MATT OLBERDING/Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 7:00 pm
Thursday was Theodore Wright’s birthday, and as a present to himself, he took the day off to attend the Verizon annual shareholders meeting at The Cornhusker.
The Lincoln resident and Verizon shareholder even stepped up to the microphone to ask company CEO Ivan Seidenberg when Lincoln would be getting Verizon’s popular FiOS fiber-optic Internet and cable television service.
That brought a much-needed bit of levity to what was an otherwise tense and terse meeting of Verizon directors and managers with about 200 shareholders and employees.
Though Verizon has greatly increased its presence in Nebraska, it’s all on the wireless side of the business, while FiOS is a service for Verizon’s landline customers, who are mostly in the eastern and southeastern U.S.
Verizon’s choice of Lincoln marked the second time in three years that a major Fortune 100 company came to the Capital City for its annual meeting.
And like the Pfizer annual meeting in 2006, this meeting brought controversy.
Verizon officials said they chose Lincoln to showcase the company’s investment in the new Verizon Wireless customer service center, which opened last year and now employs more than 330 people.
Union officials, however, contended the company came out to the Plains to get away from them during a year in which contracts are up for renegotiation.
If that was the case, it didn’t work.
About 50 current and retired members of the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, some of them Verizon employees and some from as far away as New York and Massachusetts, set up shop outside The Cornhusker before the meeting, posing for photographs and handing out flyers to people entering the Burnham Yates Conference Center.
They also showed off boxes of shareholder proxy votes in favor of a proposal to prohibit the CEO or any other executive officer from being chairman of the board. Both of those positions are currently held by Seidenberg.
Of three shareholder proposals voted on at Thursday’s meeting, that one got the most support, with about 20 percent of votes in favor.
In arguing for the proposal and another that would have eliminated stock options for executives, Bob Rehm, chief financial officer of the Association of BellTel Retirees, said more incentives were needed to make sure the executives and board of directors are working for shareholders rather than for themselves.
He called Verizon’s executive pay packages “outrageous” and noted that while Verizon’s stock price has declined 45 percent since 1995, executive compensation has more than doubled.
“Something is definitely wrong with all this,” Rehm said.
Seidenberg, whose total 2007 compensation was more than $26.5 million, countered that the company has been doing well recently.
Its first-quarter earnings, announced earlier this week, were up nearly 10 percent over the same period in 2007. And he said Verizon’s stock price is up 30 percent in the past three years, including a 20 percent increase last year.
He conceded, however, that the company has room for improvement.
“We would admit we’re not perfect,” Seidenberg said. “We have more things we can do.”
Wright, who said he’s happy with Verizon and its stock performance, was unaware of the depth of the disagreements between the company and its unions and said he was surprised — but impressed — with the union turnout in Lincoln.
“The union people made things a little spicier.”
Reach Matt Olberding at 473-2647 or molberding@journalstar.com.