Thread regarding American Electric Power Co. Inc. layoffs

One or two of ya have gotten carried away on this board but I’m glad it exists. Over the years, I’ve learned in advance about incoming layoffs that directly impacted my team, policy changes, health insurance changes, and the big one…RTO. This board is a decent resource for me without a HR, marketing or leadership filter.

I’ve heard there are some bootlickers at the top of the org who are upset about this board and surprised people are so disturbed about coming back to the office. Well, I’m just as disturbed that people use the office as a replacement for their bland social lives or to wield power over people they manage. What a shame. I’m losing faith in people.

But, I am really looking forward to resigning after ICP. Bill is either too stubborn to realize the world is changing and people crave a more balanced life where work is just a piece of the pie and not the whole thing. Or, he really believes every person needs to spend 40 hours in a building to do good work. How can a guy who thinks work should be the exact way it was 30 years ago, minus the cigarette smoke, lead AEP into an energy and regulatory landscape changing faster than any of us would have imagined possible just a decade ago? I’m gonna enjoy my summer with my family then figure the rest out later folks.

Yo Bill your wife is a ugly motherf----rand just remember you cant do any better

If someone could put together a scam phishing email with a subject line of “How to pummel your employees into submission or make them quit”, there’s a decent chance we could get Bill to click on that two or three times alone.

Did he really get phished or is it a lame attempt to seem relatable to us since he knows employees are not big fans of his...

Anyone peep the front page of AEP Now?
Bill got phished. We only need to get him 4 more times and he's out of here.
Could cyber security really come in clutch and get this guy terminated?
They'd be greeted as liberators.

Put anything in a pressure cooker, keep turning up the heat, eventually the pressure is going to exceed the limits of the containment vessel and when that happens there is a catastrophic integrity failure. Society is a lot like a pressure cooker with the same vulnerabilities and the same consequences. Ignoring wisdom is the path to destruction.

Stories of people on X in East Coast states having $500-600 a month bills and wondering if that's normal. At least that has not hit Ohio yet, if Bill wants to raise rates to that level, our customers are going to be looking elsewhere for a supplier. What I see as the main issue is Wall St wants utilities like AEP to act like a tech company and bring in double figure returns and the growth rate being the same rate. Days of a 4-5% return being great are gone because of inflation.

Not sure what's going to ki-l off the company first, the Execs and the Board or Wall St greed. Good thing I'm leaving in April.

"I hope everyone capable of finding another job does so."

I have a degree, professional certs, and over a decade of diverse experience in my field. Overall, I'd say I have a pretty solid resume. I've been applying for the last 6 months and I can't even get an interview unless I want to settle for a contract or hybrid job. It's a tough job market right now for IT.

It’s about FERC and the local commissions. That’s who decides whether these sales go through. The problem is that the OpCos were designed as a part of a larger AEP system. The OpCos have access to ServiceCo, which does basically all back office work. The utility money pool allows the OpCos to borrow at lower rates than they would otherwise.

Removing these advantages forces the OpCos to raise rates for customers, and commissions have been pushing back on that hard since inflation picked up in 2022. No one is going to okay a sale of the OpCos.

Now maybe AEP tries more minority sales like they did with the trans cos, but that won’t break up the company.

AEP can be split up. Previous failures were based on the old model and the leadership that was in place at that time. The people in charge now have the will and the motivation to make it happen.

We work to better our lives and serve our communities. We DO NOT live to work to enrich corporate officers and shareholders. We are far closer to the days leading up to the American Revolution than we are to 248 years after our victory over the immense wealth authoritarian tyranny of the British Monarchy. The only difference today is our antagonists no longer speak with a British accent.

Just fyi, before anyone gets too excited about that buy into OH and I&M, one of the funds KKR has been under investigation by the DOJ and has been charged. I imagine that will have an impact on that investment getting approved.

I hope everyone capable of finding another job does so.

AEP can’t be split up and sold off. Look at the absolute dumpster fire the approvals for Kentucky were. The Opcos are too interconnected to the ServiceCo that it would be a nightmare to do. I saw in the org chart that the team that does these deals at AEP got split up since Steve Haynes is retiring, so who knows if we even have the ability to do that at this point.

The transmission minority sale was to help pay for the new capital plan. Transmission is where all the growth is (Ohio, I&M, and Texas) with all the load coming on from data centers. It’s going to be the key focus of AEP going forward. I wouldn’t worry about that org.

Interesting. In generation, there’s been lots of talk about transmission’s future since Bill laid waste to the our structure and leadership, which was completely bizarre. We still haven’t recovered from that. Our teams have been on eggshells ever since. The transmission sale raised our antennas several notches.

Where is this stuff about transmission cuts coming from?
Transmission is already understaffed which is why the majority of our work is outsourced.
Bill said he wanted to end such heavy reliance on contractors and he wants to bring them in-house, and they've been hiring engineers like crazy. Where are the cuts?

Will be interesting to see what happens with transmission. Tons of T engineer positions posted but from what I've heard we have a hard enough time keeping T engineers let alone getting candidates to fill positions....

Bill was in New Albany today. Don't know if anyone was let go. The restructuring for transmission has still not been announced.

