IBM is Being Sued For Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands (bloomberg.com)

A lawyer known for battling tech giants over the treatment of workers has set her sights on International Business Machines Corp. Bloomberg reports: 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. Liss-Riordan, a partner at Lichten & Liss-Riordan in Boston, has represented workers against Amazon, Uber and Google and has styled her firm as the premier champion for employees left behind by powerful tech companies. "Over the last several years, IBM has been in the process of systematically laying off older employees in order to build a younger workforce," the former employees claim in the suit, which draws heavily on a ProPublica report published in March that said the company has fired more than 20,000 employees older than 40 in the last six years.

The lawsuit comes as IBM faces questions about its firing practices. In exhaustive detail, the ProPublica report made the case that IBM systematically broke age-discrimination rules. Meanwhile, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has consolidated complaints against IBM into a single, targeted investigation, according to a person familiar with it. Further reading: IBM Fired Me Because I'm Not a Millennial, Alleges Axed Cloud Sales Star in Age Discrim Court Row, and IBM is Telling Remote Workers To Get Back in the Office Or Leave.

Comments

Office Space

[alexhs]

- Yeah. We're gonna bring in some entry-level graduates, farm some work out to Singapore(*), that's the usual deal.
- Standard operating procedure

(*) I guess that should read India these days...

class action brought by US workers in favor - H1B

[Anonymous Coward]

I am waiting for the class action against tech giants for firing US citizens in favor of H1-B workers.
The industry is rife with it, but not one politician has the courage to address this.

Good not to veg out at large company

[SuperKendall]

This IBM move shows why as you get older, it's not a good idea to just sit and while away the hours at a large company.

Anything can and will happen, including sadly layoffs...

If you move around from company to company every so often, you keep your skills much more current, and at the same time expand a network of contacts you might be able to find other jobs through.

The more current skills combined with experience can also be used to maintain higher salary levels if you work at it and negotiate some.

Co-location

[Gavrielkay]

I left IBM when they started the co-location nonsense.

How can you target a layoff to folks over 35 without saying it outright? Tell most of your employees they have to relocate to a city of IBM's choosing. And you have to do it within 90 days. And even if you relocate, you'll have no more job security than you had before.

Result: IBM have preferentially "laid off" the older employees who are more likely to have community and family that they don't want to disrupt. Fresh graduates with no kids in school or elderly parents to look after will be more likely to pack up and go where they're told. All the while IBM says it's to improve collaboration and not their fault if not everyone wants to play along.

I'm sure someone got a huge bonus when they presented that scheme to management.

Re:Who is surprised by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just IBM. This happened to my parent and colleagues in a major hospital in the area. Very experienced. One was even given a regional award that was the sort of thing that was covered in the local media, interviews, etc. Laid off, same drill. Told they could apply for other positions in the same place, but those just happened to be lower paying. The higher-ups were given a bonus for the number of staff they did this to. This got around and resulted in a threatened lawsuit, and the person threatening the lawsuit was allowed to keep their position.

Call me communist, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know the number of times I have tried to point this out to people here and elsewhere: that capitalism, US style, is bad for you. Capitalism, up to a point, definitely has its good sides, but this is simply wholesale rape of workers, and it is not just IBM - all large corporations do this, callously and with no regard for their workers. There may be the odd one out, that is better, there aren't many, and apparently none in the US.

I don't care whether you can stomach the word "communist" or "socialist" - call it something else, if you want - but we, as workers, have to stand together against this, sooner or later. And we are workers, whether we are called SW engineers or any other pretentious title: if you are employed for a salary, you are a worker: working class, if you will. Or if you don't like that term either, then "lower class". If you and your family depend for their daily lives on you being able to produce an income, then you are lower class - otherwise you are upper class. Haven't you noticed how this upper class somehow always gets to line their pockets? If the economy goes well, they get richer, and if everything crashes and burns, they still get richer; but the rest of us get the raw deal in any situation.

And to those who are too young to have learned: remember that your turn will come too. When you are too old for the liking of your employer, you will be kicked out - you will still be lower class, and you will be discarded with never a thought. Unless, that is, we get together and make things change; that is supposed to be the great benefit of freedom and democracy: that we can get together and change things.