Del Jones and Michelle Kessler USA TODAY
Inside WorldCom, employees say they long ago started laughing when the company gave them stock options as an incentive.
''You felt that you were an unnecessary expense as an employee,'' says Ezra Cohen, who worked for WorldCom's MCI division in Atlanta. He was laid off in April after nine years, long enough to see the value of his stock options collapse from $500,000. Fortunately, he says, most of his retirement is invested in other stocks.
WorldCom did not require any 401(k) retirement money to be put in company stock, but many employees elected to do so, and many others bought WorldCom shares under the assumption that the price had bottomed out from $69 three years ago to $48 two years ago to $15 one year ago, and now shares have dropped to 10 cents in trading on Island Electronic Marketplace Wednesday.
''Sixteen years of blood, sweat, tears and loyalty,'' says Bobby Boles, a former WorldCom employee from Cartersville, Ga. ''Now, my retirement plan isn't worth a flip nickel.''
In an e-mail to employees Wednesday, CEO John Sidgmore said he was shocked at the discovery that the company has improperly booked $3.9 billion in expenses, but remains optimistic about WorldCom's future.
Rick Ross, a contractor in Franklin, N.C., who does installations exclusively for WorldCom throughout the South, expects he could be out of a job with his contracting company as soon as Friday, when WorldCom says it will begin cutting 17,000 jobs, 21% of its workforce. He says he's never quit a job in his life.
''I'm going to ride this horse until the quicksand starts running up my nose,'' Ross says.
But most employees see themselves less as intrepid jockeys and more like dumb frogs put into cold water on the stove and incrementally brought to boil.
In phone interviews with USA TODAY Wednesday, workers said they should have jumped long ago. Now, jobs are scarce throughout the depressed telecommunications ( news - external web site) industry. Many would quit even now, but say they can't find anything else and are hoping for a little severance money.
Workers described the office atmosphere at WorldCom Wednesday as gloomy to bitter. Many said they were doing little work while awaiting information from the company. Their bosses sat behind closed doors and talked on the phone. Workers surmised that the topic of phone conversations was their future.
Most believe that poor accounting did not cause the company's collapse, but that it was in response to mismanagement that has been going on since WorldCom acquired MCI in 1998.
That is a date that they despise. Those who worked for MCI and came to WorldCom four years ago with the merger now sadly remember MCI fondly as being a tough, but challenging company. Hours were long, but there were rewards for performance and much opportunity for advancement.
Boles joined MCI as a technician in 1985. He says he loved his job, and worked his way up to become a senior engineer. But he says things started to change after the merger. Customer service declined under new management, he says, and big customers left. ''In the last year and a half that I was there, I watched the company go down the tubes,'' he says. Boles says he was laid off last year and hasn't been able to find a job. He delivers pizzas to make ends meet.
WorldCom contractor Jeffrey Creedon of Reno, who was laid off a week ago, says rumors of the company's potential demise have been floating around since February.
''Some people would joke: 'If I'm here tomorrow, I'll see you,' '' Creedon says.
Cohen says he loved his managerial job at MCI, but after WorldCom acquired the company, it became ''one of the worst companies I ever worked for.'' WorldCom executives controlled everything from the top, he says.
He says he had to submit a $20 pizza receipt to a vice president for approval, and had to save receipts for every charge above $5. The company took away office coffee pots to cut costs, although they were later returned.
The company is running so lean that it no longer provides silverware and paper plates in the lunchroom, says Brian Cantor, who came to work Wednesday, even though he thinks he will lose his job on Friday.
This kind of financial micromanaging makes it hard to believe that WorldCom executives could have made a mistake on their earnings statements, Cohen says.
Cohen groans when talking about former CEO Bernie Ebbers' lucrative severance package. Ebbers resigned in April. ''That is pure, unmitigated greed,'' Cohen says. ''The people at the top are the ones that are going to walk away.''
Stock options lured Cantor to WorldCom right out of college. Now, those options are worthless, but he can't find another job and will stay put until he gets his pink slip, he says.
Cohen says friends who are still at WorldCom are planning to stick around because the job market it so tight.
Rachel Mills, a WorldCom network engineer in Durham, N.C., says the networks she monitors were working well Wednesday. Employees were doing the best they could under the circumstances, she says. ''The news makes us nervous, but we're plugging away. We're not going anywhere.''
New CEO Sidgmore wants to clean up the company, Mills says. ''I see this as a turning point.'' If not, she can move on. At 27, Mills does not worry much about her retirement plan.