IBM furloughs hardware workers for a week to cut costs

New IBM System and Technology Group chief Tom Rosamilia and his boss, CEO Ginni Rometty, are tightening the belts of Big Blue's hardware business so that it can make its numbers in the current or future quarter. Rumors were going around that IBM was going to put employees working in the Systems and Technology Group on furlough …

[Anonymous Coward]

A rose is a rose.

"workforce rebalancing" or "resource actions"

When did every company in the world decide to further impersonal terminology onto very personal subjects? This doesn't help the "Team" mentality, especially when the whole team has just been carried off the field from injury.

[Anonymous Coward]

The terminology is a rather sad attempt to avoid sounding negative and is rife amongst the big corporates. So you get emails that have been through the spin machine; they could be announcing mass redundancies but the email won't contain a single negative word and certainly won't mention the 'r' word.

Their attempts to sugar the pill don't make the message any easier. I would much rather be treated as an adult and if there's a tough message to convey then tell it as it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in the UK, oh no

*cough* Turning Point *cough*

[asdf]

ouch

If IBM's hardware division is bleeding money I would hate to be one of the few remaining SPARC hardware engineers at Oracle or Itanium based engineers at HP/Intel.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is really happening; the workers are being furloughed for a week but what they haven't said is that leading up to it and following it the workers will be putting in more hours meeting new deadlines that were either moved up or not changed at all. So in the end, IBM got the same amount of work from it workers but in same cases for free and in others for 1/3 the normal rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

short term fix

how about a better long term fix ... rather than make the paycheck to paycheck workers suffer (and probably with no slipping of deadlines or any more job security) to save 2/3 or one weeks wages how about a general rebalance where they look at overall compensation across the division and question the worth of some of those high paid execs who so graciously go without a weeks salary as a gesture of solidarity (after steering the ship onto these rocks)