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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.
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.
This has been an open secret for years. They want to reduce their higher paid headcount by 100, so they lay off 1000, but they give the employees time to apply for other internal jobs. But make sure that all of the open positions the laid off staff are eligible for pay less then the salaries of the employees you want to get rid of, and higher 900 back in different rolls. This same scheme works to get rid of people getting close to retirement as well, at least it did back when IBM employees still had pensions.
- 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...
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even in Canada.
I have dealings with IBM on equipment from time to time. Back in the last 90s, it would be experienced people in their mid 30s and 40s, sometimes an old experienced greybeard with encyclopedic knowledge was also on the team I dealt with. It gave you the impression they were well versed in what they were selling and supporting.
Gradually they started pushing the older people out of their workforce here, until it's now reached absurd levels. The last 2 times I had IBM SAN people here to discuss storage, they sent 1 manager who I'd hazard a guess to say they couldn't be over 30, and 2-3 techs who looked the same age as our college interns. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence that IBM is retaining their institutional knowledge and experience if the shit hits the fan and you need a crack support team to sort out an issue on site.
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.
So, in the grand tradition of class-action lawsuits, the lawyers will make multiple millions of dollars, and the plaintiff class will each get a check for between twenty-one and thirty-one dollars, (depending on the specifics of their case, one dollar for each year terminated before retirement,) and get a coupon good for a full-height, five and a quarter inch floppy drive, (installation extra, cables and mounting screws not included,) or a 10MB Bernoulli Drive diskette, (not the drive itself, but a single item of storage media) from the IBM N.O.S. warehouse.
When they object, IBM will ask, "Oh, what... you don't want these devices, maybe because what... they're OLD? Because they're OBSOLETE? Because they don't do what you'd like them to do, for the resources you want to allot to them? Who's age-discriminating NOW, huh?!?"
Anyone working in or around tech shouldn't be surprised that these days, they have the same philosophy of disposability when it comes to workers, that their customers have, to personal electronics.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
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.