Slashdot Mirror
IBM Offers Retirement With Job Guarantee Through 2013
dcblogs writes "IBM is offering employees who are nearing retirement — and may be worried about a layoff — a one-time voluntary program that would ensure their employment through Dec. 31, 2013. The program, described in a letter addressed to IBM managers, 'offers participants 70% of their pay for working 60% of their schedule.' Participating employees would receive 'the same benefits they do today, most at a full-time level, including health benefits and 401(k) Plus Plan automatic company contributions.' In 2006, IBM employed about 127,000 in U.S. The Alliance@IBM, a CWA local, now estimates the U.S. workforce at around 95,000. How far IBM will go in cutting is up for debate, including one radical estimate."
Why the heck does IBM need to cut so many jobs? They're actually doing rather well by all business standards.
Yet here they're acting like they're hemorrhaging money and need to cut costs fast.
American Airlines did this sort of thing too, along with voluntary furloughs... But they're actually in trouble and have a reason to.
WTF?!
I had thought that IBM had a problem with attrition among their mainframe programmers: More of them dying though natural causes than entering the field.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
If IBM were not closing in the US and moving completely to China and India as fast as they can, just like GE and a zillion other companies, lets figure out the crossover point:
Assume one months pay per year of employment.
This is guarantee of 70% of 18 months or about one years pay. Along with 18 months of health insurance, I'd assume.
So if you have more than 12 years in, you should risk it, you'll probably come out ahead. Less than 12 years in, you'd be better off taking the offer.
Most likely they're going to downsize every american citizen in their corporation, so you do appear to be better off taking the offer because its not a random distribution.
I'm also curious in salaried positions if you're expected to put in 50 hours per week for a "40 hour schedule", then what does 60% of schedule even mean, like you no longer work Monday and Friday at all, or you're still expected to put in 50 hours per week, except now on a imaginary "24 hour schedule"?
And a message for the last F500 employee in america, please remember to shut off the lights on your way out of the office...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
My father was just released from them last year. He was a senior level engineer 3 years away from retiring, and then they come out with this?
Heh, I'm sure you're being facetious.. but in the tiny event that you're not...
A while back we had some IBM big iron on campus, and our regular IBM tech was a guy in his (estimated) high 50s. Never have I seen someone who so *intricately* knows their shit as this man. He casually explained to me, while working, exactly what the capacitor cards do in the p690, why the system is designed the way it is, and so on. His troubleshooting ability was amazing, too.
This is expected when you have three to four DECADES of experience. A newly minted college grad may be able to sling C# code like there's no tomorrow but he won't have this experience.
I think IBM is making a mistake by letting these people go, and I'm betting they'll suffer down the line for it.
I work for a large company where the senior folks have an attractive retirement plan. Since work is slowing down and there are fewer exciting projects to work on, more of these folks are deciding to leave. They can decide to pull the ripcord rather abruptly with an email saying they've decided to burn up their remaining vacation pay while waiting for their retirement package to be processed. It kind of sucks to need to talk with someone who is the sole holder of some technical data to find out they had announced their retirement the week before and are now gone.
On top of how their abrupt departure can leave some of us more junior people stranded, a lot of these guys don't know HOW to retire. They're so fully part of the Borg that once they separate, they have no idea what to do with themselves. Some come back eighteen months later as consultants or part time employees. Others sit at home and whither away. I don't think is as much a problem for Gen X'ers and younger, as we've got so much going on in our outside lives we can't wait to be free to pursue those interests. However, a lot of the senior people have given so much time to the company they're lost without it... institutionalized, if you will.
Yeah, I think this is a great idea, whether it's to initiate a RIF or not.
This happened to a good friend of my father's back in the '90s. He was a loyal employee of 27 years and they canned him right before retirement. Seems to be (or was) business as usual up there.
That's an empty promise. IBM will just keep forcing them to work overtime and now only pay them 70% of their salary.
This is the sort of attitude that permeates the computer industry today. This is why we have people building software that absolutely and faithfully recreates the problems that were solved in the 1960s and 1970s - the people doing the work have absolutely rejected the idea that there is anything to learn from the past. History is dead to them because they think everything they are doing is new and different. They think they are striking out in unknown territory when in fact they are just walking alongside the same path that was covered 40 years ago.
Today, many of the same problems that are encountered are simply recreations of things that happened before. A huge problem is file systems that do not have sufficient robustness to deal with unexpected outages and hardware errors. If you have a file system that fails if you shut the power off unexpectedly at the wrong time you have something that was designed from a blank piece of paper. This kind of problem was dealt with in the 1970s in several different environments but nobody working on recent file systems have any experience with those solutions. Mostly because "it is all new" is an attitude and considering anyone over the age of 40 to be outmoded and incapable of dealing with all this new stuff.
Companies think they can build systems to retain the knowledge that actual experienced employees would give them. And they end up spending multiples of their salaries to do it. And it never works, and always gets torn down for the next management book of the month.
That explains Watson: an all-digital mechanical Turk that feeds on the souls of employees who expected a pension.
You have your facts wrong; IBM has a cash balance plan ("hybrid plan"). They didn't lose the lawsuit, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal after IBM won.
Specifically, July 1, 1999; I was an IBM employee at the time they converted.
In a cash balance pension plan, like a defined benefit plan, there is no favoritism in contribution for tenure, so getting rid of the older workers doesn't benefit IBM, so long as the older workers are productive.
You should read up on cash balance plans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_balance_plan
You should also realize that ranknfile-ue.org and endicottalliance.org (alliance@ibm) are propaganda arms of the CWA (Communications Workers of America) union, and that the CWA has been trying to get their camel's nose into the IBM tent for forever, ever since they saw the handwriting on the wall about the Internet becoming a big deal. They have their origins in the telephone industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_America#History
When I was at IBM, we never gave them the time of day.
* First of all, very few IBM employees are technically communications workers; all of the CWAs historical strikes to date have been against telephone companies.
* Second, we were very well paid with very good benefits, and there was no reason to hold IBM's butt to the fire in exchange for the CWA getting a percentage of our paychecks to line their pockets.
You really need to RTFA and look at who sourced it.
-- Terry