IBM faces lawsuit for age discrimination at Austin offices
IBM Corp., Austin’s second-largest tech employer, faces a lawsuit alleging violations of the U.S. Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 and the Texas Labor Code for systematically laying off older workers while aggressively pursuing younger Millenial workers and shielding them from job cuts in order to “correct seniority mix” at the company.
The complaint brought last Thursday in the U.S. Western District of Texas describes how IBM embarked on a years-long drive to change its public image and its job corps by recruiting and retaining “digitally native” Millenials (defined as the generation born after 1980) while shedding “gray hairs.”
IBM created an “early professionals” hiring program targeted solely at Millenials and exempted this category of employee from layoffs for nine months from their hire date, according to the complaint, while making severe cuts elsewhere. “In 2015 alone, IBM laid-off several tens of thousands of employees, the vast majority of whom were over the age of 40, and the greatest concentration of which were Baby Boomers,” reads the complaint.
“Not only does IBM shield its youngest workers from lay-off, at the same time as IBM has laid off thousands of Baby Boomers, it has aggressively recruited and hired many thousands of Millennials and members of Generations X and Z.”
Plaintiff Jonathan Langley, a 60-year old former director of sales in IBM’s Hybrid Cloud business unit, based out of Austin, says he received good job performance reviews and was awarded a $20,000 performance bonus for the last quarter of 2016, the largest bonus on his team. Even so, he was laid off effective June 2017.
The complaint lays out purported evidence showing that his termination was based not on IBM’s job performance system but rather on his age. For instance, an IBM document cited in the complaint shows that the company wanted to reshape Langley’s Hybrid Cloud business unit demographically with a plan to “hire and replace, and fund an influx of EP’s [Early Professionals, i.e., Millenials] to correct [its] seniority mix (46% benchmark vs 21% actual).”
“IBM tells Millennials that they make great sellers because they are — well, Millennials — and therefore they should come sell for IBM,” reads the plaintiff’s complaint. “Millennials are the most educated, technologically adept and digitally proficient generation of workers alive, making them superior to older employees in the new [cloud] markets….”
The lawsuit comes just days after a report by investigative journalism organization ProPublica, “Cutting ‘Old Heads’ at IBM,” which claims that IBM “flouted or outflanked U.S. laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination.”
According to ProPublica’s findings, IBM has “targeted people for layoffs and firings with techniques that tilted against older workers, even when the company rated them high performers. In some instances, the money saved from the departures went toward hiring young replacements.” The report also says that IBM improperly recorded job cuts as retirements in order to avoid triggering public disclosure requirements.
Austin’s Wright & Greenhill and Lamberton law firms are representing Jonathan Langley, the ex-IBM employee suing the company. The plaintiff is asking the court to reinstate him to his former position and pay him his salary for the period since his removal: “Had Mr. Langley been younger, and especially if he had been a Millennial, IBM would not have fired him. Mr. Langley’s age was a motivating factor in his selection for termination.”
Asked about job cuts allegedly targeting workers on the basis of age, IBM declined to provide ProPublica with the numbers or age breakdown of its job cuts. IBM spokesman Edward Barbini told ProPublica, “We are proud of our company and our employees’ ability to reinvent themselves era after era, while always complying with the law. Our ability to do this is why we are the only tech company that has not only survived but thrived for more than 100 years.”
