Major companies like Uber, Microsoft, Cognizant and many others are walking on the path of job cuts and layoffs. Well, layoffs get real bad when it comes as a result of discrimination and that is happening at IBM as per the recent reports.
In the last few years, IBM has fired over 100,000 employees to attract the millennials and be at par with companies like Amazon and Google, as per a deposition by a former vice president in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit. It is an effort towards replacing the older staff with the young ones.
The company is already facing several lawsuits that accuse IBM of firing older workers that include a class-action case in Manhattan as well as individual civil suits filed in California, Pennsylvania and Texas last year.
Jonathan Langley aged 60, was a worldwide program director and sales lead at IBM’s Bluemix cloud service. Jonathan also removed from the company in March 2017.
Jonathan filed a lawsuit against the company and stated the complaint under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Despite his good performance and netting $20,000 performance bonus in January 2017, he was laid off.
He wasn’t successful at getting any other role within IBM and the company’s HR system marked him as having resigned. Soon after he left in July, Langley got a letter that congratulated him on his “retirement.”
On the contrary, IBM management informed the US government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about Langley’s lay off and stated that his supervisor Kim Overbayhe ranked him as the worst-performing employee in his team in January 2017. While it was evident that his performance was good as he had won the biggest bonus that quarter.
A report from ProPublica and Mother Jones show how IBM targeted older workers for termination. The report also states how the money saved from such layoffs got used for hiring the youth. Also, the job cuts were converted into retirement and the company boosted resignations and firings.
The employees that were targeted for layoffs were encouraged to apply for other IBM positions and the managers were quietly advised not to hire them. While few employees were told that their skills weren’t up to the mark but then were asked to work as contract workers at lower pay and fewer benefits.
As per January’s report, a former senior executive at IBM claimed that she was ordered to lie to the US government about the count of older workers IBM was laying off. When she spoke about how the company was breaking the age discrimination laws by firing the employees that were above 50 years, she was fired.
The company might also be looking towards cost-cutting by removing the older employees as IBM’s revenue is falling 4.2 percent year-on-year. IBM has also struggled with shrinking revenue for almost seven years now.
A user commented on HackerNews, “I doubt IBM lays off its older workers solely to appeal to Millenials.
It’s more likely that older workers are laid off because they are more expensive due to higher higher pay, have more paid time off, use more healthcare and are more politically calibrated to their organizations than younger workers.”
According to a few, the older employees come with great experience and knowledge and it is good to work around them. A user commented on HackerNews, “But I want to comment that as a young mainframer (I started 14 years ago at the age of 26, with a big IBM competitor), I really enjoyed working with older people.”
“They work quite hard (they have survived lots of changes in the organization, and that – in majority of cases – means that their contribution was appreciated somewhere), often are less crazy (they are set in life, don’t have to “compete” anymore), don’t panic or get overexcited too much (they have seen lot of stuff and that moderates their emotions), have good stories from life (they lived through one already), and you can learn from them a lot (they often have weird experience in areas that you would never expect).”
Another user commented, “When I worked at Boeing (my first real job) I learned an awful lot from the older engineers. But when I switched to the software biz, older ones didn’t exist and I had to pretty much learn everything the hard way.”
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