Sealed, confidential IBM files in age-discrimination case now public to all Confidential IBM documents presented in court as evidence to support claims Big Blue systematically shed older workers – documents subsequently placed under seal – have now publicly surfaced in one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against the IT giant. The documents – slides and charts that describe corporate …
It also shows how the lack of effective enforcement and oversight has encouraged and enabled it. I know people on all sides of this fight, newcomers that got hired in as replacements for the grey beards getting pushed out, old timers that were the brains and blood of a generation the made IBM a titan. Sadly I also met some of the management and HR people that were all to happy to swing the axe to shore up the balance sheet fiddling that papered over senior managements rudderless failures as the organization lost money, talent, and reputation year after year.
The saddest thing to me is that this has happened over and over at big blue. The punishment for getting caught takes too long, and is to small to discourage ongoing purges. After the first big cull of the gold watch crowd, there was a pause while the cases foundered their way through the courts. When it became clear the enforcement was toothless they doubled down hard, trying to block accountability through use of contact labor, arbitration clauses, trickery, and political maneuvers. But it was of such scale it was obvious even from the outside.
Their hiring and recruiting process was also unabashedly targeted and discriminatory. The old timers need not apply was made pretty clear.
We shouldn't be relying on IBM to write down incriminating material, we need laws that provide transparency on hiring and firing of workers, and supports interventions as soon as the patterns of abuse appear, not after 15 years of endless appeals.
Justice in a wrongful termination or age discrimination case needs to be delivered when the victims are still alive and in the labor pool.
The biggest atrocity is the arbitration clauses that prevent any form of cross-case discovery of facts/precedent to help expose the issues at hand. If a single person locked into an arbitration clause proves that they have, in fact, been given the shaft, there's no way for another employee making the exact same claim can use the facts presented in the first case to prove their own. If a hundred folks all have the same claim & argue the same facts, the arbitration clause process prevents them from forming a class action to consolodate matters; they each have to make their individual cases, presenting individual facts, arguing individual issues, even though there may be an angry mob of others with the exact same problem.
The courts should strike down arbitration clauses & force all such matters back into the judicial light of day. YES it will swamp the courts with employment matters that could probably be handled by an employment tribunal, but it would ALSO prevent the employer from being able to sweep such matters under the rug. One person filing a wrongful termination claim wouldn't raise any eyebrows, but a thousand individuals all filing such claims would get noticed & probably consolodated into a single class action matter that would DEFINITELY prove the employer is full of shit.
TL;DR: arbitration clauses should be illegal. Companies need to be brought out into the light of public/legal review.
Arbitration clauses don't necessarily have to be illegal, but it should be applicable to cases where it's more gray-scale issues (early termination in breach of contract, firing over workplace disputes from personalities clashing, that sort of thing). But claims of blatantly illegal behaviour like this, I agree. At the very least once ONE person can show funny business going on, anyone claiming the same should be allowed to go straight to court in a class-action.
I'd really like to see the courts crack down on people/firms repeatedly filing papers asserting things already proven to be false in prior court cases. If judges started referring lawyers who do that to their respective State Bars for discipline, you'd see a lot more lawyers push back on their clients to cut the obfuscation. It would also be nice to see some prosecutors start going after executives who also go into court and perjure themselves by repeating stuff already proven false in prior court cases.
IBM got caught and should be raked over the coals.
But they are certainly not alone in discriminating against older employees, primarily to save on payroll costs. The problem is the difficulty of proving it, since few companies are as stupid as IBM to write it down in their records.
>IBM got caught and should be raked over the coals.
IBM have already effectively destroyed themselves, they will live on as a government legacy platform and then finally as a patent troll - but IBM as a computer company is dead
sadly its what happens when a technical business is run by HR & accountants & thinks anyone can do the technical bits so no need to have expensive techies when you can higher more cheaper ones.
the former titans are no more, just a shell of their former selves trading on mystique of previous endeavours.
