LONG GOODBYE

What year is it? In the dour, downsizing months of 2001 and 2002, most telecom employees — fearing at every moment that their next paycheck would come with a pink slip — probably prayed for 2005 to come so that the industry recovery would restore their job security. This isn't that year.

Though the overall condition of the industry has improved much in the last few years, jobs are still in peril at every water cooler. More than 35,000 telecom workers were laid off in this year's first quarter alone, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. No other tech sector was hit as hard.

Along with the rosy news that its customers are increasing spending, AT&T announced last week that work force reductions will continue this year, though — and here's more good news — not as severely as last year, when 23% of the company was let go.

Lucent Technologies is a much more stable organization today than it was four years ago, but the fact may not be of comfort to its work force. The firm cut 800 people from its ranks over the last six months, mostly from its weakened wireline division. And with the announcement that the group is merging with Lucent's mobility division, CEO Pat Russo intimated last week that more jobs will be lost.

Component vendor JDS Uniphase will cut about 850 employees by the end of this year, it revealed last week — 700 in manufacturing and another 150 support personnel as it phases out products and sends more work to China.

Because layoffs have persisted in telecom for years, they no longer gain as much attention, especially as the tide has receded in a relative sense. In the past few years, Lucent alone has clear-cut more than 125,000 jobs, so what's a few hundred more?

Of course, to say that there are victims in this story doesn't necessarily mean that there are villains. Corporate downsizing is an act of fiduciary duty, not callous indifference. And whether these cuts are unjust — in the face of exuberant executive pay or misapplied capital — is anyone's judgment to make.

The cruelest face in this crowd may be the calendar's. Exactly which circle of hell is it in which hard-working telecom employees sweat their way through five long years of ax-dodging only to watch the light at the end of the tunnel go out? The industry's remaining constituents, facing the virtual certainty of more layoffs in the wake of big-carrier consolidation, are left to keep waiting for 2005 or perhaps paint a new number on their hopes. 2008?