Lawsuit: IBM Cut Older Workers Not to Be a ‘Fuddy Duddy Organization’

IBM allegedly has shed up to 100,000 workers in recent years, focusing on older workers, while simultaneously hiring younger employees in an effort to make Big Blue more attractive to millennials.

That’s according to a lawsuit filed by Jonathan Langley, a former IBM employee, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division. Prior to being laid off in 2017, his role was sales lead for the PureApp team.

This week, Langley filed a response opposing IBM’s motion for a summary judgment, asking the court to rule that Langley has no case.

Langley’s suit alleges that IBM is “obsessed with getting younger, and that obsession is based in a belief in the broad-brush stereotype that one class of persons – young people – is more valuable to IBM than another class of persons — old people.”

IBM sent us the following statement: “We have reinvented IBM in the past five years to target higher-value opportunities for our clients. As part of this reinvention, we have made major investments in our skills and in new businesses, such as Watson Health, and in people with expertise in critical new areas such as cloud, analytics and quantum and blockchain technologies. We have also transitioned to a less labor-intensive business model and have divested some of our operations. 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.”

Earlier this summer, IBM confirmed plans to lay off up to 1,700 employees, representing a fraction of the more than 340,000 workers at the company.

Alan Wild, former vice president of human resources, said in his deposition that IBM determined one way to show millennials that the company was not “an old fuddy duddy organization” was to make itself appear “cool” and “trendy” like Google and Amazon, hence shedding older workers.

According to Bloomberg, IBM faces 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.

Last month, IBM reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings, including nearly $19.2 billion in revenue; however, year-over-year revenue declined for the fourth consecutive quarter, even as profit grew.