if they limited the roles to just Columbus. The pool would be much smaller, so they’d have to pay more to be competitive. Now they can hire folks all over the country who will accept these roles for way less.

If you think he's going for the cash balance pension funds then the smart move would be to leave, take the cash as a lump sum and roll it over to an IRA. If he were to take the funds before hand, the company is still on the hook for the funds. Not sure if that plan is protected by the federal pension insurance fund, it's like FDIC but for pension. I do know it's broke so it may be on the company to come up with the funds. Either way, when you leave take it as a lump sum.
As for IT, yes Therace cut people because she wanted to control who left and who stayed. She's a control freak and told HR she would run IT as she see's fit and for them to stay out of her way. She's just a cu-t, plain and simple. May is her 5th year, maybe we'll get lucky and she'll leave. I know if she does, I'm not going to send her a card unless it says go to he-l

I think Icahn and his team covering utilities believes Julie’s focus on the regulated businesses was a mistake. The idea was that because interest rates were so low, AEP was able to invest a lot and stuff it into rate base. It seems very low risk, right?

AEP leadership at the time severely underestimated the risk of the state commissions pushing back on rising customer rates, especially as inflation popped after the invasion of Ukraine. So, then Sloat’s plan to sell off the underperformers like Kentucky, sell off the competitive businesses like Onsite and the competitive renewables portfolio, and invest those proceeds into the regulated OpCos was a huge blunder.

So AEP was stuck with some huge commitments to the OpCos without a safe way to get a return on those investments. Icahn saw this and jumped at the chance to upend the business.

First is to get the finances under control. The sale of Kentucky getting axed really sc--wed AEP as the company needed those funds to invest elsewhere. The FFO to debt looked bad and risked a downgrade, which would have made the debt way more expensive. The sale of the contracted renewables portfolio and now the minority sale of the transcos have helped. AEP will have to issue equity, but not right now. Maybe next year. The finances are under control.

And with the data center story now, the growth prospects look better for the company than they have since its incorporation.

AEP could be a gold mine for an evil capitalist parasite like Icahn, which is terrible for the employees.

@1qzj+1qB6FXi3
Hopefully the ones we have left are better at typing code than you are at making sentences (or friends).
You might also want to treat whatever exposed nerve triggers these fits, before you hurt yourself.

Um, hey there sport. IT was exempt from the voluntary layoff BECAUSE THYE HAD AN INVOLUNTARY LAYOFF A COUPLE MONTHS EARLIER THAT DISCARDED A LARGER PERCENTAGE OFMITS EMPLOYEES THAN THE VOLUNTARY ONE. Try to keep up an do some work instead of whining in here every day.

From the "citizen.org" article someone posted below. What I don't understand is how the board allowed Icahn to take control of the company with just 1% of the shares. This makes no sense! This article also puts our recent rising stock price in a completely different light.

"Activist investor Carl C. Icahn owns only 1% of AEP’s voting shares. For typical investors, owning 1% of voting shares grants no special rights or privileges, let alone control over two seats on the board of directors. But Mr. Icahn is not a typical investor. He is an activist investor—earning the colloquial moniker “corporate raider”[5]— specializing in engaging in protracted, hostile shareholder fights to gain control of target corporations for the sole purpose of moving the company’s stock price to a pre-determined target that bestows considerable profit for Mr. Icahn. Icahn is uninterested in providing long-term capital investment to assist a public utility in ensuring the reliability of the bulk power market or delivering just and reasonable rates; rather, Mr. Icahn exploits regulatory loopholes to transform companies into mere speculative commodities to serve his short-term investment whims.

Companies are eager to avoid the tumult that accompanies such hostile takeovers, and therefore typically accommodate Icahn’s requests and hand him control over the board despite owning a trivial 1% of voting shares. But AEP is not most companies: it is a public utility governed by the strong public interest protections demanded by Congress."

The mandate is BS, and how you can tell is that it does not apply to IT. The voluntary severance also did not apply to IT. Watch what they do, not what they say. He wants rid of most of the back office. That's the main reason for the RTO. This fossil knows the Accountants work crazy hours and across states with each other, successfully. Staring at the back of a traffic jam over an hour a day isn't an improvement. It's how you do more cuts. That's it.

@1qyb+1qB6FXi3 - It's because he's there to raid the pension fund.

Cook has always struggled to maintain a respectful workplace. The place had food trucks that have refused to come there becauses people are rude. That should tell you about the culture and is a reflection of leaders. The thing that is most concerning is that the bully leaders have always been there, but AEP had a culture that was based around employees. With a CEO who appears to be a bully and probably promotes bullying, the bullies that may have been holding back will come out and will not hold anything back.

