Brit IBM veteran wins unfair dismissal case after 2018's Global Technology Services redundancy bloodbath

A long-serving IBMer has won an unfair dismissal lawsuit after representing himself against a qualified barrister – although his related discrimination claim was struck out by the judge. Stefan Devis, formerly a client support manager with 20 years of service with Big Blue, worked in the Global Technology Services unit on IBM' …

[Anonymous Coward]

You never get to know the score. I never got my score, no matter how many times I (and others) asked.

You have to remember, its not about how good you are. Its not about how great the customer thinks you are. Its about cutting costs. IBM will dream up whatever it can in order to justify saving money in the short term. The judge was correct in saying IBM hadn't got its ducks in a row - the important thing about the IBM ducks is that they are all decoys. If they were being totally above board they wouldn't have needed to line up ducks (decoys or otherwise).

IBM don't care about its employees. IBM doesn't care about its customers. All IBM cares about is profit. They're not in the business to provide a great service, just one that is as bad as any other service provider (just not necessarily the worst).

[UCAP]

IBM don't care about its employees. IBM doesn't care about its customers. All IBM cares about is profit

And how does that make IBM different from any other large multi-national company?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Because other tech companies think that you need qualified staff to make a profit. Most of my work is trying to find new staff and keep the ones I have from leaving for SV

[andy 103]

Because it's not really about a score. A score is just their artificial way of justifying why they want to get rid of you. In a similar manner if they had a project and desperately needed staff, said scores would suddenly become a lot higher.

They've decided they don't want you. You've decided them getting rid of you is unfair. Nobody is a winner.

[MyffyW]

All IBM cares about is profit

And when they are so rubbish at achieving profit, you can see the depth of the problem....

[Cederic]

Caring about profit is the driver to reduce staff.

Caring about profit should also encourage them to reduce staff in a fair and reasonable manner, so that the staff can't then take them to court and win a profit-reducing payout.

Caring about profit also requires you to take into account how good people are and how much the client likes them. Losing a client or incurring operational issues (due to substandard performance, mistakes or other reasons) reduces profits, so it would be silly to treat people as a fungible labour pool.

IBM maybe doesn't care about its employees but if they really care about profit then they need to.

[Anonymous Coward]

redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

Intentionally laying people off and moving their jobs to another country in order to lower costs is not redundancy.

The employees should have been offered, at a minimum, the option to move to new location at the same wage and moving costs, this did not happen IMHO simply because the idea here was to cut costs rather than remove people who's job is no longer required by the company.

[andy 103]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

Re - Intentionally laying people off and moving their jobs to another country in order to lower costs is not redundancy.

Absolutely. But the only thing which will stop employers doing it is if there is some default massive fine (let's say £1m plus) per employee if they're found doing it. They do it, because they can get away with it.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

They do it, because they can get away with it.

If the company can get the same job done adequately and more cheaply by a lower-waged person in anther country, why shouldn't they be able to do it? After all, if you can find another company willing to pay you more do do the same job, you'd be pretty pissed if the courts prevented you from moving jobs because it wouldn't be "fair" to your current employer.

Agreed, it's certainly not redundancy and it's not "fair', it's just business.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

That's two separate things though - an employee choosing to leave, and an employer pretending that offshoring an existing job is redundancy.

The former is fine. The latter is the problem and should be illegal as it is clearly not redundancy - the job still exists, it was just given to someone cheaper in a different country. Seems like the "different country" aspect is the loophole. That needs to be closed.

[Falmari]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

@Jimmy2Cows I find offshoring to “someone cheaper in a different country” morally wrong. I just don’t see how you can make it illegal. If a company wants to move to another country, they can it is a different jurisdiction.

But what I think should be picked up on and made illegal is the whole knowledge transfer and training those in the country that the job has moved to. I mean they company are saying the job is redundant so if the job no longer exists there is no need for knowledge transfer and training.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

As I point out in a comment above, make employment law stronger and the payments for redundancy much larger. This is what happens in Germany.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

In Germany it's very expensive to make people redundant, which prevents much of the kind of abuse seen elsewhere. At a previous employer the whole UK team was made "redundant" and their jobs outsourced to India. The German team stayed, and the boss was totally upfront about it being because if the redundancy costs. Schadenfreude ensued when the Indian programmers f*cked up so badly that it made it onto a story here in el Reg :-D

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

Happens in France too, which is why US companies like Facebook are closing down their French operations and offshoring the jobs.

