Alcatel Lucent Workers Worldwide Call on Executives to Give up Golden Parachute, Bonus

Contact: Jeff Miller or Candice Johnson, CWA Communications, 202-434-1168, jmiller@cwa-union.org and cjohnson@cwa-union.org

Washington, D.C. -- In countries around the world where Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) workers have a union voice, thousands of workers are telling CEO Patricia Russo and Serge Tchuruk to forego a huge golden parachute severance payment for Russo and a merger bonus paid to Chairman Tchuruk in 2006. Petitions from workers worldwide will be presented to Russo and Tchuruk, the Alcatel Lucent chairman, in different languages, from workers who have been hit hard by the Russo team's management failures. [Read the letter to Alcatel Lucent executives.]  

Alcatel Lucent's CEO Russo is taking a severance package of more than $9.4 million, despite the company's extremely poor performance under her tenure.  

More than 6,000 workers from six countries and 17 unions signed the petition so far, with nearly 300 signers from the United States.

In the United States, "the last of the Alcatel Lucent manufacturing jobs have been eliminated and shifted offshore with the shutdown of the Merrimack Valley facility," said Ralph Maly, CWA vice president for communications and technologies.

Alcatel Lucent stripped security clearances from union installers, many of them military veterans who have been working on sensitive government projects for decades, and has engaged in brazen union-busting by setting up non-union operations in California and Texas but refusing to hire union workers for those jobs, Maly said.