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IBM Says 'Couldn't Fire 150K US Workers If We Wanted To'
theodp writes "In an e-mail worthy of the Dilbert Hall of Fame, IBM execs responded to Robert X. Cringely's Project LEAN layoff rumors, reassuring employees by pointing out that they've already wiped out too many U.S. jobs to be able to lay off another 150,000. Big Blue's employment peaked around 1985, when it had about 405,000 workers who were acclimated to a long tradition of lifetime employment. IBM puts its current global workforce at 355,766, with a 'regular U.S. population' of less than 130,000."
Is this evidence enough that Cringley's stuff can never appear on Slashdot ever again? He's a complete hack of a "journalist". I'd rather see blogs written by 12-year-olds than "articles" by Cringley.
I'm ashamed that he is funded in part by non-profit funds from US taxpayers and makes a bad name for PBS in general.
... because it shows that Cringely's claim is not based on real IBM figures.
Americans are getting poorer and cheaper. They're 25% cheaper than just a couple of years ago. The urgency to outsource to cost effective workforces is reducing.
Deleted
I hope you realize that there's a catch-22 preventing me from sympathizing with you, because it's impossible for IBM to have victimized you without repercussion. If IBM was wrong to let you go (i.e. if the $16/hour guy does a lousy job) then they'll hurt for it (a repercussion). If they were right to let you go, and your job can be done for $16/hour, then they haven't victimized you, they've just been responded to a force in the market.
That said, I hope you find a good new job, and I hope they didn't try to screw you out of part of your severence package.
I used to work at a company, where the standing joke at headquarters was if a plant (factory) did anything wrong, they would close it. The big boss would say: "Either they make target, or I'm going to close the plant!" Of course, the targets were completely unrealistic, so the next meeting would be: "Well close the plant dammit!!! Close the plant!"
The people at HQ would keep a running tally of how many divisions (plants) were closed that week. 15 plant closures was a bad week, as the company only had 13 plants. At one point, things got so bad they had to purchase a few more plants to make up for the plants they really did close. I'm glad I'm not working for that company anymore.
Yes, it is possible for management to discuss closing more plants than they have, and to fire more employees than they have hired ...
then they haven't victimized you, they've just been responded to a force in the market.
These are not mutually exclusive. Our huge trade deficit is a political issue created by international corporations who want to do things their way and hire top lobbyists to get it. The huge trade deficit is not good for Americans, but the international corporations don't give a sh8t.
(By the way, maybe IBM hired 2 guys at $14/hr to do the job of one American at $30. Even if the replacement is lousy, they get an extra one to clean up the first one's booboo's. They thus would save 2 bucks.)
Table-ized A.I.
IBM stock has reached a 52-week high and is set to go higher. After a quick look, it seems the job cuts are a balance vs their investments in future growth. Gotta have good quarters and making the Street happy.
I'm sure the King of France said the same thing to the angry crowd outside his palace gates.
Of course no one owes anyone anything... But if you don't bother to take care of the people, they tend to "take care" of you. We could have quite easily became another Nazi or Communist country had FDR not instituted his New Deal reforms during the great depression. Free market capitalism works... up until a point.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
All too often the people who say as you have either 1) have a job from which they haven't been fired, or 2) fire their "inferiors" and need a maxim to assuage the guilt over the damage theyt've done, or 3) are sociapaths who really don't deserve jobs.
As they say in reality television: "You're fired". Two years from now when the market turns up, you'll wait in line to hear the potential employers in your field say "If you had been good; you wouldn't have been let go. Someone would have hired you." and ask, "Are you an alcoholic?"
I haven't had the above said to me, but I've heard accounts from many others. They weren't alcoholics. They chose the wrong initial employer. That is their only "sin".
You should expect a job and expect to be retained; if you do the work assigned. You shouldn't be promoted, but you should be retained. What's happening now is that even those who do good work are not retained and treated like dirt if retained.
Well, at least it's not Auschwitz. You gotta be glad it hasn't come to that yet.
Seems pretty silly that in this 21st century the billionaires can move their funds and trade across the globe in milliseconds... But the ordinary people still need some silly visa permit from the king to move their skills likewise. Trade at the post-industrial level, immigration at the Napoleonic law level?
Kind of a sweet deal for the industry: move your production to whichever country has cheaper citizen slaves knowing the people cannot follow in kind.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
That 130,000 number is total US employees. Cringely's previous estimate supposedly just included Global Services employees, which only represents a fraction of the total workforce. So if we assume half of all US IBM employees work for global services, that still means IBM needs to hire 85,000 new employees before his estimate is even mathematically possible.
This whole thing reminds me of a scene from the South Park episode, "Two Days Before The Day After Tomorrow".