[Fred Dibnah]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

IANAL but I would imagine that UK courts would count moving jobs offshore as redundancy. Happy to be corrected though.

Employers have to be very careful with who they call redundant. A former colleague was told by email he was to be redundant, and BTW could he put some notes together for the handover to his replacement? Oops...

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: magine that UK courts would count moving jobs offshore as redundancy

That does seem to be loophole which needs to be closed. The legal definition is probably outdated, and needs to be corrected for modern multinational business.

[Mr Humbug]

> moving their jobs to another country in order to lower costs is not redundancy.

Actually, it is.

The legal definition of redundancy is that it happens when a business stops doing work of a particular kind or in a particular place. So if there are tech support employees in London and the business moves its office to Manchester (or to another country) then the London tech support employees are redundant.

They should be offered suitable alternative work, if available (which might be in the new location). The employer doesn't have to pay for them to move, but better employers might offer to.

Of course, if not all jobs are moving then the selection criteria must be objective and fair, which is what seems to have got IBM into trouble over this one. The 70% reduction says that the judge agreed that even if IBM had been fair and objective teh result would have been the same.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

>Of course, if not all jobs are moving then the selection criteria must be objective and fair,

Which is why the safer alternative is to make everyone redundant and then start hiring for new jobs on new contracts

[katrinab]

Which is illegal.

[Mr Humbug]

If you call it redundancy it is, but a business can dismiss and re-engage someone if it needs to change the terms of employment and has been unable to negotiate an agreement with the employee.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

>The employees should have been offered, at a minimum, the option to move to new location

First you have to suggest to the new country that your HR dept is now in charge of their immigration policy.

Obviously not a problem for a world bestriding super-power such as Apple, but could be an issue for a non-nuclear IBM

[katrinab]

Re: redundancy is laying off workers where the job no longer exists

The UK was in the EU at the time, Bulgaria still is. So that wouldn't have been a problem.

[andy 103]

This is ridiculous

So many employers don't even follow their own procedures when it comes to doing this.

But what really really f-ks me off is this line:

job cuts, known in IBM-ese as a "resource action." His job was due to be offshored from the UK to Bulgaria

How can an employer claim someone's job isn't required, then offshore it? Clearly it is required, but they feel it should be done "differently" - i.e. at a lower cost to them.

Cases like this shouldn't even be given time of day. Clear case of an employer taking the p**s. If someone's job isn't required then they shouldn't be allowed to replace them. It should be put into law with a massive, massive payout to anyone who's unfairly screwed over by this.

[BenM 29]

Re: This is ridiculous

>>How can an employer claim someone's job isn't required, then offshore it?

Becasue that's business. Employee is definitely redundant because in that location the company is no longer doing the buisness for which he was employed.

>>If someone's job isn't required then they shouldn't be allowed to replace them. It should be put into law with a massive, massive payout to anyone who's unfairly screwed over by this.

They are.... its unfair dismissal but that doiesn't apply in this case. The business was no longer carrying out that job inb his location (they moved to to Bulgaria... presumably an airbag factory?) so the ex-employee was indeed redundant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is ridiculous

So I am genuinely curious.....

A fair few of the GTS roles are primarily technical. A lot of them work remotely. Your location is now largely irrelevant, especially now during Covid when most are even working from home.

Location then becomes largely irrelevant right? You can be anywhere. So this really does then become a question of cost reduction and not job function. If the job function exists, the job is not redundant.

How can someone in HR justify that someone sat at home doing a job can be made redundant because someone sat at home in a different country can do the same job cheaper?

[Anonymous Coward]

HR evaluations everywhere...

...consist of subjectively deciding the employee's rating, and then reverse engineering the required scores in whatever this year's "objective" evaluation process is.

[My-Handle]

Re: HR evaluations everywhere...

One big company I used to work for had an appraisal scheme where each team's average score had "be average". e.g. 2.5 out of 5 or whatever.

We had some teams full of over-performers, all of which went above and beyond, yet some of them had to score "below average". Then you had teams of lazy bottom-feeders, some of whom scored better than the over-performers.

