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IBM Accused of Violating Federal Anti-Age Discrimination Law (propublica.org)
A group of ex-employees filed a lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of failing to comply with a law requiring companies to disclose the ages of people over 40 who have been laid off. The suit also alleges that the company has improperly prevented workers from combining to challenge their ousters. From a report: It is the second broad legal action against IBM since a 2018 ProPublica story that documented widespread age discrimination by the company in its global restructuring. The former employees are asking the court to invalidate a written agreement that IBM requires its employees to sign to receive severance pay. Under the document's provisions, workers agree to give up any right to challenge their dismissal in court. Until now, most age-related legal actions contesting an IBM layoff have been brought by the rare ex-worker who refused to sign the agreement and left without severance.
If the district court were to agree that IBM's separation agreement is invalid, it could open the company up to lawsuits by tens of thousands of older workers IBM has laid off in recent years. Today's lawsuit and the string of other cases filed in the wake of ProPublica's story face steep odds as a result of decisions by the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts that curtailed workers' ability to challenge employers' staffing decisions. The rationale is to limit what federal judges view as cumbersome, costly cases that hamstring both employers and the courts.
If the district court were to agree that IBM's separation agreement is invalid, it could open the company up to lawsuits by tens of thousands of older workers IBM has laid off in recent years. Today's lawsuit and the string of other cases filed in the wake of ProPublica's story face steep odds as a result of decisions by the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts that curtailed workers' ability to challenge employers' staffing decisions. The rationale is to limit what federal judges view as cumbersome, costly cases that hamstring both employers and the courts.
It ain't just IBM. Shall we take a look at the average employee age at Facebook? Google? People over 50 don't get interviews, don't get hired, and are the first out the door when the layoffs come. I thank god every day that I went into stodgy defense work, where young people generally don't want to work and being over 50 is not seen as a deal breaker (my PhD probably doesn't hurt either), and I've had 25 years of steady employment.
Ok it's better to say we did not follow H1B laws and layed off USC's just to replace them with H1B's
Also level 1 help desk is master's degree preferred (and the pay is no where near any thing to cover the loans for that)
If we only had an UNION!!!!
Unions are only found in free countries, they're collective bargaining and collective rights enforcement by citizen laborers. Union DUES are somewhat controversial (to some retards like yourself) but the union itself is not.
Union labor is why America still has a middle class that Republican trolls have allowed to be choked nearly to death. You just don't even realize you're a traitor for multi-national corporatist globalists to use as their tool.
You're oblivious to it, and it's clear you don't have a job either. Today's a work day, comrade. You're an unemployed coal-tard toady, not a productive citizen.
Back in the '90s, when I worked at IBM, I was appalled at the people they let go. Age was clearly a factor, followed by the number of letters behind a person's name. Up to that point in time, the company had been incredibly successful and never had to consider layoffs before, so the primary decision point was literally who had a full retirement followed by degrees, type and where are they from. Guess how many mainframe system admins were over 50 with only high school? The damage done to the company was incredible and measurable.
Now, being older and wiser, I have seen many, many layoffs from different companies with no clear criteria or thought to what would happen after the layoffs were complete - they're generally done to bring quarterly costs into line with investor's expectations with little lip service being put to only keeping the most productive employees.
So, while I can see the reason for tracking the demographics of who a company fires is important, I'm not aware of any cases where layoffs improved the long term health of the company or that any demographic study would show that the layoffs were done in a strategic and effective manner.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Porn stars don't get fired. They get jobs singing adult contemporary pieces on cruise ships and mountain resorts
Man, I've got to get my wife to consider something other than Disney for our next vacation.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
And the decomposing flesh of things they've killed.
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When Cisco laid me off at age 56, they did cover their bases. The layoff came with a stack of paper an inch thick with statistics of the ages of those laid off, showing they were fully prepared to defend themselves against any claim of age discrimination.
They also included a very generous severance package.
And, if you signed an agreement to not sue them for age discrimination, that very generous severance package became very *VERY* generous.
See point 1 above, they were fully prepared to defend themselves against any claim of age discrimination.
Hey, when I got home from getting laid off, right there in my Gmail inbox was an email from a recruiter at the place I'm currently working. The layoff turned out to be a rather substantial windfall.