IBM refuses to provide any numbers/demographics on who was fired within departments during the time periods in question or if they hired younger professionals in their place. They say there was a resource action eliminating employees' jobs/departments, but refuse to substantiate it. Rometty and Diane Gershon, both in their 60s, had the unmitigated gaul to attack the maternal workforce. How dare they? Rometty sits on the boards of several companies including JP Morgan and the Council of Foreign Affairs still getting paid millions. She & Gershon, now teaching at Harvard Business School (the irony) were the masterminds behind the elimination of all these older workers and in the meeting which termed older workers "Dinobabies." They cheered the VP on. I hope they pay; but given that Rometty lacks a compassion chip in her brain, and has moved forward without giving two figs about anyone's life she destroyed, it will never happen. She is shielded from being deposed.
As we all know, people have lost not only their jobs, but homes, medical insurance (depending on the year you were fired, you either got 3 or 6 months of medical care at the corporate rate, then it accelerated to $1800/mo for a family of three - who can pay that?!). If anyone thinks finding work at 55 or older is easy, despite advanced education, attempt it. There's an ex-IBM employee in Boston (his story was in the Boston Globe earlier this year) who was laid off at 63, and he's working at Trader Joe's so he can put his 13 yo son through school and college. Many employees who sued had sick family members yet still exceeded in their roles. One woman in the Kinney vs IBM case, had been given an award for pulling IBM out of a software quagmire worldwide, was promoted (Rometty announced it herself) and after coming back from a company sanctioned leave because her brother died of brain cancer, and her mother died three days later (she was caretaker to both), was fired! Case after case demonstrates that all these employees were high performing and let go OR were set up by a manager who came in just to fire them. HR had "LISTS" (who compiled them no one knows, but a whistleblower said they had an algorithm). All anyone in these cases wants to know is who was laid off, the selection process and if any younger people were hired in their place. Everyone should read the Kinney vs IBM case, because it details the backstories of the 15 litigants and IBM's "scheme," (the attorney's words) in bullet format. It's stomach turning.
The grey hairs bring experience to the table. Experience can help in understanding many issues such has how a technology developed, operational issues, customer issues, etc. Understanding the issue is the first step to solving the issues. The experience can be valuable even if it is not strictly IT as it might give an understanding on how a process will actually work. Experience is only gained by facing issues as they come. Firing the grey hairs and replacing them with diapers is idiotic as there will be no institutional memory.
The grey hairs bring experience to the table.
Exactly. Although not anything I think IBM would be involved in, I recently had to explain to a youngster how to join a gear train to a stepper motor, when said motor had no keyway. In spite of an MSc (Hons) in Aeronautical Engineering, he had never heard of a collet.
Later he decided he needed repeated accelerating rotation for part of his project and started writing a special driver for the stepper before realising that changing the motor speed would change the speed of the entire mechanism, and he was about to abandon his project. I pointed out that all he needed was a spiral gear (nautilus gear). Again he did not believe that such a thing existed as he believed that all gears were circular and that only the tooth shape changed depending on the application.
Mind you he has already gone on to become a millionaire, sold his company, and is now in the process of building up his second business venture. He may have been dangerous to let loose on aeroplane design, but he certainly learnt the lessons of how to do business.
"...One of the fundamental issues of the milennials right there when it comes to practicality.
Unable to think for themselves, do research etc. Blind to commonsense, blind to knowledge of the 'elders'
We'll be in caves again in the next few hundred years if we allow them...."
Without a constant influx of new ideas and fresh thoughts that come out of educational institutions we also run the risk of stagnating.
There is a flip side to these discussions which is rarely mentioned and always biased towards "the yoof need to listen to the experience" - some (not all by a long stretch) older/more mature workers are too set in their ways to change. They view new ideas with too much skepticism rather than taking a balanced view and giving new ideas and approaches a fair shot.
Yes, it's true that the younger crowd if let loose will often repeat the mistakes previously learned from, and need that guiding hand of experience to temper the overzealousness, but... you can learn a lot by listening to them as well.
