Verizon says 10K+ employees, or about 7% of its workforce, have accepted its voluntary severance packages which were offered to ~44K employees in September
Sara Salinas / CNBC :
Context & Ripple Effects
The September offer to ~44,000 employees arrived alongside Verizon's $700M agreement transferring IT workers to Infosys, so the two moves read as one headcount program: outsource a function, then pay others to walk. A 10,000-plus take-up — about 7% of the workforce — means nearly a quarter of those offered chose the exit.
This is also the opening move of a pattern the corpus keeps returning to: weeks later Verizon Media followed with its own 7% global workforce cut under Guru Gowrappan, and by late 2025 Verizon was back at it with a ~15,000-job reduction — its largest ever — plus notifications to 13,000+ affected employees.
First-order effects
- Roughly 10,000 Verizon employees exit voluntarily, shrinking the company by ~7% without a single forced termination — the cheapest possible way to hit a cost target.
- Infosys takes over the IT work behind the transferred roles, converting Verizon salary lines into a contracted outsourcing fee.
Second-order effects
- Verizon Media's separate 7% cut weeks later suggests the parent's cost discipline cascaded down into subsidiaries rather than stopping at the network business.
- Voluntary-severance-as-cost-control gets validated as a playbook for large employers — Amazon ran the same play in 2022, offering resignations with deadlines beyond its formal layoffs.
Third-order effects
- The 2025 rounds show the structural lesson: voluntary buyouts trim a cycle's costs but don't reset the trajectory — Verizon returned seven years later for its largest-ever cut, indicating recurring restructuring is now normal operating behavior for carriers.
- If voluntary programs keep preceding forced ones, employees face a standing choice between taking an offered package now or waiting for a harsher round later — shifting bargaining leverage toward employers.
The trend: Large US employers are normalizing voluntary severance as the first tranche of recurring workforce reductions, paired with outsourcing, rather than as a one-time reset.