IBM gearing up to lay off over 100000 American employees?
By Darren Murph 
posted May 5th 2007 12:02AM
posted May 5th 2007 12:02AM
We'll admit, even we're a bit frightened that immensely intelligent humanoid bots may one day oust us from these seats, but according to whispers going around at IBM's HQ, something just as momentous could be going down as early as this year. Shortly after Lenovo told 1,400 of its US-based employees to politely hop off the payroll, IBM's LEAN plan could call for over 100,000 American workers to be canned in favor of (surprise, surprise) hiring overseas. Already, the firm has laid off 1,300 employees in 2007, but according to a recent report, an ongoing "planning meeting" for how to handle the company's Global Services could eventually axe "up to 150,000 US jobs" while hiring cheaper labor in China and India. Interestingly, this news could actually be sweet music to Wall Street, at least in the short term, but we can't imagine how this logistical nightmare will ever bode well for Big Blue's future.
Why not just give the jobs to christian mexicans instead of communist chinese and vietnamese? It would keep from supporting an undemocratic totalitarian society and help fix our immigration problems.
Simple fact people: you can't legislate quality of life if you share anything like a free-trade economy with parts of the world that lie outside your sphere of legislative influence.
One of the reasons that employees are so expensive in the US is that companies are required to give them all kinds of benefits. People thought they were helping workers by passing such laws. Instead they were just destroying jobs. You cannot create wealth by fiat. We've made it illegal for cheap labor to exist in this country, but we haven't destroyed the demand for it and we can't control supply from other countries. So now instead of being home to the cheap labor, someone else will. Instead of those cheap laborers spending their money in our country, on products made by others like them in our country, they'll be spending it in another country. The world economy is only leaving us behind because we want no part of it.
I am sick and tired of being told that foreign workers are better educated and/or smarter than Americans. That is simply not true. In fact my experience has been the opposite. I have often found off-shore resources to be less knowledgeable than Americans with comparable resumes. I also find them especially lacking in areas of initiative and creative problem solving.
I work in GBS and we have what is known as an "Off-Shore Complexity Factor". This is attributed to the lessor ability of our Asian counterparts and the logistics in dealing with the time change. This factor is well known amongst the rank and file, yet IBM's management will not admit that such a factor exists.
In the end, it really doesn't matter who is smarter. Business is about low costs, and just because the Asians may not be as high quality as the Americans that they are replacing, they are in the eyes of management good enough. Unfortunately, it is not the cost of people that has run up the cost on the engagements that I have been on, rather it has been management's inability to get things done. That will not change with lower billing rates.
may be we can hire these cheep labor people from abroad and have them run our goverment bet they wouldn't subcontract their jobs out. why is our goverment letting this happen may be its because of all the( KICK BACKS FROM ABROAD AND IN HOUSE)
its time we take back our country and get ride of the losers STAND UP FOR YOUR JOBS AND BE HEARD NOW!!!
Wake up American workers --- US companies are banging on the doors of Congress to increase the number of H-1B Non Immigrant Temporary Workers entering the USA to take jobs from skilled, educated Americans. The leaders for this outrage include: Senator Edward Kennedy (D.); Senator John McCain (R); Congressman Flake (R) Arizona; etc. These elected officials have stated that Americans are under-educated and under-skilled. Amazing hostility against the very people who pay their salaries, isn't it?
Consider that prior to being laid off from the American jobs, created by American workers, that these American professionals are often forced to train the less skilled, less educated, and zero experienced alien coming in on the H-1B visa program. (Which by the way, the Government Accounting Office has reported to Congress for more than 15 years is corrupt and should be repealed because of the fraud that cannot be stopped. Applicants (ie the alien who holds the H-1B visa) lie about their education level, skill level, job experiences, and even the location in the US that they will be going to -- all found in several of the reports by GAO).
For more information on the upcoming Skil Bill (and about 4 others waiting for Congressional votes) to increase the H-1B visa numbers -- go to:
htt://www.jobdestruction.com
It is a web site by Rob Sanchez -- an unemployed American engineer who seeks to inform his fellow countrymen of why there are no careers and rarely jobs for American professionals.
Will IBM lay off 100,000 US workers? Who knows. What is disturbing is that a lot of folks after having seen massive job destruction in the USA aren't finding it irrational or impossible to think that an American company would abandon American for a Third World Nation.
