IBM Starts Cutting U.S. Jobs Again

Published: March 8, 2010

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

So much for my whole idea of Colonizing Endicott from a little more than a year ago. IBM's strategy is more like Colonoscopy Endicott--and a whole slew of other facilities in the United States. Last year, IBM chopped an estimated 10,400 workers in its supposed home country, reducing its workforce here to around 105,000. And on March 1, it started cutting again.

According to counts made by Alliance@IBM, the local of the Communications Workers of America union that has been trying to organize IBM for longer than I have been in the IT racket, as of Thursday night, IBM had chopped some 2,699 employees from the payroll, [inhale] presumably to offshore jobs to China, India, and other low-cost regions so it can shell out billions in cash to buy back its own shares to prop up earnings per share so Wall Street gets all excited and IBM's top brass gets to have big ole bonuses [exhale]. Yeah, that was a tough one, but I am annoyed. And I don't think we need a union at IBM so much as a whole new way of making capitalism work for people, not corporations and politicians.

Alliance@IBM says that 24 people were cut from Systems and Technology development, with another 80 getting the axe in STG's sales and support group, 39 being given pink slips in the software development labs related to STG, and 12 getting cut from the global markets operation. Software Group cut 149 jobs in its Information Management and WebSphere Portal units, with another 119 going in its application and integration middleware products. Some unit of Global Services called Integrated Technology Delivery (which I have never heard of) had 1,366 jobs cut in various areas, all relating to the management of other people's IT resources. (This unit has a huge operation in India, and I suspect it just got a lot bigger.) IBM let go of 124 people in its own human resources operations, 57 in its Sales and Distribution organization, 48 in corporate marketing and communications, and the remainder were mostly within Global Services.

Here's what I want to know. If IBM moves all of its marketing and a lot of its sales operations overseas, will we notice? Could marketing, particularly for the i for Business platform, get any worse? The answer is definitely yes, but it is intriguing to think it might be no.

Now, if you are willing to locate anywhere else on the globe and take whatever local pay IBM deems reasonable, there are, as you can see from this query for job openings at Big Blue, some 4,864 vacant jobs at the company; 1,167 of those are even in the United States.

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