All this cloak and dagger stuff is a bit much. There's nothing that happens day to day that is going to make anything but a ripple in the pond called Wall St. AEP is small fry compared to most companies on NASDAQ. What Carl is seeing in AEP is beyond me, he might make a few million at the end of the day but he's not going to make a ki-ling on this company. Our debt level is too high and most of our assets are not easily converted into cash.
If he was going to have made a move it would have been with the sale of the stake in Transmission. The board could have said they were using the $2b in a stock but back which would have given him a chance to cash out but that didn't happen. Still not sure what his end game is

https://www.citizen.org/article/icahn-aep-american-electric-power/

Might be old news... But, not sure if anyone has seen this. Everyone should email the guy that filed the protest and wrote the article, Tyson Slocum. If I were you, create a burner email account with some place like ProtonMail, and send this guy inside details of the craziness. Things like employee communication emails with the date, AEPnow articles with the date, and anything else that might be of interest to someone that ties something shady or wrong with Bill, TR, or other cronies.

Don't take screenshots on your work provided computer. Use a personal phone to take the image, go to Walmart and get a $20 hdmi to usb capture device, or remote into your work pc from personal pc and make sure to take the screenshot from your personal pc's OS.

Someone that obviously studies this stuff in depth might be able to piece together something that could really force some change. Seems like he might have a fairly loud voice too.

Tyson Slocum
tslocum@citizen.org

I know what you might be thinking, "it might hurt the company's image...". Uhh, the image is already the lowest it's ever been. In a world like we have today, it is very likely that the only way to affect change at the top, is to circumvent them all together. Now days, whistleblowing is the way unfortunately.

Bill will get his for sure, only problem is it'll be the Board giving him 1000's of shares for pennies. We may never get another ICP but Bill gets his.

Wait till Bill gets the municipality and county emergency response bills from the Fire Departments for all the burning tree calls they responded to because of primary contact. Good luck paying a dividend in the first quarter of 2025. It already costs more to ignore the problem than to fix the problem. Now local tax payers are going to rake back those rate increases through creative locality and municipality service fees since the rate increases went to shareholders instead of increased right of way trimming.

Rumor circulating ICP was .91 but Ferhman took 5% off top and is now .863. Supposedly, he didn't feel like we deserved anything the last 5 years. Sounds like with new metrics, next year will be almost impossible to achieve.

We missed by a penny but best the year. We should get a decent bonus all things considered. Otherwise, we'll see the company cut into the ICP as a way of savings money, pi----g more people off and then seeing how many will just leave. It really is starting to look like they want as many of the employees to leave. Replace them with lower salary employees and keep the dough. I may be jumping the g-n but I have a bad feeling about the entire ICP process right now. RTO will be an added expense and little to no bonus doesn't help with wanting me to stay.

Nope, we missed. Employees will now carry the burden. We'll be unburden by the burden we carry once our burden has been removed.

We'll know in a few hours which way the wind is blowing. My guess with the weather, we'll beat the best by 2 cents.

The real question is why don't they care? If RTO is having such a negative effect on morale and culture, the results they thing they are going to achieve must be worth it. What are the results, higher growth rate, less O&M cost, higher EPS?
Let's say the lose another 10% of the employees, that's 1600 people they don't have to buyout. That would help the EPS. Maybe it's all planned, they want to get to 14000 and if pi----g off the employees, so be it.
I don't know what the number is, it just seems, it's higher than what they want it to be but they don't want to spend anymore money to buy people out.

So AEP had a 7% growth in operating earnings, but Bill Fehrman had the nerve to say the forced RTO mandate is because of "performance" reasons. How does that make any damn sense?

Bill Fehrman is intent on destroying this company and it's culture. When everything is in ruins, the only thing left to ask is, "Happy Bill?"

Doesn’t matter, none of Bill’s direct reports will stand up to him. When masses leave after ICP will be wake up call, but not even sure that will matter

The negative perception of AEP/Bill goes way beyond RTO. Had a candidate for a vacancy ask me about the culture, and say they’d seen some really negative things on Glassdoor. I went to check it out and Bill’s approval rating is 36%. AEP also has a terrible score as a company. For the sake of comparison, Akins was at 75%.