Yes. Older workers may have a lifetime of experience layered on top of an outdated education. They may work at keeping up in some specialities but stagnate otherwise. Even if they work at unlearning limits, their sense of what's feasible, let alone easy, can fail to match that of younger colleagues, while those youngsters may lack the the hardwon understanding of what can, will and has gone wrong. Employers should want both.
In time, the young will grow old and then they can complain about the young. It's been going on for thousands of years and yet somehow we're not living in caves.
I wouldn't say "outdated" education. Perhaps less experience with new technologies, but as far as I know, math and basic science don't go out of date. And 90% of what we engineers do is utilise technology to solve problems, so keeping up with technology is far more important than the date on your diploma.
"They view new ideas with too much skepticism rather than taking a balanced view and giving new ideas and approaches a fair shot."
The problem is that so many of these "new" ideas are just a repackaging of something we've already abandoned in the past, but it seems new to those that are new to the field.
"Without a constant influx of new ideas and fresh thoughts that come out of educational institutions we also run the risk of stagnating."
Any fans of Battlebots here? Have you also noticed that the "elders" of the game are still running the same robots, just with incremental changes, bigger motors, stronger armour etc while the "new blood" come in with new designs and concepts? Not all the "new bloods" do well of course, and many talk about what they learned from the "elders". The "elders" even congratulate the "new bloods" when they do well. But the "elders" rarely seem to take on any of the new designs and concepts themselves.
The younger generation job hops which the older generation never thought to do, because it looked bad on your resume. There is zero loyalty among the young, because they are being recruited at a faster pace than older workers. Younger people simply don't have the experience or rapport to deal with clients. The kids today prefer texting or emailing and NO phone contact. How in heaven's name would they be able to build client relationships. It's a generational thing, and older workers are much better at this in sales.
Oh yeah, have met a bunch of these in various industries.
My nickname for them is "Educated Fools" or "Educated Idiots".
Paper qualified, assume they are always right cos of the paper, and then get stuck when they don't know how the world actually works. Met people like this, all the way to PHDs (or permanent head damaged, as we call them, when they exhibit similar symptoms).
You sure it's Millennials you have a problem with? The YOUNGEST of them is now 26! The oldest are 41 and on their way to becoming grumpy old codgers themselves.
You make it sound as if every mechanical engineer should just magically know about the existence of non-constant radius gears. The problem is (and I can attest to this myself as a millennial engineer) the training we receive nowadays heavily emphasizes disciplines like motion control and dynamics and neglects purely mechanical solutions. Because the VAST majority of the work an engineer is likely to do now involves those disciplines. Mechanical gear train solutions are only used in a small subset of the work and the expectation is that if an engineer needs he it will learn that on the job from those with the knowledge they need. Since he went on to run an apparently successful business I am guessing he took a lot of lessons to heart. Just maybe working on mechanical drive lines was not his thing. It happens. (Personally l like that sort of thing, but it's probably also the reason I'll likely never set up any business and become a millionaire.)
The problem I've run into is that sometimes the gray-hairs might have the experience but their "holier than thou, I know it all and you're an idiot" attitude makes it impossible to learn from them. These people get left by the wayside because inevitably they DON'T know it all and there is stuff they can learn from us spring chickens (oh how I wish I was still a spring chicken)
"You make it sound as if every mechanical engineer should just magically know about the existence of non-constant radius gears."
Not magically, but because university *taught them that*. That's literally basics of mechanical engineering: Different mechanisms to generate desired movement. AFAIK every university teaches that and it's mandatory course. Has been since for ever, too. Because it's literally *the basic stuff*.
Every *engineer* should know that and a mechanical engineer who have slept through the lectures and doesn't know, is a poor engineer, shouldn't have passed that course.
"Not magically, but because university *taught them that*."
But like I just said, there is a good chance their university DIDN'T teach them that. Mine didn't. We got the basics of gears and cams, but things like non constant radius gears was never mentioned beyond MAYBE a vague picture reference. I wouldn't fault someone for not remembering something like that off the top of their head years later.
" Because the VAST majority of the work an engineer is likely to do now involves those disciplines."
Yes, because they literally can't do anything else.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, *every problem ever* looks like a nail.