Scores were assigned to fit what the company wanted them to be, not how the employees actually performed

[MrBanana]

Re: HR evaluations everywhere...

Stack ranking, grading on the bell curve, call it what you like - it sucks. Especially when your manager tells you that for this year, no matter what your achievements, you have to take a low score "for the team".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: HR evaluations everywhere...

GE were sods for that, as they sacked the bottom 10% each year.

If you are brilliant, but in a stratospherically performing team, then a good manager would move you to a poorly performing team to protect you and more someone in the opposite direction to be the fall guy. However, you were lost to the original team and their performance would then drop.

Bad managers didn't even bother with that.

And your performance each year, would become your average goal for the next year. So, even if you were a 'role model' in one year and did exactly the same the next year, you would be marked as average!

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: HR evaluations everywhere...

Microsoft teams (allegedly) used to hire a couple of idiots every year to fire as cannon-fodder to protect their people from stack-ranking

[Korev]

Re: HR evaluations everywhere...

Microsoft teams (allegedly) used to hire a couple of idiots every year to fire as cannon-fodder to protect their people from stack-ranking

<<Opens Microsoft's career site>>

[My-Handle]

Re: HR evaluations everywhere...

Said previous employer also had a similar scheme. Bottom 10 or 15% each month were put on a "performance improvement plan". If they came in bottom again, they were fired.

The kicker was that the targets for these teams were completely arbitrary and, for significant portions of a year, actually exceeded the amount of work coming in to the company. That's right, it was actually impossible for everyone to meet their targets because they weren't being given enough work to allow them to do so. And work was handed out pretty randomly, which made getting put on a PIP a dice roll.

As a side note, turnover for staff on the floor was about 2% -per week-. Some via the above rules, most by their own accord. Every Friday was a leaving do for a handful of people.

[Mark 65]

Re: HR evaluations everywhere...

As a wise man once told me - HR only exist to make sure you're gotten rid of legally.

Seems they failed in this case.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I got made redundant...

...from a well know major IT player, I had no idea what criteria they used to choose me, I had no idea if 'scores' were involved. I did ask but never got a sensible answer. All I new about it was from a email from my manager telling me I was out of the door in six weeks time. I did not complain since I was glad to see the back of the crap company and due to my particular circumstances I got a reasonable pay-off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: When I got made redundant...

If you are who I think you are, then we miss your 28 years of experience and your replacement in Romania would struggle to logic his way out of lift if it didn't have blinking lights!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like people producing something useful, the Title Is Optional...

I could never understand the logic behind cutting half-a-dozen customer-facing or product development/delivery worker drones but keeping one Management type who doesn't work directly with the customers and doesn't produce or develop the company's products, in fact doesn't seem to do much except "liaise" with other Management types and decide who gets fired.

Oh, wait a minute...

[Sam not the Viking]

Re: Like people producing something useful, the Title Is Optional...

It is a mystery. Every manager should be viewed as a potential cost-saving.

[andy 103]

Re: Like people producing something useful, the Title Is Optional...

Because managers never factor in their own salaries when producing Excel sheets showing cost "savings".

It's a pretty simple formula. All the people who actually do real work are a cost (salaries) but all the people who manage those costs (even though they often have much higher salaries) are seen as saviours because they can "save the company money". Often by trying to replace highly skilled workers with less skilled workers. When things go tits up said managers leave, and then repeat the process at another company. All whilst extracting a massive salary + benefits for themselves, naturally.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Like people producing something useful, the Title Is Optional...

I work in a consultancy where we often do 'organisation restructuring' (I don't get involved in that, but I see a lot of the reports and analyses). Usually, when it's done right, middle manager jobs are the biggest reductions. You keep all the people on the bottom layer who do the work and their supervisors who know how to do the work. Then you make the senior managers work harder by taking away their immediate underlings so they have to talk to the supervisors.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Like people producing something useful, the Title Is Optional...

Imagine if somebody had invented some sort of mechanical device for processing information quickly.

Then you wouldn't need armies of middle managers making reports for other higher layers of manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Like people producing something useful, the Title Is Optional...

They're not the only obvious target. A general rule of thumb is that if the HR department has been left to its own devices for the last three years then half of them can go.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Like people producing something useful, the Title Is Optional...

