WorldCom staff who lost their jobs cheer at indictment
"We're just so excited," said Kristen Stahl-Sharp, one of thousands laid off by WorldCom in summer 2002, when a multibillion-dollar accounting scandal caused massive firings.
The news was a bit of closure for some former and current employees who have since been looking for new work, wondering where their retirement savings went and feeling frustrated that they had no answers.
Their sentiments were quickly reflected across the high-speed world Ebbers helped create, as current and former employees exchanged e-mails expressing relief and renewed anger. "Finally. If justice prevails, he'll be found guilty," a former employee said in an e-mail to current and former WorldCom workers.
For many workers, the indictment and trial are key moments in a drama in which they played bit parts.
As a tiny start-up operation, MCI successfully challenged AT&T's grip on long-distance service, eventually growing into a major telephone company. It was taken over by WorldCom in 1998, another aggressive upstart whose acquisition spree turned the company into a powerful telecommunications giant, until the company's massive accounting scandal. Since the company filed for bankruptcy more than 1-1/2 years ago, more than 20,000 WorldCom workers have lost their jobs. Employees who had invested in WorldCom stock for their retirement collectively lost more than $4 billion.
Some former employees say they've moved on to new jobs and think little of their final days at WorldCom. Others, like Troy Robertson, say they need the closure of seeing punishment meted out.
Robertson's pink slip came June 28, 2002, days after the company had admitted it improperly accounted for $3.9 billion — a sum that would eventually climb to $11 billion. On his way out of WorldCom's suburban Ashburn, Va., campus, Robertson made his feelings clear to reporters standing at the entrance: "Some people at the top ... should be punished in the severest fashion."
"I need to see how justice will prevail," Robertson said recently. "I knew the telecom boom was coming to a close, or at least a slowdown, but the selfishness of those people gave telecom a bad name."
Some employees said there were several signs in the weeks before the accounting announcement that something was seriously amiss.
For instance, said Stahl-Sharp, a former WorldCom project manager and sales-support employee, there was Ebbers' surprise announcement that there would be no more free coffee. "He got on a conference call and said the employees were stealing coffee, because he was looking at the ratio of coffee used per filter," she said.
More worrisome was the lack of sales, Stahl-Sharp said, and it also seemed that bills to and from WorldCom weren't getting paid.
Then there was the huge number of closed-door meetings.
Workers, having already lived through several rounds of layoffs, would stand up in their cubicles to see who was in the meeting, hoping it was not a precursor to more pink slips, Stahl-Sharp said.
Christi Murphy remembers her final day with digital clarity. Morale was horrible. Everyone knew layoffs were imminent, so she and a friend went to the cafeteria in the Ashburn headquarters to "get away from everyone moping," she said.
On their way, they passed a sobering scene: Employees of the company store were throwing clothes imprinted with logos from WorldCom and a company it had acquired, UUNet Technologies, to people walking in the hallway. T-shirts, hats and other merchandise were being treated as useless giveaways.
When Murphy returned, her boss asked her to come into his office. "This isn't anything personal," he told her as he gave her the bad news.
"I think I took it better than he did," she said. "He knew I was pregnant. He was so apologetic."
Murphy had planned to cash out of her stock options in January 2003 and stay home with her new baby. She and her husband had made those plans when she started in 2000, when shares were $44 each. When she was laid off, those shares were worth 2 cents each, she said.
"I was so upset with the whole situation," she said. "It was a good company when I started."
After the pink slip, Murphy worked a temporary job with an entertainment company that owns the Barnum & Bailey circus. Although it didn't pay much, it was a paycheck.
Andy Sharp was never laid off, but left in June 2003 and now works for a small telecommunications company in State College, Pa.
Only afterward did he realize just how tough working for WorldCom had been. "I didn't realize I had this until I quit, but I used to wake up every morning and think, 'Is this the day I get laid off?' Or maybe not today, but it could be tomorrow, or next Tuesday."
Still, Sharp said, he was distressed to leave friendships and the promise the company once held for him. "At one point we knew what we had as UUNet and what we were. And a lot of that was taken away by WorldCom," he said. "We had a lot of potential."
And though Murphy, too, has moved on — she now tends to her 1-year-old daughter — her resentment against Ebbers remains.
"He needs to get what's coming to him," she said. "Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs that day because of him."