IBM has been slapped with a lawsuit for alleged discrimination against its employees based on their age.
The American multinational information technology company has been making headlines for such controversial issues. There was the time when the CEO of IBM said Indians lacked potential and skill for employment in IBM, then there was the mortifying incident where the organization started firing employees left, right and centre.
The present scenario shows that IBM has been firing employees based on age, thereby inciting age-discrimination. Apparently, the organization is targeting people beyond a specific age and relieving them of their services.
And this is not the first time.
Read on to know more about this grossly inappropriate discrimination that IBM is practising.
Lawsuit Filed Against IBM
This lawsuit has been filed in a federal court of New York by four former employees of IBM, Steven Estle, Margaret Ahlders, Lance Salonia, and Cheryl Witmer. All these ‘plaintiffs’ are above the age of 56, which sheds light on the age group IBM is targeting specifically.
Apparently, the company started handing out depreciating annual performance score for these employees. The said employees also received evaluations that were worse than that of previous years.
As per the lawsuit, IBM has never been kind in its approach towards older workers. An internal report also describes such employees as ‘old heads’ and ‘gray hairs’. Such terms are, without a doubt, demeaning and certainly not expected from a company of this calibre.
The lawsuit states that in the past six years, “IBM has discharged over 20,000 U.S. employees who were at least 40 years old in pursuit of a company-wide practice of using forced group terminations, referred to as ‘Resource Actions,’ to accomplish its goal of removing older employees from its labor force.”
Read the whole lawsuit here.
The Millenial Experience?
IBM has previously fired employees targeting their age, and this was in 2014. During this time, IBM launched a new blog, “The Millennial Experience,” and a cooked up a Twitter hashtag as well, ‘#IBMMillenial’. This was IBM trying to refresh itself, which the company showed by hiring a team of young employees ‘Millenial Corps’ who were appointed to advise the senior officials of IBM on business decisions.
IBM had started hiring young employees for the company, as young workers are “generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”
This decision and methods of IBM do not seem rational in any way whatsoever.
Do you agree with IBM’s modus operandi? Let us know in the comments section below!
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