Big Blue is still not releasing details aboutthis year’s layoff wave that it confirms hit the Triangle and beyond, but the union seeking to represent the company is being very vocal.
IBM (NYSE: IBM), the computer services mammoth that sold its RTP-based low-end software division to Lenovo last year(but still maintains a massive RTP campus), won’t talk specific numbers or locations of the cuts, making it difficult to gauge local impact.
“We don’t comment on staffing plans,” said IBM spokesman Clint Roswell on Tuesday. “IBM has already announced the company has taken a $600 million charge for workforce rebalancing. Last year, IBM hired 45,000 people, and the company currently has about 15,000 job openings around the world for new skills in growth areas such as cloud, analytics, security, and social and mobile technologies.”
But Lee Conrad, the very vocal spokesman for Alliance@IBM, the union seeking to represent Big Blue, released new headcount numbers Tuesday that, if accurate, could show how the wave of layoffs that hit Big Blue in February impacted IBM’s domestic numbers. Citing a “reliable source” that he won’t disclose when pressed (“source is inside company and I can’t divulge,” he explains), he says the number of employees in the United States has dropped from a little more than 77,300 to 75,600 since Feb. 19.
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He estimates nearly 1,700 regular employees and nearly 200 managers have been laid off in the latest round, and says the company has gained 1,500 contractors during that same time period.
He warns that, “as there are many random hires/fires in any given day,” the figures may not fully represent the cuts. “My feeling, however, is that it is statistically representative of the magnitude of the (layoffs),” he says.
IBM won’t comment on Conrad’s speculation.
IBM also confirmed recently that previous cuts had made a big impact on its headcount. Securities filings released in February confirm that IBM’s headcount shrank 12 percent from 2013 to 2014.
At last official count, Big Blue had 379,592 employees worldwide, compared to 431,212 in 2013.
Unless IBM lays off at least 500 employees at once in RTP – or shutters an entire facility here – it is under no obligation to report details on its layoffs to the state of North Carolina, which makes estimating a current headcount difficult.
In 2008, the last time IBM was required to release a localized headcount, the firm had about 10,000 in RTP. But Conrad expects today’s number is much lower.
IBM is in the process of transitioning its focus toward high-growth areas, such as cloud and big data computing.
Date: March 3, 2015