San Francisco: In a market where the tech giants have a new age employees, to compete and look trendy in the market IBM deposed over 10,000 employees over the years. To look ‘cool and trendy’ like its rivals it brought in new employees and is hiring aggressively.
According to The Registrar, in the lawsuit hearing in the case filed by lawyers on behalf of ex-IBM salesman Jonathan Langley, a one-time HR vice president Alan Wild reportedly testified “that 50,000 to 100,000 Big Blue staff has been axed in the past five or so years”.
The 108 year old IBM says that it doesn’t discriminate on age. However Langley, 61, sued IBM last year for “unfairly ditching older capable staff to replace them with so-called early professional hires”.
In a statement, IBM said: “The Company hires 50,000 employees each year, and spends nearly a half-billion dollars on training our team. We also receive more than 8,000 job applications every day, the highest rate that we’ve ever experienced, so there’s clear excitement about IBM’s strategy and direction for the future”.
Although a report claimed that Langley was a long-standing IBM Hybrid Cloud salesperson until he was selected to be laid off – despite performing so well. Wild said IBM wanted potential hires to see Big Blue not as “an old fuddy duddy organization,” but as “cool and trendy”.”To do that, IBM set out to slough off large portions of its older workforce using rolling layoffs over the course of several years,” he added.
‘ProPublica’ published an investigation last March that found IBM had fired an estimated 20,000 US employees ages 40 or older in the past five years.