What puzzles me is why aren't US elected officials seeking ways to reward loyal American corporations -- ie those that keep their operations in the USA, those that hire American professionals for career positions, etc
ann and scaremongers like you, as well as all these sad, sad (but undoubtedly high quality) engineers that are unemployed: please move the f_ck out of wherever you effing are and go to where there is LOADS of JOBS and NO people able to fill them. for example silicon valley.
i have interviewed loads of engineers for well paying positions and guess what? there's a parade of freaks, clowns, paranoids, completely uninterested people coming in the door. took months to find someone usable. this is in - write this down - SILICON VALLEY - ya know, south of San Francisco, north of San Jose, CA.
no wonder companies there want to hire more H1Bs. also know that H1Bs are a huge pain in the @ss to hire (legalese, lawyers, $$$) compared to americans an on top of that have to be paid AT LEAST median wage in the area even if they are fresh college graduates who never worked an honest job in their life. therefore no employer in their right mind would hire an H1B over an american. it would be stupid. so please get over your paranoia. and move out of Idaho or wherever the heck you are, for the sake of all our sanity, OK??
Nikster -- it is amazing that you would be able to interview anyone at all with the kind of abusive and crude language that you have posted.
The governor of several states swore that they would find high tech jobs for their state citizens. So they went off to Silicon Valley thinking they could bring back to their states some of the rumored high tech jobs that were going unfilled. Funny thing is that they all returned to their respective states -- hats in hand -- without any jobs from California. Seems that there are no jobs that are begging to be filled in Silicon Valley. Silcon Valley is the once great location of dot.com jobs where companies produced mythical work products.
Unfortunately, folks don't bother to educate themselves about the corruption within the H-1B Non Immigrant Temporary Worker Visa program and spout off with absurd and abusive comments like Nikster has done.
The FACTS -- put in professional and polite terms:
1) There is no shortage of highly educated American professionals;
2) Fact there has never been a shortage of high tech American workers (these rumors of a pending crisis have been around sinc 1953 which was a scare of a shortage of engineers, then scientists in general, and then in the 1990s it was "computer professionals / high tech workers") but any well informed American professional knows these basic facts;
3) The US produces per year enough American citizen college graduates to fill every new high tech job created in America -- couple that with the number of laid off American professionals that means that there are more American professionals available every year than there job openings;
4)According to the most objective federal investigative agency, General Accounting Office, the H-1B Non Immigrant Temporary Worker visa is so corrupted that it cannot be fixed. This corruption -- coming directly from the GAO reports over more than 15 years of reporting -- include: the alien reporting false educational histories; false work histories; false work location statements. It includes US employers grossly under-paying the alien worker rather than paying the prevailing wages to the alien. It includes having the alien pay the fees for all filings.
5) And, there have been several federal prosecutions of fraud regarding the H-1B visa program of aliens knowingly falsifying H-1B applications for other aliens to obtain H-1B visas in a paid criminal scheme in several states.
6) American high tech workers have been forced to train their H-1B visa holder replacements by large employers in the USA. If the American employee does not do so -- the company will not give the American worker (skilled, experienced and in the job) the severance package. This means that the alien taking the job from the American worker is clearly unfit for the job since the Americans have to train the alien to do the work held for years by the qualified American who not only can do the job but can also teach others to do their job.;
6) Nikster needs to listen to CSPAN and hear Congressional testimony of American workers who have testified under oath how they have have been abused by US employers who have replaced them with cheap, less skilled, less educated aliens who hold an H-1B Non Immigrant Temporary Worker visa. (Anyone who isn't aware of this testimony and has expressed an alleged knowledge of the H-1B visa program as Nikster has -- has been living under a rock for the past decade!);
6) The engineers, scientists, computer professionals that I know are professional, respectful, highly qualified, Americans. (I don't know if Nikster has actually been in an the capacity of interviewing high tech professionals but if he is and all he found are "clowns" to interview ...maybe Nikster should look in the mirror. He clearly appears to have interviewing techniques problems and some personality issues that would impede anyone seriously working for a company that would employ him. Clearly, the posting here was rude, offensive, and had crude language. A little hard for an American professional to take such an interiviewer seriously nor would any sane American want to work for a company whose interviewer is as unpleasant a first encounter as you seem to be. Maybe its time you took a Dale Carnegie course or two, Nikster).
By the way -- Idaho is a lovely state as is Washington, Arizona, Minnesota, Florida, Nebraska, Texas.
You know, Nister, if you really are in the higing business of high tech professionals -- it's no wonder you have problems getting high tech professionals to work for your employer. Maybe these companies should start looking at what goes on in the hiring interviews if they have such hostile folks such as yourself who hate "Idaho", claim that Americans are "clowns', etc.
This would have been an excellent opportunity for a professional interviewer to have taken the opportunity to post that the company that they worked for had a dire shortage of high tech workers. It would have been an excellent opportunity for a resourceful interviewer to have expressed a great interest in American professionals to connect with their company for employment. Any interviewer in short supply of workers should take every opportunity to avail themselves of finding workers be those workers are living in Silicon Valley (the home of the dot.com BUST); San Diego; Boise, Idaho; Washington State; Texas; Denver, Colorado; etc. Who in their right mind would want to work for a company where the interviewer is as unpleasant and rude as Nikster has been in his posting? Geez!