And therefore engineers *need to know* all the tools ever invented. At least at basic level. Like non-circular gears *existing*. Anyone who teaches only one, is just stupid.
Remember when the greybeards would work on projects with the recent grads and bring them up to speed on-the-job? Project after project? As a recently retired greybeard, I remember being on both sides of that, and enjoyed it immensely.
Sadly, the companies I was with all wanted to turn me into a manager. I like building sh*t, so I repeatedly declined. Finally, I found a company that was happy to let me continue to work as a senior engineer. It was wonderful...until they got bought by a multinational who wanted me to "grow". I avoided it for a few years, then finally retired. Maybe I'll go back as a contractor, when they discover they are short of greybeards.
> The grey hairs bring experience to the table. Experience can help in understanding many issues such has how a technology developed, operational issues, customer issues, etc. Understanding the issue is the first step to solving the issues.
You're thinking only in terms of efficiency and quality of service to the customer. How quaint. :-)
Why have a greybeard fix a customer's problems in half an hour when a junior can stretch it out to days, even weeks at full billing rate? This is the modern way to do business. And if all businesses are equally bad competitive then the customer has nowhere to go.
"Why have a greybeard fix a customer's problems in half an hour when a junior can stretch it out to days, even weeks at full billing rate? This is the modern way to do business. And if all businesses are equally bad competitive then the customer has nowhere to go."
So, what you're saying is there is a gap in the market for a company employing greybeards to solve other peoples problems at 1/10th the cost, 1/10th the time and steal everyone else's customers and make a killing?
Sure there is but there's no profit in it. Experienced people cost more and it looks bad in bookkeeping, so stock value will be low and CEO isn't getting bonuses.
Any company spends 100M in 'consultants', but wont spend 30M to hire competent people doing the same thing, because employees are 'fixed cost' and it looks *bad* to stock brokers, lowering the bonus CEO is getting.
The real reason for outsourcing is *never* cost saving, it's always transferring costs from fixed costs to variable costs. And stock exhange rewards that by rising stock price, so CEO and the owners are really happy, while company spends 3* more money than earlier. No-one cares: Profit is taxable money, stock price increase is tax free.
Explains also the fanatism companies buy their own stock back, at any price: It pumps the price up and hides the profit. No profit, no taxes. And 30% increase of stock price. In a year.
But part of IBM's problem is that they wouldn't let 'the old guys' retrain on new technologies. It was like they believed over a certain age an old dog couldn't learn new tricks.
I am getting old, yet I am always looking to learn new things, and I am able to identify and avoid issues (not all mind you) when doing so. IBM went out of their way to block people from moving to other disciplines. Open seats would miraculously vanish. Any attempt to move to another obviously struggling project/customer was blocked.
There is a time and place for experience, and there is a time and place for new ideas. They need to co-exist to move us forward without falling flat on our faces.
If I remember correctly, IBM "declined to verify the authenticity of the documents" to the Register (and the rest of the Media circus) after they were leaked to the Press. The Documents in the court case were sealed, and so might have been in the court case (we can assume yes, but cannot prove it), in which case they would have been verified for the court. But because they were sealed (a dodgy judicial process if ever there was one!), we may never know the truth, unless they're used in the next case, and the judge in that case decides not to let IBM get the documents sealed again...
In many ways the same thing.
The only thing that should be in 'keep your mouth shut, here a few $k-£k for your trouble' are items that disclose meaningful things to competitors - like your new product, genuine secrets
Outside of those, anything that impacts on the rights of an employee should be allowable, irrespective of prior coercion - sorry - agreement.
"Discrimination of any kind is entirely against our culture and who we are at IBM, and there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our company," she said ...
Golden Rule: Anyone who uses the phrase "That is not who I am / we are" is without doubt that thing. I presume they use the phrase because questioning any aspect "identity" has become heresy: it's OK to question what someone is like, but not who they are..
Just like I cringe every time I hear a politician say "The truth of the matter is"... You just know that what follows will be a truth from an alternate reality.
