They aren't laying off people, it was a voluntary separation:
> Verizon Communications Inc said on Monday that about 10,400 employees will be leaving the U.S. wireless carrier by mid next year as part of the company’s voluntary separation program.
Of course they are. Many, many companies offer a “voluntary first” incentive to avoid the bad press and services they might otherwise have to provide to laid-off people. Jobs went away. Sugar-coating the exact method of ending the jobs doesn’t change that.
Your cynicism seems misplaced; up to a year's salary as severance sounds like a pretty sweet sugar-coating to me. They didn't "avoid bad press", they simply didn't do anything to merit bad press. What's wrong with someone voluntarily choosing to take money in exchange for a resignation? It's not as if there is something inherently wrong with "jobs going away" when your definition includes people voluntarily quitting their job.
To be fair, it's not entirely resignation. It's "take this X and resign, or be put on the list to be fired and get something less than X". It's still better than just being layed off, but it not as nice as a voluntary resignation.
I don't really see it as sugarcoating, this is way better than the alternative. They're giving their employees a generous heads up, offering an incentive to anyone who finds other employment, and people who really don't want to leave likely won't have to.
And they get to structure who leaves and when. You can wind down projects responsibly, shift resources over time, train people on new tasks. Far less disruptive than a sudden layoff.
Why? Because you say so? We should ignore the literal words of the press release in favor of something you think may happen?
In fact, the structure of the the offer is one that offer's a far greater incentive to those with a lot of seniority vs those who are newer. If we assume that many of these might be technician jobs under a union contract where more years of service equals higher pay, they could have more senior workers take the package, immediately hire new employees and save a decent amount of money.
Granted, I've only seen that strategy in practice with municipal workers, but it makes no more assumptions than you do.
"voluntary separation" might as well be lay-offs, because if they didn't get enough volunteers they would have laid people off without giving them a package.
I volunteered for a lay-off when they merged Aol and yahoo because I had recruiters breathing down my neck offering me big raises to leave anyway. I got enough in the severance and signing bonuses to pay off a new car and pay for most of my wife’s masters degree.
One of my major career regrets was leaving a job about 6 months before they offered voluntary layoffs with generous severance. I was already grumpy with the job. If only I held my nose and stuck around those six months, I would have been first in line for the package!
I don't think it's quite so black-and-white. Often there are multiple such positions and they are being reduced. So your position still exists and they don't want you (or rather, they would prefer to have X number of your coworkers rather than you). I don't think it's synonymous with being fired, but you can smell it from there.
Every time I'm seen a layoff in tech it is always the lower performing employees first out the door. Round 1 is normally just letting people go who should have been fired years before.
Of course this is often when the good employees start doing interviews as well.
The first round of cuts (of deadweight that avoided egregious screwups) work so well that managers get addicted and pretty soon they're cutting the actual workers and they kill the company.
Fired and laid-off are not synonyms. Fired and terminated are synonymous. However, laid off generally means the position is not continuing.
That being said, "voluntary separation" just means they are anticipating a large layoff and are attempting to reduce the overhead of determining who to let go.
Fired means you were terminated, and can be for cause or for no reason. Laid off means the position was terminated and implicitly means your performance was not a factor. They don't mean the same thing and they're not used interchangeably.
Fired became 'let go'. Layoffs became 'reduction in force'. In my experience, I've never seen 'fired' and 'laid off', or their counterparts, used interchangeably.