Well, reverse your thinking and imagine the fallout if companies fired all of their junior staff ( say anyone under 30 ) and replaced them with anyone over 30 for: Reasons. ( Now replace age with anything on the list the EEOC prohibits and you begin to understand why discrimination laws exist. )
Tip: You don't get to destroy someones life after twenty plus years simply because you want a younger ( read that: Cheaper ) workforce.
If you were laid off simply because of any EEOC qualifying reason, would you have any issues with it ?
If you knew Company X was going to fire you because of your age later on, would you even work for this company ?
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
There are so many new college grads hungry for a job.
But why pay for a college grad when all they can do is about as well as some of our software or robots - if that. College grads know nothing of real value, they have simply been screened to meet a certain minimally acceptable standard - if that. Maybe I'd rather have a guy who has worked for a competitor for 20 years and understands the limitations of the robots and the software. He would be worth something.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
IBM Ages and Wages people out ALL THE TIME! If the numbers were ever publish about the age and salary of everyone they "layed off" you would see this. You won't see millennials being "layed off".... They are young and will work for cheap! Wait - most companies are starting to do this now....
The Truth is a Virus!!!
This doesn't strike me with surprise at all. My dad was an IBMer who was lucky enough to get downsized in December right before Christmas (around 10 years ago). He was in his mid-50s at the time and had so much DB/2 and other database knowledge IBM based their certification programs off of his skills. He always received impeccable performance reviews and worked hard for the company. I have no doubt some shithead in IBM HR did a SELECT employ_ID WHERE emp_age >50 and went on a "cost savings" massacre. These RIFs are baldfaced attacks on older employees whose only crime is they couldn't stop the aging process. They have all built decades of specialized and technical skills making them invaluable resources. IBM doesn't give a shit about how it treats its employees and it shows in their years of declining revenues. They're on a slow death-march into the sea with this current strategy, which is unfortunate to see a once great company fall apart.
. . . I was standing in line in the grocery store, with two Micro$oft types behind me, who believed they had a brilliant idea. After listening to them for five minutes, and patiently explained that their earth resource technology had already been developed by Perkin Elmer and had been in operation for almost 20 to 30 years.
lol, you think unions protect their member. I've worked at a couple factory places with unions and almost everyone hates them. It's like a bureaucracy with power over both the employer and employee. They do the absolute minimum, but at the same time if anything threatens their power, they will fight it full on. Even the long term employees complain how unfair the union is to the employer and how it reduces the quality of life at work.
In my very limited experience over the past 10 years, junior positions are almost always of negative immediate value and primarily used to discover or attract young talent. Even normal positions are of about break-even value. It's only once you get to people of a senior role, even if not an official job title, that you get people where they can take a 6 month team project and solo it in 1 month or fix a bug that someone has been working on for several months, in a matter of days. And not to say that the senior person is working any more hours.
In general, for our roles, the break even time before an engineer produces the same value as we pay them is about 6 months to a year. The point where they regularly provide more value than they cost is about 2-3 years.
We tend to see two types of software developers. The kind that like to be told what to do and the kind that find ways to improve existing processes. The later have poor personal productivity but bring very high team/group productivity. The 80/20 rule seems to apply. About 20% of the programmers come up with 80% of the useful process or system improvements.
You would think the other 80% of programmers would get automated out of a job, but in our area, the better we make our processes, the smoother and higher quality our product is. This causes an increase in demand. On the whole, we need to periodically hire more engineers because we can't improve our systems faster than demand increases. About 20-40% yoy increase in demand for the past 15 years. It's nearly impossible to automate away people's jobs with that demand. CPO(Chief Product Officer) is biting at the bit to open the flood gates for our services.
The most important requirement to keeping up is thinking ahead. Our idea creators are coming up ideas for improvements several years ahead of needing those improvements. That gives us some time to start preparing. We keep surviving only by the skin of our teeth, and that isn't luck, it's preparedness. At any given time, we have about a 2-3 year backlog of improvements. That's 2-3 years of work if that's all we worked on. And virtually none of the ideas get dropped and nearly all of the ideas have eventually been implemented after some time. Only a few keep getting pushed. Not because they aren't useful, but because there's always something deemed more pressing.