IBM hacks into chip peoples' pay

Bunny people working at IBM's US chip plants face tough times. IBM has confirmed reports that it will cut the pay of 3,500 assembly line workers at New York factories in East Fishkill and Poughkeepsie and another factory in Vermont. The workers will see their wages drop 10 per cent. Next year, shift employees will also lose …

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh woes is us

If you were any good youd leave.

15% pay cut last year

10% pay cut this year

HR trying bto get you down to 50% of salary before....

1. Final salary pension, 30% of very little now

2. Package, its smaller every year

Wakey Wakey USA your the new India :)

[vincent himpe]

At the Airconditioning unit with the first post (AC)

Ehm , they are talking about PRODUCTION people. Its not a matter of leaving if you are good. It's a matter of there is no place to go. Production in the US is shutting down in ALL semiconductor companies. This year alone over 7 waferfabs in the US have been shut down , and there are very few left ...

In silicon valley itself there is maybe 1 left.

So pipe down your fan and blow less hard.

[mario]

@vincent himpe

i agree. besides production on semicon lines is highly specialized work and your skills may not count for much in other industries.

[Tom Wood]

Economics

So, demand for chip production workers is low. Supply of workers is relatively high. Doesn't take an economics genius to work out what will happen.

It's not that there is 'no place to go'; there are other jobs out there. But they may either require re-training or be even less attractive than taking a pay cut in a chip plant.

Workers are free to leave if they want to...

[Norfolk Enchants Paris]

Cause and effect

Typical of union leaders to spout some facts and then tie them together with the wrong pice of string.

Mr Union Man:

Fact 1: IBM are going to cut these hardworking peoples' wages

Fact 2: IBM are making record profits

Fact 3: IBM Execs are getting whopping pay rises

Piece of string: These workers are the driving force behind the profits and should get paid better.

In fact, the reason that IBM (and companies like it) make better profits is substantially because executives make and implement cost management decisions such as these. If the workforce had been given 10% rises every year, IBM would NOT be making good profits. IBM chip plants have to compete against Taiwanese and Chinese plants, with cheap labour rates and high levels of productivity.

At a strategic level, this is a wise decision. What would be good in this situation is if IBM could help employees retrain for better-paying roles or roles in other industries. The sad fact is though that low-skill production jobs are like liquids - they will flow to the lowest point. Today China, tomorrow Africa.

Paris, because she knows this to be true (which is the ONLY REASON she does not work in a factory.)

[Anonymous Coward]

All about the profits

It doesn't matter now if the company is making more than ever before, they want workers to accept the same levels of pay as in India or China. The more they outsource the easier it is for them to achieve this as they just say if you won't work for x amount of $/£/€ then we shut down, move away and you don't work. This just increases the gap between the haves and have-nots leading to more crime, social unrest and the economy of the nation goes downhill.

But hey, that doesn't matter as the CEOs, shareholders etc won't be affected as they will all be raking enough money in to stay in the nicest, safest areas with guards if necessary, or even emigrate with everything they want available to them while being completely oblivious to the problems that the people who put them in that position are suffering. Without the workforce, they would not be where they are now yet it is always the workforce that gets shafted.

[Norfolk Enchants Paris]

@AC #2

What is a company about? Profit. What are the management doing? Maximising profit.

IBM do not owe anyone a living. They have responsibilities to their staff but that does not extend to giving them a job for life with 10% payrises every year. And, as I have pointed out earlier, I think that IBM could do things to help. However, people do have choices. They may not have the choice to become Richard Branson, but they do have the choice to change their own situation.

I too believe that the offshoring of work to the cheapest bidder will, in the longer term, be very bad for the social and economic fabric of the USA, e.g. their economy may struggle without a decent manufacturing base, but for companies it is all about sink or swim, right here, right now.

The irony here is that, if there had been a union involved that flexed its collective muscle, then either the whole plant would have been scrapped, or IBM would become unprofitable and put the entire big blue workforce in peril, a la British Leyland.

[Alistair]

Shocked and appalled

There really is a place called "Poughkeepsie"?

Mines the one with hydroflouric acid-proof lapels.

[Anonymous Coward]

@alistair

>>>>There really is a place called "Poughkeepsie"?

Yep, its usually pronoucificated "puh kipsee"

Mine's the jacket with the wireless tranceiver for the earpiece that tells me what to say.

[Eduard Coli]

Move along gents, nothing to see here

Multinational executive pulling in grotesque bonuses on obscene pay at the expense of employees and stock holders is nothing new in this Brave New corporate America.

[Anonymous Coward]

well, if they wanted

To totally maximise the profit the top brass would all quit and the company would be way better off....

[Anonymous Coward]

As AC who wrote "well, if they wanted" correctly hinted at,

if they really wanted to maximize savings and shareholder equity, they'd start slashing entire levels of the varying layers of executive management. How many divisional VP's do one company need anyway? Keeping in mind that all of these bozo's also have executive staff's, and layers of management whose only purposes in life are to insulate the upper management from the assembly line workers. That's corporate waste and taking money out of the share holders pockets, if you ask me.

If the upper echelon of IBM were to collectively take a 15% across the board pay cut, it would probably save the company hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If they're going to start dicking around with pay cuts, make it across the board and have it impact EVERYBODY, instead of targeting the hourly folks. Hell, it's probably have a more positive effect than moving several plants to SE Asia.

[Bruce Sinton]

IBM-at it again

I remember the way IBM behaved in the eighties,when it was on top of the PC industry. It controlled everything and Microsoft was very smallfry .

They were considered as a bully , much as MS is now by many.

A monopolist and all that.

They are out of the PC market but big in the other fields of computing, and just like most American Corporations- a bunch of greedy shits.