But if the HR dept needed to make anyone in the HR dept redundant they would have to hire more staff to deal with the work

[hoola]

Re: Like people producing something useful, the Title Is Optional...

I wish someone would do that at my place.........

The number of people in non-productive roles increases as the number actually doing the work decreases. Strangely (or not) most of the non-productive roles are higher up in the pay scales.

[Howard Sway]

Never mind the quality, just look at the cost

The only things that IBM have had going in their favour for the past couple of decades are the quality of their unique technologies and the expertise and professionalism of their staff. For the very high end business stuff, they were still a reliable option, but were always a premium one. This came with superb documentation and access to advice that made it a proper added value proposition.

By ruthlessly booting out decades of experience and knowledge and replacing it with el cheapo newbies, just to save money on the balance sheets, they are announcing to the world that they are now a purely bean counter led company, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. So, in the end the world will ask what the point of them is, and look elsewhere for cheaper alternatives themselves, hastening their decline.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Never mind the quality, just look at the cost

The only thing IBM have going for them is a bunch of govt contracts that get renewed because 'nobody got public-inquired for buying IBM', soon they will be bought by Carl Icahn and devolve into a patent troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Never mind the quality, just look at the cost

What do you mean announcing? They've been doing this for decades.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Never mind the quality, just look at the cost

Nevertheless it's an interesting experiment in just how long a company can circle the drain before actually going in.

[Anonymous South African Coward]

IBM = I'ts B*ll*cks Man

[TimMaher]

I’m Back Monday

Unless you have been made redundant.

[Shadow Systems]

Where's IBMAlone?

Of all our members you would think that one would be posting to this article, no?

*Leaves out a plate of fresh cookies, BlinkenLights, and a pint to entice said member to come around*

=-)

[Grease Monkey]

Older vs Younger

Dumping older staff in favour of younger staff is a short sited policy. In most large companies it's likely that further redundancies (sorry "efficiency savings") will be necessary at a later date. The beauty of keeping on your older employees is that you can hope that some of them will retire before your next round of redundancies is necessary.

Of course many people also cite the saving by keeping on younger staff being offset by the loss of skills and experience, but in my experience there's another risk to laying off your older staff. When a round of redundancies is announced then some staff will start looking for another job. Even after the redundancies have been confirmed some staff will continue to be nervous and will continue to look for another job. Not only that but you may apply for other jobs before the redundancies are confirmed, but the offers may not start coming in until after that point. I've seen this happen on a number of occasions. One particular instance involved a team of 12 Where it was decided that only 8 people could achieve the same thing - the fact that this wouldn't actually fit in with the shift patterns did not seem to bother management. However within two months of the redundancies being confirmed a further three people had resigned. This left the business with 5 people trying to do the work of 12. So what does this have to do with age? Well younger people are going to find it easier to find alternative employment. No only that but lower paid younger staff are more likely to be able to find alternative employment at a higher rate of pay. So this scenario is more likely to occur if you decide to lay off the older staff and keep the younger.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Older vs Younger

"Well younger people are going to find it easier to find alternative employment."

But they're not going to start looking until they've been there long enough for disillusion to set in.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is cost effective?

When I worked for IBM they let go a lot of lowly paid people, such as the person who came round, checked the toner in the printers, and replace it if necessary, and "space planners" who organised any office moves, including network connections, cupboards,the people to do the moves etc.

These jobs were now done by expensive professional managers. I got to know the inside of a printer, and fixed many a paper jam.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is my actuallymy first anon post. Unfortuntely, after 40, it gets quite hard to find job. people in 20s will work half my wage now. damn the experience I have and speed I can work.

PS: I'm an engineer in construction business.

[Potemkine!]

taking an average of just 48 seconds per person.

How sensitive.

Next time IBM will use an AI to lower this to 48 ms.

[briesmith]

What about the client?

What did Santander think about this decision (to move support to that hotbed of English language speaking, Bulgaria)? Did they run it against their own employment policies and practices? Did they carry out a risk assessment? Did they seek documented and quantised assurances from IBM before agreeing to the change?

Or did the offer of reduced costs from IBM switch off any concerns they might otherwise have had? Shipping jobs offshore should simply be banned. We will soon need every last one we can find.