A friend of mine does HR consulting and said the two scores combined would put AEP in the bottom 10% of all Fortune 500 companies on Glassdoor and that the CEO score is one of the worst they’ve ever seen at a large company. Does leadership have any idea how bad things are right now?? We have no shot at attracting or retaining talent.

But where will we go? News alert Bill, there are companies hiring and that care about employees. Just hang on until ICP payout in March

I've been at AEP (Indiana Michigan Power) for over 25 years working at DC Cook Nuclear Plant. The morale here is already very bad. RTO is just making it worse! They don't care about what we think or feel. Management here has absolutely no empathy. Our station management has not even addressed the RTO mandate. Employees and supervisors have been stating concerns but nobody is listening. They really don't care if employees walk.

Don't waste time on it. I don't care how many people sign that f---ing petition," Dimon said when asked about the in-person work policy during a town hall meeting Wednesday

Same mindset as Bill.

Everyone is bringing up what happens when the talent who can leave actually do. The bigger damage will be people who can't do that. You're going to drag a whole lot of latent rage into those offices. That should be a fun culture experiment.

Uhhh did anyone else notice that if AEP grows at the same pace it did this year or less, there will be no ICP next year?? Think about that. Bill says all factors matter equally moving forward. But, we could have zero safety incidents, no phishing fails and groundbreaking reliability and still get no ICP if weather and inflation don’t cooperate. Hmm.

So for the record, you’re being asked to see less of your family, spend more on extraneous things (Gas, food, childcare etc.) give up any hope of upward mobility due to org flattening, do more work than ever because your colleagues that have left still aren’t being replaced…for less take home pay than you’ve likely seen in years and potentially no bonus if we have average growth.

HUH?!!? Why would anyone with options stay here??

There will be an exception process for some to remain remote. Your manager will have to submit it for you, and it goes up pretty high to determine if it will be accepted.

I saw a study that showed companies that implement 5 day in office policies see anywhere from 20-40% attrition within one year of implementing the policy. Similarly several recruiters have gathered data on hiring trends. As for hiring, the average time to fill a remote position is 18-35 days. A hybrid position is 25-42 days, and on site 5 days in office a whopping 8-12 months. How does Bill think he is going to reduce contract work and hire in house with numbers like these? He is so far disconnected from reality. Whatever talent is left at AEP will be long gone by this summer and all those metrics he discussed on the employee webcast today I can guarantee will get way worse.

Ohio customers paying 55% more for electricity than they were in 2019 is absolutely ridiculous. It seems to me that average consumers are footing the bill for the explosive commercial load growth in central Ohio.

If this guy on the employee webcast thinks every job matters why are they so bent on full time RTO? There’s going to be a massive loss of talent and there can’t be a 54B plan being executed when the engineers don’t exist…

For Phish test, make sure you create a rule to send all external emails to an external folder. At least that way you you'll have an idea or not if the email MAY contain a phishing attempt. OR BETTER YET, on all external emails, send them to Security to have them check them out. I'll bet that'll get someone's attention. I'll bet Security is not set up to handle a few 1000 email checks.

What is it with the same 3 people down voting anything that is negative towards Therace? She did a terrible job at JCPENNEY, Target and Country Financial. Her main MO is to come in, outsource IT services because she doesn't know how to run them. It's easier for her to blame the contractor (TCS) and the old staff for not making it work. After she fu--s up so bad, she leaves for another company to do the same thing. She's like a parasite.
In our case, we're the latest host. Just wondering if the host will survive? What a cu-t.

The Phish tests are being used as a way to terminate for cause. Security didnt ask for that sh-t to be done like that and they are being hit with retaliation by people who dont understand they are just being used to thin the herd even more.

That “Ask Bill” article borders on propaganda. There is no possible way Bill didn’t get a deluge of RTO questions and feedback from employees. To ignore RTO completely in that article discredits the entire premise of transparency around “Ask Bill.” Incredibly odd choice.

With a dozen colleges and a major university in the local area, there is plenty of IT talent available in Columbus. We do not need to go looking in other states unless that person wants to move back to Columbus.
You can not tell me that having half of IT outsourced to India was because of a lack of talent. It was all about money and the best part, it never saved any money, if it did, we would not have had to get rid of a number of people last Jan. That bi--h Therace had to restrict IT from taking the buy out otherwise there would have been a huge number would have taken it and IT would have been sc--wed. She also knew TCS could not take on the extra load because they DIDN'T have the talent.
So in the end IT is worse off since Therace took over and it's not getting better.

New episode of ASK BILL came out today.
Questions about RTO were conspicuously absent.
I guess employees just have nothing to say about it!