Cutting “Old Heads” at IBM
Peter Gosselin and Ariana Tobin (Hacker News):
The company reacted with a strategy that, in the words of one confidential planning document, would “correct seniority mix.” 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.
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The company’s pre-2014 layoff documents required employees receiving severance to waive all bias claims based on “race, national origin, ancestry, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, marital status, age … disability, medical condition, or veteran status.” The new documents deleted “age” from the waiver list. In fact, they specifically said employees were not waiving their right when it came to age and could pursue age discrimination cases against the company.
But, the new documents added, employees had to waive the right to take their age cases to court. Instead, they had to pursue them through private arbitration. What’s more, they had to keep them confidential and pursue them alone. They couldn’t join with other workers to make a case.
With the new documents in place, IBM was no longer asking laid-off workers to sign away their right to complain about age bias so, the company’s lawyers told the EEOC, the disclosure requirement in the 1990 amendments to the age act no longer applied.
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IBM has also embraced another practice that leads workers, especially older ones, to quit on what appears to be a voluntary basis. It substantially reversed its pioneering support for telecommuting, telling people who’ve been working from home for years to begin reporting to certain, often distant, offices.
Update (2019-01-23): Gerrit De Vynck (via Hacker News):
Shannon Liss-Riordan on Monday filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan on behalf of three former IBM employees who say the tech giant discriminated against them based on their age when it fired them.
Thomas Claburn (via Hacker News):
A former senior executive at IBM has claimed she was ordered to lie to the US government about just how many older workers Big Blue was laying off.
And she says she was fired after pointing out that the aging biz was breaking age discrimination laws by primarily firing post-50 staff.
Update (2022-02-16): Noam Scheiber:
Now it appears that top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees at the company, sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like “dinobabies.”
A trove of previously sealed documents made public by a Federal District Court on Friday show executives discussing plans to phase out older employees and bemoaning the company’s relatively low percentage of millennials.
Update (2022-06-16): Thomas Claburn (via Hacker News):
In one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against IBM, Big Blue has been ordered to produce internal emails in which former CEO Ginny Rometty and former SVP of Human Resources Diane Gherson discuss efforts to get rid of older employees.
Update (2023-05-15): Thomas Claburn (via Hacker News):
IBM and its IT infrastructure spinoff Kyndryl were this week taken to court by an axed exec who had put decades of her life into the tech giant.
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Doheny’s complaint, filed by Boston-based Lichten & Liss-Riordan PC, contends that Kyndryl, as indicated by its use of terms like “Resource Action” and its reliance on IBM severance materials, has carried over IBM’s alleged discriminatory layoff practices.