If you really have access to jobs that need to be filled, Nikster --how about posting those specific jobs, salaries, and locations where Americans from across the country can apply for them? If not, I assume you posted without having a single job that needs filling and you just wanted to be an unpleasant poster.
THE full link to the web site for Job Destruction by Rob Sanchez is:
http://www.jobdestruction.com
(The "p" in http was dropped in the original posting by Ann)
By the way -- if you too are disgusted with getting off shored call centers to your American home (call jobs once held by Americans!) and you can't get these off shored script readers to stop calling you to buy services / merchandize from once former American companies. I found a solution that worked in my home.
First, these off shored centers have been pushed as a great thing because these folks speak English. Well -- they have never correctly pronounced my name nor my husband's name. One has to GUESS who they want. I used to be polite and go along with it. Then I realized why should I have to guess and be polite when these jobs were once held by my fellow countrymen and these companies think they can turn back to America to get into our wallets. I asked them to stop calling us. It didn't work. I hung up on them. It didn't stop them. I set the phone receiver down and let them speak to no one. It didn't stop them. FINALLY -- I realized that these calls centers are functioning on the assumption that anyone they reach back into the USA speaks English. That is the key! When I knew I had an off shore sales call coming uninvited into my home and using my telephone line that I am paying for which means that MY name and MY telephone number sits in some data bank out of the USA --- I respond in an language other than English. Within two weeks of using this new self-defense tool against offshored American jobs -- these call centers no longer call our home. We have been offshore call center free for more than four peaceful months! (It did stun the off shore call worker who would restart reading from the top of their script call when one asks "who is this?" in Spanish; German; French; Italian; or Japanese. As the script is re-read from the beginning and one then states in a non-English language "I don't understand". The call center end goes silent and then disconnects.)
If these companies want AMERICANS to buy their services and merchandize ... maybe showing some LOYALTY to America would be a nice foundation for doing business with Americans.
Offshoring has been planned since at least the 1950s, when David Rockefeller promoted the wholesale dismantling of industry in the USA and reconstruction in Latin America, both privately as well as publically in editorials that were published in the New York Times.
The plan was that big money-center banks would make huge loans to various targeted countries, ostensibly to build infrastructure such as roads, dams, railroads, etc, that were thought to be condusive to industrialization. The targeted countries were to pay back the loans, with interest, with the procedes from the export sales of their new industries to the USA.
Things didn't happen according to plan. Instead of building industries, the happy foreign workers were raising their standards of living with subsidized electricity from the dams, new transportation networks, and the rest of the loans largely being used to pay for current consumption instead of capital investment.
This lead to dependence on MORE loans, chronic trade deficits, and inflation, and the IMF constantly demanding "austerity programs", which often backfired as the unhappy foreign workers would attempt political solutions.
The Chileans for one example of many, elected a socialist government (of Salvador Allende) that promptly nationalized the industries. I suspect Mr. Allende's assassination was a result of some bankers' unhappiness.
That's why when offshoring finally did happen, it didn't happen in Latin America and Africa as per original plan; it happened in Asia where the culture is more condusive to capital accumulation and industrialization.
How does one protect one's economic livelihood from the loss of not only industrial and information jobs, but also many service jobs? For example, health care is often assumed to be many X-rays are transmitted to India for analysis these days. Wendy's chain of hamburger restaurants has already tested a system for offshoring the taking of your order at the drive-through--your order will shortly be routed through the Philipines or India if it's not already.
Unfortunately I don't have a full answer because the problem exists largely at a national level, but one can't exactly go to a government that is party to the offshoring plan and ask them nicely to ignore the powerful people lobbying for this. Basically it is very difficult to defend your job if your counterpart can afford to eat out every night and have a full-time maid on one-fifth your salary. Nor can one compete with overseas companies that pay drastically lower taxes, and are regulated less.
One can, however, even up the odds a little. There is a report on this at www.mutuallyassuredsurvival.com, but unfortunately the download capabilities don't seem to be working at the moment (at least, I keep getting nearly empty files instead of PDFs). Contact the webmaster with questions.
Nikster:
There are always freaks, clowns, etc. when sifting thru job applicants. I have found that there are plenty of good people to choose from when looking. Perhaps the cost of living is too high in the area that you are hiring for the salary offered? Or perhaps your methodology is flawed. Instead of trying to find people who have memorized tons of specific technical information you should be looking for people who have general engineering experience, technical aptitude and the ability to think.
Simple economics state that if you cannot find what you are looking for at the price you are offering then it is time to up the price. Otherwise you should try to find an alternate source. H1B's are particularly attractive because you can low-ball their pay (a little gerrymandering of the statistics always helps.) and they do not have the ability to sell their services to a competitor.
