Lucent Shareholders Meeting February 15, 2006

LUCENT SHAREHOLDERS MEETING
Ralph V. Maly, Jr. Vice President
CWA Communications & Technologies
February 15, 2006

Good Morning, Pat & shareholders, my name is Ralph Maly. I am a shareholder and the Vice President of the Communications Workers of America representing employees of Lucent, AT&T & Avaya.

I come to you today along with many CWA members and retirees to first tell the Board of Directors that for once they made a good decision in promoting Frank D'Amelio to the Chief Operating Officer. Frank, in our mind is the main reason Lucent is still in business today. The second reason I am here today is to voice our concerns over the continued excessive bonuses paid to the senior leadership of Lucent Technologies.

As I said last year at the Shareholders meeting, in a time when everyone is being asked to make major sacrifices to help keep Lucent from going under we find the Board of Directors doling out huge bonuses for senior officers in order to keep them from jumping ship - huge bonuses that do not meet any standard of business success. An example being services, where we bargained a new low wage title to help grow the business, but over a year later we still have little or no growth, revenues are still flat and bonuses far exceed performance.

Everyone understands pay raises and/or bonuses. The bargained for workforce received such this year. However, at a time when thousands of Lucent employees have lost their jobs and others have made sacrifices to help the business we find these bonuses of 30 to 50% above salary to the senior leadership to be outrageous and highly insensitive to the pain your workforce and retirees are experiencing. It is a question of leadership.

The board of directors must be held responsible for the misuse of their authority. It is a total lack of respect to all those former employees who helped make this company a success over the years.

Again as I stated last year, we were told this was the only way Lucent could keep the talent they have from leaving. Then I must again ask you the question what are they being paid for? Isn't salary enough? Where is their allegiance to Lucent? Certainly, the thousands of Lucent retirees have proven their allegiance.

I would ask the Board of Directors to do the right thing, as they did with Frank, and stop this obscene excessive executive bonuses.