Also when they say " the numbers don't lie", it means they are about to spout a statistic which may possibly be true for a single limited case (although is usually just made up) but in terms of what they are trying to prove is completely false.
There is no systemic age discrimination at our company, but amazingly, people over 50 always have poor annual assessments and surprisingly, their skills never match the profiles required for vacant roles. We don't know how that keeps happening for every Resource Action, but it does.
I took a voluntary package after a year of pressure. Dozens of others left at the same time. Any real deadwood had long gone (unless protected by TUPE contracts) and everyone going had valuable skills and experience. I actually believe IBM that it wasn't about age, it was about cost. Graduates and people in developing economies are cheaper than skilled professionals in Europe and North America. If IBM could have avoided paying pensions and gotten older people cheaper that's who they'd hire. Delivering for our customers had long gone by the wayside since the PwC reverse takeover.
It was cost driven, but I guess some PHBs targetted older costs. I left in 2015, after that packages were statutory minimum for a while, so it was a good time to leave. I'd managed to keep a grip on my job as some of our customers required UK support (and I required Full SC / UK Eyes Only clearance) but that customer went shopping elsewhere, and 'UK support could mean EU' (as this was pre-Brexit) started being said, and I knew which way the wind was blowing, and it was offshore.
Still, the pension is performing OK, so I can't gripe too much.
I think that Project Waltz saw this off in the end; the pension burden exists of course but I think it's immaterial whether or not you work for IBM any more. I left IBM in 2008 and I'm a deferred member of the defined benefit pension scheme and I stand to collect on this shortly, and it's a good deal, which was sold to me when I joined IBM in 1984. But once the defined benefit scheme was shut down, after I left, anyone still working for IBM is in the same boat as I'm in - older workers might get paid more but they aren't building up any more pension "burden" for IBM.
Unless it's a DB style pension which are a pain for a lot of older companies as they need to keep the pot filled until the last claiment pops off. Most companies now just chip into something akin to a stakeholder fund style pension. They set one up and hand you the logins and it's up to you to make it earn it's keep then they don't have to worry as the whole fund is yours, the second you leave the employ you keep it and they don't owe you a penny more. Last DB pension I had was closed way back in 2002, since then every company I've permied at has been stakeholder fund type, when you leave you just strip out what's there and transfer to top up to your own personal pension fund holding.
I left in a much earlier clear out.
I had been telling my favourite customer what I expected my daily rate to be - about one-third of what IBM had been billing for me.
He replied "How the hell does IBM think they will be able to do business in future?".
"37 per cent of all US hires at IBM were over the age of 40;"
Right, now separate out those that came onboard through acquisition of their company and those you actually set out to hire. Oh, quelle surprise ... you acquired some over 40's, which you got rid of as soon as you could, but actually hired a load of 20 somethings.
>but actually hired a load of 20 somethings.
I suspect not, no 20 something with permission to work in the USA and a choice went to IBM
They might have hired some 20 something H1s or some overseas contract labour - but nobody that recognises a keyboard would choose to work for IBM at this point
For at *least* the last 35 years has been utterly and completely about keeping the stock price rising, not about doing it right the first time or getting the newest/bestest thing out there.
I was shunted to GDF division a ways back and left of my own accord. Whilst I was there the young bright things from a management level or two up were concerned with *one thing* only, how to collate data that would allow them to charge my former employer *far* more money for the services being rendered. Two of them were horrified when I explained that the (monster server running major important application) only had 2 cores per CPU. They were hoping they could multiply service charges by " At least 8 times" by charging by the core. They were further horrified when I produced reports about the (five year old) IBM AIX systems in place (think carefully here) that *also* only had 2 cores per CPU. They insisted I had to be wrong because (hot secccsy recent) model had 8. The MBA simply did not understand that the older models were ....... older tech. Mind you he had trouble understanding why there was no wifi for the servers in the data centre and why we were pay so *damned* much for cabling.
I also know the best possible way to CYA, and have several copies.
