MONEY

IBM global headcount drops sharply in 2014

Craig Wolf
Poughkeepsie Journal

IBM Corp. reports that its global workforce dropped by more than 51,000 in 2014, a decline of 12 percent.

IBM jobs

They don't say how much of a cut they did in the United States, but the head of a national workers advocacy group says more than 1,600 regular IBMers lost their jobs in a recent downsizing.

IBM's global report comes as an exhibit in a required annual filing, called a 10-K, done with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In it, the company says that "for the year ended 2014" it had 379,592 employees, a substantial drop and a much greater one than in 2013.

About 38,000 "resources," as the company calls its employees, were gone due to divestitures of the business units in which they worked, the report said.

IBM used to break out how many people worked for the company within its home country, but it stopped giving U.S. numbers in 2010. It also has stopped giving local site headcount reports except when required by some law or often, terms of a tax-break deal.

Lee Conrad, national organizer for the workers' group, Alliance@IBM, said he has learned there were 75,622 regular IBMers on Tuesday, down by 1,686 from mid-February. IBM has not confirmed nor commented on that number. But the company has said that a "workforce rebalancing" this year would amount to several thousand jobs.

"The latest IBM employee number that the Alliance has received clearly shows that IBM is continuing to decrease its US employee population regardless of all the public relations talk of so called 'hiring,'" Conrad said. "For years IBM management has tried to hide the fact that they have been abandoning the U.S. workforce. We know and the IBM employees know what is going on and it is shameful."

In its filing, IBM said that as a globally integrated enterprise in more than 175 countries it "is continuing to shift its business to the higher value segments.... The company continues to remix its skills and resource needs to match the best opportunities in the marketplace."

Craig Wolf: 845-437-4815; cwolf@poughkeepsiejournal.com; Twitter: @craigwolfPJ