A senior IBM employee filed a discrimination lawsuit against the company, alleging, they fired around 1 lakh employees in last few years to look cool and trendy for millennials, like Google and Amazon do.
According to The Register, in the case of ex-IBM salesman Jonathan Langley, Alan Wild, a one-time HR vice president reportedly testified “that around 50,000 to 100,000 Big Blue staff was fired in the past five or so years”.
Old staff was replaced by young people, as is the case with several tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, among others. On this issue, the 108-year-old company said that they do not discriminate on age.
In one of their statements IBM said,
Every year the company hires 50,000 employees 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
The report also says Langley was a long-standing IBM Hybrid Cloud salesperson but despite performing well he was laid off by the company. .
An investigation by ProPublica in the month of March found that in the last five years, IBM fired an estimated 20,000 US employees ages 40 or older.
IBM fired nearly a third of its global workforce while aggressively hiring as well in those years.