30-35yo is your technical peak - at least to all HR departments. After that you do not fit in with the younglings. It is also trendy to go the the 'cloud', outsource your storage, and rent applications and os's - for as long as you are in business. As IBM won't give out actual tangible numbers - well where there is smoke ... There is also a trendy to outsource specialties, like comms, since basically the 1990's. It is like can I get a package, and end up working doing the same thing Monday. Some can, some can't. Some companies market test, go cheap, then discover the winner has no experience when the 5% dig you out of a hole knowledge - is absent.
This space is littered with IT service looser's **, HP, HPE, DXC, IBM etc - Lockheed Martin IT? Anyway the winners were all young companies with just out of uni fresh employees, not many experienced ones. Looser's only because the software and cloud licence games, ripped budget off the client, who had less money to spend on vendor development - which oddly appeared in Accounting firms pockets.
The hard fact is IBM was and had to respond to clients being unfaithful to be long term, meaning it cant afford specialist pensions. You will note the Airline industry and the car makers are getting lots of hand outs. Without looking at IBM, you can see plenty of other sectors ditching older workers, and putting new ones on with casual conditions, via a labor hire company to firewall the shame.
"The hard fact is IBM was and had to respond to clients being unfaithful to be long term, meaning it cant afford specialist pensions."
It seems to be really a surprise to you that clients tend to leave the company when you rip them off with both hands.
At that point your 'hard facts' are more like greedy a**holes claiming that *customers* are bad and not paying the extorsion money we want to make outarageous profits to richen ourselves.
IBM has a lot of profits ("only" 7 billion in 2021), claim that they can't afford something is really blatant lying. And you know it.
"For example, one passage describes an IBM vice president admitting "that neglecting to at least make an effort to transfer at least a few of the soon-to-be-laid-off IBM employees will 'blow a hole in our rhetoric.'""
To be fair to the VP in this quote, he/she appears to be trying to be somewhat moral here; as in - c'mon guys, let's at least TRY to do the right thing. Was probably in a room full of other VP vultures doing their best to savage the workforce, and was trying to keep some semblance of decency in the discussion whilst also trying to make sure his/her name didn't get 'accidentally' added to the redundancy list for not being a team player or some such bollocks.
I have no doubt that the "Managers" who are advocating this strategy are NOT young.
On the other hand, I've been able to observe the on-boarding and progress of of these same "EP's" at another US mega manufacturer... and so far, I've been forced into the conclusion that no university degree ever guarantees that your new hires are diligent, well educated or well balanced.
"Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance". — David Mamet
On the other hand, aiming for that early high salary frequently means they keep on the move, always looking for that better job/package and don't accrue much/any company pension or redundancy benefits. I wonder what happens to the "fast young things" when they start to realise that jumping ship for the next opportunity every year or two is getting harder because they are less young?
It's been said on these pages before that some recruiters, whether employer/HR or agency, see a short CV with few jobs on it as a strong negative, as if they don't want the sort of people who might be loyal and spend time gaining experience in a job.
"On the other hand, aiming for that early high salary frequently means they keep on the move, always looking for that better job/package and don't accrue much/any company pension or redundancy benefits"
Which no company offers anymore, at least for anyone under 40 anyway. Wasted time to even try.
We call these people "company hoppers" or "CV stuffers". They won't stay even 3 years in *any* company before swapping and from company point of view they are totally useless people, often levaing after one year.
Once they've learned their job to pay back the effort of teaching them, they'll leave as one more line in CV is gained.
HR people see a 'strong CV' and hire these on the spot and don't bother to think that a person who hasn't ever been even 3 years in a company, won't stay longer than that in yours either.
"HR people see a 'strong CV' and hire these on the spot and don't bother to think that a person who hasn't ever been even 3 years in a company, won't stay longer than that in yours either."
I have to say that early job hopping isn't bad. You get interesting projects and more diverse experience, letting you find what you like and are good at. You don't put new folks into supporting legacy projects, and if you have no history with a company you don't have a string of past projects you're expected to support. And in good times you generally get paid pretty well. Chip guys who are job shopping these days can pretty much write their own ticket.
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