Can’t believe it took this long for someone to mention Transmission. Bill has been very direct in his own way that more cuts are coming. RTO was just one way to drive people out, along with org flattening. You can drive people out the easy way, or the hard way. The easy way is making things so difficult that people just decide to leave. The hard way is layoffs. There is a Reuters article in late ‘24 that was fairly bold about where AEP is heading under Bill. It directly states cutting layers of management will reduce costs.

“We have alot of wood yet to chop around the company,” AEP CEO Bill Furman said on a company earnings call. Furman declined to say which parts of the company could be put up for sale.

Would be stunned if more assets are not sold off in the near future. Transmission staff cuts coming after new unit leader is hired.

I'm running for the exit but no one will hire me.
All the people threatening to leave are facing the grim reality. There aren't thousands of jobs out there just waiting to absorb all of us, especially not remote ones.

Everyone needs to face the facts. Four CEOs in four years. Icahn buys in. Bad news for sure. He brings in a BH disciple. AEP is going to be split up and sold to the highest bidder. It’s not a new model. Stuff similar to this has been happening for decades.

Transmission already got FUAD (fu---d up and destroyed)
What else could they do?

HR/IT rumors are just rumors.

Transmission? You are in severe danger. Take that as a warning folks.

We are what is called a "natural monopoly" meaning that we are allowed to operate without competition because a competitive market would be too unwieldy or unfeasible.
You're telling me even under monopoly conditions we still can't operate effectively unless we have external investors? How? Where is the money going? I realize we are in a capital-intensive business but why is there apparently such a huge need for investor money?

Just doing some quick math, our outstanding shares at the end of 9/2024 was 0.534B.
The last 4 dividend payouts were $0.93, $0.93, $0.88, and $0.88.
This means over the past 4 quarters, we paid roughly $1.933 billion in dividend payouts. Almost $2B cost of parasitism. Every year. Imagine if that money could have gone to capital projects, or back to our employees, or passed down as savings to consumers.

When you go to the AEP website, the very first tab right at the top of the page is "Investors." Proudly proclaiming front and center who this company is for.

Many more cut backs needed to keep electrical bills lower, without substantial increases. The managers and office workers will need to go, the workers have already been cut too thin.

The idea that shareholders come first is known as shareholder primacy, a corporate governance theory that prioritizes shareholders over other stakeholders. This theory is based on the idea that shareholders are the only stakeholders who take risks that deserve a variable reward. Shareholders never went up in a bucket or climbed a pole in an ice storm to restore power while ice coated tree tops and branches are snapping and going off like shotg-ns before crashing to the ground. They never restored power in 100 degree plus heat with high humidity. They have never walked a distribution right of ways choked with undergrowth, infested with ticks, chiggers, yellow jackets, snakes and thorns that can give you cellulitis. They can always acquire more wealth but we only have one life to risk. I guess we know how much our lives are valued by shareholders and corporate officers. If you die, they will come out and pull the AEP logoed shirt off your lifeless body and say let the buzzards clean him up, its cheaper.

I've heard IT and HR are being cut. Not sure about what level. Also demotions continue.

Flattening is so important, it's very important that we frontline employees are closer to Bill on the organization chart. That way when he ignores our feedback we really get the message that we are irrelevant to his decision making.

Who claims people are being let go "as we speak" without substantiation? I'm not saying it isn't true, but don't go dark for hours if one knows something.

I believe IT and Finance are the last 2 groups left to go thru org flattening.

Man i would pay to see them walk Therace out that trash ruined AEP!

@1pdx+1qB6FXi3
What areas, departments?

Post ID: @1pdx+1qB6FXi3

You said managers are being let go as we speak - what group(s) are being impacted (IT, opco's, etc.)?

Managers being let go as well speak.

The plan is to sell off assets to keep credit metrics investment grade, divide the company up so it’s easier to stuff things in rate base in the respective regulated jurisdictions, pray load growth goes up with data centers and continue to reduce head count in groups that aren’t profit centers so you can stuff more in rate base. Any strategy built on m&a is foolish because who knows what regulators will say.

Not sure, if you spin off the west and then merge, you might have basically 3 BH energy companies from the East Coast to the West Coast. Spinning off the southern states would basically create CSW again or they could merge with someone else down south. I understand that would take a lot of states to say yes. If not, what's the plan? Turn AEP into a shell of it's former self with 10k employees and 10k contractors operating a company with barely any growth.
I don't see a plan.

I mentioned a BH acquisition/merger to coworkers the day he started and they looked at me like I was nuts. Personally, I think it would be tough with regulators on certain states.

I think he's here to go scorched earth for one last big payday and then disappear into the shadows. He is purely mercenary.

Bill is already at retirement age for a CEO. It begs the question why come back? Why leave another company after 6 months only to come here. I understand the took the age cap off for him but really, how long will he want to stay? End of 2025? End of 2026? Is he here to set the company up for a merger and then to walk away. Remember what happened to CSW, most of the CSW folks were the ones cut in the end. Either by buy out or forced retirement. If AEP is the target, most of the cut will still come AEO side. I seriously doubt AEP has the ability to buy another firm unless it's really small. BH operations are mostly in the west so I could see the west service area being off loaded to someone else when the East merge with BH. That's my prediction.