USA: IBM faces several lawsuits over alleged age discrimination after firing employees
"IBM Fired as Many as 100,000 in Recent Years, Lawsuit Shows", 31 Jul 2019
International Business Machines Corp. has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials and make it appear to be as “cool” and “trendy” as Amazon and Google, according to a deposition from a former vice president in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit.
The technology company is facing several lawsuits accusing it of firing older workers, including a class-action case in Manhattan and individual civil suits filed in California, Pennsylvania and Texas last year.
“We have reinvented IBM in the past five years to target higher value opportunities for our clients,” IBM said in a statement. “The company hires 50,000 employees each year.”
In his deposition, Wild said 108-year-old IBM faced talent recruitment problems and determined one way to show millennials that IBM was not “an old fuddy duddy organization” was to make itself appear “as [a] cool, trendy organization” like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc., according to the document. To do that, IBM set out to slough off large portions of its older workforce using rolling layoffs over the course of several years, according to court documents...
This strategy deliberately targeted older workers like the plaintiff, Texas-based Jonathan Langley, 61, who has accused IBM of firing him after more than 24 years because of his age, according to the document. IBM filed a motion to dismiss Langley’s case. On Tuesday, his lawyers filed an opposition to that motion...