In a shocking revelation that has just come forward, a senior IBM employee has said in an ongoing discrimination lawsuit that the technology giant has fired around 1,00,000 employees in the last few years because it wanted to have more millennial workers like Amazon and Google so that it looks “cool” and “trendy”.
According to a report that has surfaced on The Register, the lawsuit hearing in the case has been filed by lawyers on behalf of Jonathan Langley, a former salesman for IBM. It is worth pointing out that former HR vice president of the company, Alan Wild has said that “50,000 to 100,000 Big Blue staff have been axed in the past five or so years.”
The axed staff at IBM was replaced by younger people so that the company looks ‘young’. Several technology companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook also have a lot of young people and millennials working for them. Langley, 61, had sued the company for “unfairly ditching older capable staff to replace them with so-called early professional hires.”
IBM, however, has maintained that it does not discriminate on the basis of age. In a statement, the 108-year-old company said, “The company hires 50,000 employees each year, and spends nearly a half-billion dollars on training our team. We also receive more than 8,000 job applications every day, the highest rate that we’ve ever experienced, so there’s clear excitement about IBM’s strategy and direction for the future.”
It is worth mentioning that the technology giant, in the last few years, has fired nearly a third of its global workforce and aggressively hired new people simultaneously. According to the report, “Langley was a long-standing IBM Hybrid Cloud salesperson until he was selected to be laid off – despite performing so well.”
In his disposition, Wild has also added that IBM wanted potential hires to see the company not as an “old fuddy duddy organization”. Instead, the company wanted to be looked upon as “cool and trendy.”
He further added, “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 ProPublica, an investigation that was conducted in March last year found that in the last five years, the company has fired almost 20,000 employees in the United States and most of them were either 40 years in age or more.
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