Indentured servitude is what made this country great. H1Bs take it a step further cause once they are done,we can send them back to where they came from....
Well, I guess it doesn't matter what the numbers are; if it's perceived as a trend, it's likely that it will become more and more acceptable (and it's not like there's a stigma now either). There are just so many issues at play here, from social attitudes (whether correct or not, there's a perception of U.S. workers as overpaid, lazy, etc.) to the fact that there is no accountability in upper management in larger companies... But businesses don't see the value in paying more, especially given that many U.S. workers can be just as bad in things like creating bad, non-user-centric applications and code, etc. but they're given timelines to get something done, not to get it done well or get it done so that there's less maintenance or higher quality. People who have a strong work ethic will want to do it right, but that kind of ethic is waning. I say U.S. and not American, because American really encompasses more than the U.S., and I know several people here on those Visas from Canada, Chile, etc. who are more than happy to work hard in this country. While there are many people in the U.S. who would like to work, unfortunately the ones who don't feel like they need to make it harder for them. I know of organizations that fight to get people w/disabilities hired, and they are so grateful for the opportunity to earn a living, but then people try to milk the system for disability checks because they have a hangnail.
Actually, this is already happening and has been happening for a little over a month now. As someone that was affected by the Lean process and know others that have been affected by the Lean process it is disturbing. To date, 3500+ IBM employees and contractors from Global Services have been released. Some have been given 30 days notice, and others only hours notice. Even clients are going back to IBM and asking why they come in and only one person is maning a Support Center where just "yesterday" there were five. The clients are not being notified of the releases and this is bad business on IBM's side.
I am an IBMer and I don't believe this story at all and I am not scared either. This is my opinion, not IBM's but let's get some facts straight. IBM is not owned by the Chinese. We sold our PC business to Lenovo which is Chinese. Note that IBM still owns a minority part of Lenovo. Our business has strengthened since then and the PCs are still very good. Chinese does not mean bad. In this case it means very good for everyone. IBM still makes servers, such as blades, we are still the second largest software company in the world, we are one of the (if not the) largest services provider, we make mainframes, we file more patents than anyone else (and I am proud to be a contributor to that particular statistic), we make the cell processor that powers all the major video games. This is certainly not a company that's on its way out. This is also a company that generally does the right thing by its employees, customers and shareholders.
Can I ask what specifically you do for IBM?
Do you work in a services or support or software development position?
I see the writing on the wall, it has been in the making for as long as I have been at the company. We get reassurances from our direct managers that our product will not be affected, etc etc etc... yet I still don't see them shelling out any money in raises/promotions/education.
No, instead we are focusing on creating a bunch of online training and "self-help" items, while at the same time we are hiring more Chinese and Indian developers/support staff that we are having people fly over to Asia to train.
I have yet to see an intelligent decision come down from upper management, and each year it gets worse.
IBM is shooting themselves in the foot with American companies though, whether they can make more profits in India and China remains to be seen.
Here's hoping for a decent severance package and IBM stock to soar to new highs... at least for a year, then I can cash out those stock options and sell all acquired stock and ditch this company.
I have wanted to make a switch anyway to something that is more personally satisfying... like farming... shovelling literal bs is going to be so much more satisfying than eating the figurative stuff I've been handed by my employer.
Skippy, I work in Global Business Services. I don't share your pessimism. We control how we view the world. If we want to see doom and gloom we will. If we want to see the good we will. This is not a perfect world. You have to learn to take the bad, take the good and make the best of the situation. I still believe IBM is a great company.
I was given my notice. My last day is May 31st. Sam Palmisano, the CEO of *Indian Business Machine*, will make huge fortune by doing this. I have plenty of cash in the bank, as I saw this coming ten years ago. I feel for my co-workers, though, who have bigger expenses than me. One guy has three kids, another one on the way, and a $2600.00 per month mortgage. It is sad. In my father's day, he had one job, and retired after a long and rewarding career. Sam Palmisano has obliterated that opportunity for us. Thanks, Sam. Enjoy your billions!
Stop Blaming Chinese
We live in Global Economy, so at end bottom line is what matters most, not nationalistic pride
At least IBM will lay them off and hand out severance packages.
Look at Siemens' wireless division - "sold" to BenQ for negative 250 million. Closed as 'bankrupt' 1 year, 1 day later. How many severance packages do you think were paid out to the loyal workers?
Same day, the execs at Siemens gave themselves a 30% raise (no joke).
This outsourcing and closing things/relocating is nothing new - but at least IBM won't try to just dump them; they have some business integrity.
All of these people should look at themselves in the mirror, and then they will know who to really blame.
I am sickened by all of the loss of employment in this country in the name of globalism.
Now its WHEN will everyone start waking up that they have been screwed.
Looks like whitey is mad and jealous that Asians are going to run the show