Reporter: Tom, I'm currently ten miles outside of Beaverton, unable to get inside the town proper. We do not have any reports of fatalities yet, but we believe that the death toll may be in the hundreds of millions. Beaverton has only a population of about eight thousand, Tom, so this would be quite devastating.Anchor: Any word on how the survivors in the town are doing, Mitch?
Reporter: We're not sure what exactly is going on inside the town of Beaverton, uh Tom, but we're reporting that there's looting, raping, and yes, even acts of cannibalism.
Anchor: My God, you've, you've actually seen people looting, raping and eating each other?
Reporter: No, no, we haven't actually seen it Tom, we're just reporting it.
Isn't journalism so much more fun when you don't have to worry about those damn things called 'facts'?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Excuse me but the Napoleonic Law was innovative and revolutionary - so much in fact it remained the legal code of choice for the countries formerly-occupied under Napoleon. If anything the French Code Civil was and is a very good system of law. And today most of the world's legal systems are based up on the Civil Law legal system with deep French roots. The US legal system however is mostly based up on Common Law..
But has no idea what it's about.
He wrote: It has to be since the very essence of LEAN is foreign hiring.
LEAN http://www.lean.org/ has nothing to do with foreign hiring. It's a philosophy for process improvement that focuses on eliminating wastes in that process. Such wastes include: excess inventory, re-work, moving things around more than needed. It's about redesigning the process so that there is as little wasted effort and material as possible.
LEAN is well-executed when the culture of a company is changed to empower workers to have more control over the way they do their work - and those employees are encouraged to find better ways to do what they do. For example, Toyota is often held up as a prime example of LEAN. There, an employee who finds a better way to improve a process is rewarded with cash bonuses.
Now it may be that a company has hired a consultant to tell them do do layoffs and they call it LEAN, but that's not what it is.
But, everyone here seems to be of the opinion that Cringley's full of shit. I'll have to agree.
Where in the hell do you think IBM is going to find 150k qualified people in India? Maybe if you're ignorant of the realities of employment there. The labor market is very tight and salaries are skyrocketing as a result. There aren't 150k engineers on the market in the entire country right now. They could try sniping people from the big companies already present there (Google, Microsoft, etc.), or from the local companies (Infosys and the like), but it's going to be tough. The average salary for a software engineer in Bangalore has gone from a little under $10k 3 years ago to over $20k now. If IBM started trying to pull in another 150k heads, they'd see the average shoot over $30k as competition for talent gets fierce.
*Who* said every job is going to India? To avoid this kind of skyrocketing in wages, *if they are really going to layoff that many jobs*, they will distribute them among many countries... Hungary, Romania, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, India, China, ... There are lot of countries with competent IT professionals out there.
ilex paraguariensis for all
... ...
Because goods are free to move, but not people.
Jobs are free to move, but not people.
Oil is free to move, but not people.
Money is free to move, but not people
New Model Army - Another Imperial Day
(honestly, great song)
I read it. You're humour impaired.
He's saying it makes no sense for the machine to be non-responsive when allegedly "idle".
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Well, how about all the high-skill "Indians" coming to the US to the higher-paying jobs? That way the company has to either 1) hire absolute crap in India or 2) Increase wages in India to attract the migrants back
Some companies will chose 1) and eventually lose to the competition, while chosing option 2) will cause Americans to go over to India and work for those increased wages. What you'll get is [skills]*[wages] being a constant, hence no artificial incentives to outsource/offshore.
If the skilled people are not locked into slavery, they will do what is best for them, including going for higher pay or even starting their own companies. Since here the people with the greatest wages and benifits set the standard, this leads to increased prosperity across the board. It you let Industry set the standard you get a race to the bottom we currently face. Again, we cannot let the employer dictate the lowerst wage since they would use toddlers and slaves, if they could: a controlled open-immigration policy would essentially expand the existing American labor standards to the entire world, with our standard of living to follow that expansion!
To answer the inevitable "stealing my job" question, a properly controlled immigration is no different, or better than a high birthrate. And a properly handled high birthrate can be a great productivity boost for the country (Baby Boomers, Arbeiterjugend, etc.)
> Free market capitalism works... up until a point.
If the Government hadn't stepped in, every American would now be an employee of The Rockefeller Corporation.
The trouble with Free Markets, is they're usually not. Heard a Pundit on BBC World Service saying we shouldn't worry about Rupert Murdoch taking over the Wall Street Journal because it's a "Free Market" anyone can set up a blog and compete. (Level playing field, my ass.)
They do if they expect anything resembling employee loyalty. Pay cuts plus a murky employment future will leave you only with fair-weather employees all too willing to jump ship when a better offer comes along, ultimately making lean times leaner for the company.
One would think that the events of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries have shown that the company needs its employees as much as the employees need the company, if not moreso.
A cynical approach to hiring only nets you cynical employees.
You haven't told us whether to count contractors as "people".
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