Rumor Mill: Circuit City bankruptcy triggers Verizon Wireless layoffs

Circuit City's financial meltdown is now apparently burning Verizon Wireless employees assigned to the stores. Fierce comments and outside reports point to layoffs for Verizon Wireless sales staff formerly embedded at Circuit City.

Numerous comments made on a Fierce story discussing rumors of job cuts [1] at Verizon indicate a culling of mid-level sales representatives, most from Verizon's now-dead Circuit City footprint. Engadget is saying over 90 percent of employees who showed up to work at Circuit City will now have to file for unemployment benefits -- understandable since Circuit City is now gone. But Howard Waterman, of Verizon Wireless, said this figure was way off in an email exchange.

"We are retaining 55% of our employees that worked in Circuit City locations," Waterman wrote. "For those we cannot unfortunately retain, we will provide severance packages and outplacement services." Waterman also said that the layoffs are solely related to the Circuit City store closings, and that rumors of layoffs of senior sales staff in the Gulf Coast area are "absolutely not true."

Anonymous comments being posted on Fierce indicate that departing Verizon Wireless employees will get severance pay at two weeks for every year of employment with the company. According to these comments, the company notified the employees that they were not terminated for performance and can be re-hired somewhere else within the company.

If you are one of the affected employees, please feel free to contact us [2] with more details about the downsizing.

For more:
- see the Engadget article here [3]