IBM laid off up to 100,000 workers, Austin man's lawsuit claims

International Business Machines Corp. laid off up to 100,000 workers in recent years, an Austin man's ongoing lawsuit against IBM claims.

Jonathan Langley, a 60-year-old former cloud salesman at IBM's Austin operations, alleged that IBM forced him out after 24 years as a "successful employee" because of his age. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Western District of Texas last year, is one of several lawsuits accusing the company of firing older workers.

The company has made a recent effort to show millennials that IBM was not "an old fuddy duddy organization" and to appear as a "cool" and "trendy organization" like Google and Amazon, according to a deposition from Alan Wild, a former IBM vice president of human resources.

In his deposition, Wild agreed with Langley's counsel that IBM "probably" laid off between 50,000 to 100,000 workers. In court filings, IBM said the workers were laid off over an eight-year period, which would be an average of 3% of IBM's workforce per year.

IBM called media reports of the figures "grossly inaccurate" and said they exaggerate layoffs at IBM.

"We have reinvented IBM in the past five years to target higher value opportunities for our clients," the statement read. "The company hires 50,000 employees each year, and spends nearly a half-billion dollars on training our team. We also receive more than 8,000 job applications every day, the highest rate that we've ever experienced, so there's clear excitement about IBM's strategy and direction for the future."

Lawsuit: 'If he had been a millennial,' Austin man says IBM wouldn't have let him go

IBM does not publicly break down its workforce numbers by city and declined to comment on whether IBM Austin has seen job growth or decline in recent years.

In his initial filing, Langley claimed that IBM created a culture focused on attracting younger talent and pushed a “staff reduction methodology” that ranked employees. The methodology is flawed, the lawsuit alleges, because IBM’s goal is to make room for younger employees.

“IBM has devoted countless millions of dollars to its effort to rebrand as a hip, millennial-centric tech company,” the lawsuit said, adding that the company “signals to decision makers that Baby Boomers are not welcome at IBM and do not fit IBM’s new culture.”

Langley declined to comment beyond the statements made in the lawsuit.

IBM is one of the largest technology employers in the Austin metro area, with an estimated 6,000 workers here. The company was one of the pioneers of Austin’s tech sector, as it has had operations in Austin since 1967. Its Austin site remains one of IBM's largest locations.

In the past decade, the company has fired thousands of people in the U.S., Canada and other high-wage jurisdictions in an effort to cut costs and retool its workforce after coming late to the cloud-computing and mobile-tech revolutions. The number of IBM employees has fallen to its lowest point in six years, with 350,600 global workers at the end of 2018 — a 19% reduction since 2013, Bloomberg News reported last month.

Last March, a ProPublica and Mother Jones report estimated that over the past five years, IBM has terminated the employment of more than 20,000 American employees who were older than 40. That number, according to the report, accounts for roughly 60% of the company's total estimated U.S. job cuts.

ProPublica’s investigation led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to open a nationwide investigation into potential age bias at IBM, according to published reports. The commission has not publicly confirmed an ongoing investigation.

Additional information from Bloomberg News.