Posted on 04/01/2018 8:41:46 AM PDT by catnipman
It slashed IBM’s U.S. workforce by as much as three-quarters from its 1980s peak, replacing a substantial share with younger, less-experienced and lower-paid workers and sending many positions overseas.
ProPublica estimates that in the past five years alone, IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over, about 60 percent of its estimated total U.S. job cuts during those years.
In making these cuts, IBM has flouted or outflanked U.S. laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination, according to a ProPublica review of internal company documents, legal filings and public records, as well as information provided via interviews and questionnaires filled out by more than 1,000 former IBM employees.
Among ProPublica’s findings, IBM:
Denied older workers information the law says they need in order to decide whether they’ve been victims of age bias, and required them to sign away the right to go to court or join with others to seek redress.
Targeted people for layoffs and firings with techniques that tilted against older workers, even when the company rated them high performers. In some instances, the money saved from the departures went toward hiring young replacements. Converted job cuts into retirements and took steps to boost resignations and firings. The moves reduced the number of employees counted as layoffs, where high numbers can trigger public disclosure requirements.
Encouraged employees targeted for layoff to apply for other IBM positions, while quietly advising managers not to hire them and requiring many of the workers to train their replacements.
Told some older employees being laid off that their skills were out of date, but then brought them back as contract workers, often for the same work at lower pay and fewer benefits.
(Excerpt) Read more at features.propublica.org ...
IBM has totally flouted Federal law and what they've done is completely disgraceful.
Happens even among private contractors. As we get older and more experienced, in effect, more valuable, and our rates go up, people go with younger and cheaper.
Silly Con valley engineers are now majority foreigners — Asian, mostly communist China with some Indian and so forth. Top level American graduate engineers sometimes can’t evrn get interviewed. Except for jobs at Burger King.
The greatest pool of under/non-utilized talent in the world are displaced professionals over 50. If you are a technical and laid off after 50, you are probably done career wise.
This is the way of IT. With every software/hardware refresh
much of what you knew is changed or gone. You are now competing with a group who just got trained on what is being installed and who will work tirelessly for less. Staying viable is a big part of the job, relationships are crucial if you are to survive after 50.
Yes. Whitey gets the ax, and non-Whitey gets the job.
Nothing new, as this poster can affirm.
I got cut in 2006 after training my four Brazilian replacements. They laid off 1500 people over the age of 55 in one day from my division. We had to sign a statement saying we wouldn’t sue them or we didn’t get our severance pay.
Interesting article.
The company I work for has a workforce wherein fully half of them will be eligible for retirement within the next five years. There are typically a half-dozen retirement parties each week. The company isn’t forcing them out, they are leaving - in many cases careers of over 30 years (one guy had 45 years under his belt).
The company itself appeared to be largely ignorant of the accelerated rate of departure of its brain-trust - the accumulation of tribal knowledge - of its workforce. Now they’re trying desperately to identify, collect, transfer, and preserve that tribal knowledge.
I wonder if IBM even cares that they are shedding their best n brightest?
Our country’s wealth is being stripped mined by the Thirs World.
A company my brother worked for got rid of all the older experienced engineers and hired all newbies with little experience. It went belly up in a couple of years.
“Told some older employees being laid off that their skills were out of date, but then brought them back as contract workers, often for the same work at lower pay and fewer benefits.”
Their skills weren’t out of date, IBM just wanted to benefit-dodge.
Then people wonder why contracting gets a bad name.
So, IBM is conspiring within itself to hire workers and the lowest cost?
What kind of economic theory is IBM exploiting?
Not just IBM, every damn company is doing this crap.
That severence is now max of four weeks pay. No longer worth signing the agreement.
In the early 1990s, MITRE did the same thing. The first cadre of old-people layoffs got settlements because the President of MITRE was caught on video tape saying words to the effect of: “we have cut overhead as much as we can, so now we have to reduce average years of staff experience!”
Several years later, I was working on the AN/BSY-2 at GE Aerospace, and some MITRE folks came up to tell us about the neat processing algorithms they had come up with for the digital periscope. They spent four slides of their presentation explaining vector algebra to former rocket scientists, so I realized that MITRE’s program to dumb themselves down had worked quite well.
And in other news Lotus Notes is still crapware.
No love for IBM from me.
“That severence is now max of four weeks pay. No longer worth signing the agreement.”
They just laid off a bunch yesterday. Ginny’s big plan is to send all the project management to India. How are you going to manage an American customer with equipment on our floor from India? This will not end well. They’re having to cut back because they just lost another huge lawsuit for screwing a customer.
I have zero respect for corporate America.
In the health care industry factories, staff positions are eliminated and the eliminated staff are invited to become CNAs or use their long unused nursing degrees, at age 55 or more, to become third shift workers on busy hospital floors.
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