IBM has confirmed that it is making redundancies, following a serious of employee posts on popular jobs board The Layoff. The company told CNBC it is “repositioning” teams “to align with our focus on the high-value segments of the IT market.”
A spokesman added: “We also continue to hire aggressively in critical new areas that deliver value for our clients and IBM.”
IBM Job Cuts: 1,700 Estimated
CNBC cites a source as saying the IBM job cuts will be “half of one percent” of its workforce; with IBM employing approximately 340,000, that would be 1,700.
Watson Health, Cloud Services, and Global Technology Services (GTS) Infrastructure Services Delivery units staff have all been laid off, according to a number of posts on The Layoff. (IBM’s last quarterly earnings report points to ongoing plans to “optimise portfolio by de-emphasizing lower value services content” across GTS.)
The company currently has over 7,000 job openings.
A common thread across the Layoff posts was the age of those affected: ” After being rebadged to IBM after IBM took over infrastructure responsibilites, 18 months later I’m here [being laid off]. Being 57 doesnt help much either” one employee posted.
Another wrote: “I don’t get it. Nothing has changed. IBM has being acting like this for or at least the last 5 years. Although I sympathize to all effected, every year employees come on to this board in seemingly denial. What did you expect was going to happen? There is absolutely no future at IBM if you are over 40 and working in the USA, UK and many other western ‘high pay’ countries.”
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The criticisms come as a group of former employees earlier this year filed a lawsuit against IBM in federal district court in New York accusing the company of not complying with a federal US law that requires companies to disclose the ages of people they lay off who are 40 or older. The suit alleges that the company has improperly prevented workers from combining to challenge their ousters.
ProPublica reported in March 2018 that IBM laid off an estimated 20,000 U.S. workers ages 40 and over during the preceding five years. In some instances, it used money saved from the departures to hire young replacements to, in the words of one internal company document, “correct seniority mix.”
