InfoWorld: IBM plans service job cuts across Western Europe: March 18, 2005: By : PROFESSIONAL_SERVICES — Whatever happened to the notion of lifetime employment at IBM? Didn;t these folks used to treasure their employees?
Two weeks after announcing plans to cut 600 service jobs and close two locations in Germany, IBM (Profile, Products, Articles) on Friday said it intends to eliminate 538 similar positions and shutter five sites in Sweden.
Additionally, as many as 2,000 jobs could face the axe in France, according to French news reports. A spokesman for IBM in Europe, Fred McNeese, confirmed the planned reductions in Sweden and Germany. Yves Ravez, a spokesman for IBM France, said the company is in discussions with unions about “the evolution of IBM in France,” but has not announced any cuts.
IBM dropped its life-time employment strategy in the mid to late 1980’s. The immediate result was a noticeable increase in the quality of typical IBM employees. They had been carrying some pretty dead lifers.
I dealt with some of these dead lifers, and I think IBM’s change of plan was a good idea.
I worked on one project where IBM had to provide a liaison person to us, but didn’t want us to learn much. The lifer was sincere, hardworking, and never able to find the info or the answrs we needed. Eventually another IBM employee took pity on us and spent a day finding everything we had ever asked for, and not gotten, from the lifer.
– The Precision Blogger
http://precision-blogging.blogspot.com
Dear Miguel Lopes,
There is no hypocrisy on the part of corporations. Companies still value their employees and consider them their most important asset.
It’s just that they have a new set of (lower wage) employees as their most important asset.
If you are a skilled worker and willing to work for Indian/Chinese level wages, I guarantee that you too can be a valued employee of a major multinational corporation!
Sincerely,
Guillermo
I dunno…I think if you’ll work at Chinese/Indian wages….the corporation will start looking for a trained dog to do the work. I think the newest motto is “we can do this cheaper”.
The trouble is that too often cutting jobs is nothing more than a short-term strategy for cutting immediate losses, without actually addressing core underlying issues that lead to loss development in the first place.