It happened, typically, in one of Intel's windowless conference rooms, at the end of a long table under droning white fluorescent light. A supervisor arrived, along with someone from human resources.
We've got some bad news, they'd say: You're being laid off. They would pass paperwork across the table and tell you it's time to go. Right then. You might have passed a friend on the way out, pausing just long enough to share the news before handing over your Intel badge and walking out the door, for good.
The scene replayed itself 2,300 times this spring at Intel sites across country, the first phase in a plan to reduce Intel's total workforce by 12,000 by next year.
Intel's cuts hit people across the business, in all departments, but fell most heavily on a single category of employee: Older workers.
People over 40 were two-and-a-half times more likely to lose their jobs in this spring's layoffs than Intel employees under 40, according to data Intel provided to employees in compliance with the federal Older Workers Benefit Protection Act and obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Intel offered buyouts to another 2,300 U.S. employees - again, primarily older workers - and early-retirement packages to 3,400 other senior employees with an average age of 57.
Intel's restructuring offers an inside look into the plight of older workers in Corporate America. These are some of the most experienced and best-paid professionals in every industry, but in a business world that changes fast, those traits often turn them into targets as employers look to reshape businesses and cut costs.
Newly laid-off older workers will find the job hunt especially challenging: A study last year by AARP found workers past the age of 55 often spend months seeking a new job after being laid off, and frequently have to accept wages dramatically below what they had been making previously.
Resources for Intel alumni in Oregon
Intel hired career transition specialist Lee Hecht Harrison to provide outplacement services for the chipmaker's laid-off employees. In addition, a number of efforts outside the company are seeking to provide help.
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Intel Eliminati
: Employees who lost their jobs last year created this online group as a support system and networking opportunity. Former Intel workers can seek admission by emailing pdx-tie@googlegroups.com, or can visit the Eliminati's new, public online portal,
.
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: Rick Turoczy, general manager of the Portland Incubator Experiment and leading booster of the city's startup scene, has compiled a list of
open to hiring recent Intel employees and links to Portland's startup community.
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Worksystems Inc.
is leading a "rapid response team" for state and local governments to help recently laid off Intel employees with unemployment insurance and other questions. For information call 503-478-7368 or 503-478-7311.
For employers
Lee Hecht Harrison says it will work with all those organizations to place Intel alumni, and asks employers looking to hire former Intel workers to contact LHH directly at 503-221-0241. Employers should ask for Melissa Cohen or Natalie Miller.
"Older workers like myself, it's economically painful or devastating. This is a time in your life when expenses are high," said Mark Kogler, 57, an engineering project manager laid off by Intel last summer from its site in Folsom, California. Last year's layoffs at the company, like this year's, were weighted toward older workers.
In many ways, Kogler said, he's fortunate - his kids recently finished college - but he had been saving for retirement and planning to work just three more years. Now working for the state of California, Kogler said he's doing similar work to what he had been doing at Intel - but at $60,000 a year, earning half what he made before. So Kogler is postponing retirement indefinitely.
"I think there's a big issue with age bias for older workers," Kogler said. "I think it's wrong. I think it's discriminatory. To me, I think it's in the same category of education or race or all the other equal opportunity laws."
Federal law protects workers over 40 against discrimination based solely upon their ages, but it doesn't protect them against losing jobs if their skills grow outdated or their pay grows too large at a business seeking to cut costs.
University of California Berkeley economist Clair Brown said employers these days tend to hire for specific skill sets and no longer put a premium on employee longevity. (A different generation might have called it "loyalty," and it would've been seen as a positive.)
At Intel, which is facing a painful transition from the fading PC market to mobile gadgets and other emerging technologies, Brown said it makes sense that Intel would want to develop a new generation of employee and reduce its "legacy" costs.
"You want your young workers. They're cheap, they're learning, they have all the new skills," Brown said. And she noted Intel is treating departing employees relatively well, with weeks or months of wages for laid-off workers and up to a year of pay for workers taking an early retirement offer.
"On the other hand, there's nothing like the human misery of being thrown out of a company where you've been working your whole life," Brown said. "It's not their fault, but Intel can't keep making stuff you can't sell anymore."
Intel, which declined comment for this article, told employees that decisions April's layoffs were based on their performance in the company's annual review process and not based on age, gender or other factors.
Nonetheless, Intel's layoffs skewed severely older. That's not a coincidence.
Employees say the review process, called Focal, forces supervisors to allocate a limited number of performance-based stock grants across all their employees. Often, those managers would give cash bonuses to older employers and save stock grants that take years to vest for younger employees.
Last year, when Intel began using those stock grants as a performance measure to determine who gets laid off, older employees took the hit. Intel's ongoing effort to retain under-represented minorities, employees say, may also have affected stock grants to older employees who - as a group - are less diverse.
The average age of an Intel worker is a little under 43, according to the documents obtained by The Oregonian. The average age of laid-off workers is nearly 48.
As workers age, their chances of losing their job in April's layoffs increased. Intel was nearly 8 times more likely to lay off workers over 60 as it was to lay off those under 30.
"It can be difficult, just based on raw numbers, to discern whether an employee is being targeted because of their age or whether it's just because they're paid a lot," said Courtney Angeli, who represents both employers and workers for the Portland firm of Buchanan Angeli Altschul & Sullivan.
That doesn't feel fair, Angeli acknowledged, but to prove age discrimination in court a worker needs to demonstrate it was their age that triggered their layoff and not some other factor. It would be rare, Angeli said, for a mass layoff like Intel's to be motivated by bias against older workers - after all, she noted, it's aging executives who are typically calling the shots.
For the workers who lose their jobs, though, that doesn't make the situation any easier.
"You're still unemployed and that sucks, but it's not unlawful," Angeli said. "It's not unlawful to say: We're just paying too much money."
Older workers who lose their jobs face particularly daunting prospects, according to last year's AARP survey.
Leo Frishberg, 58, lost his job as an Intel product design manager in Hillsboro during layoffs last July. For the first few months, he said, he busied himself with networking, writing a technical book, consulting and sending out job applications.
"The first week in October I ran out of things to do," Frishberg said, "and that was the first week I got despondent."
With all he was doing, Frishberg said, it seemed something was bound to come along. But nothing did, and nothing has - now nearly a year later. Frishberg's morale is strong, but he's frustrated to still be looking for work.
"I am having trouble getting re-hired," he said. "But I don't think it's because of my age. It's because I'm looking for a senior position and those are very, very hard to find."
Managers are, by definition, at the top of the pyramid in any workplace - there are several front-line employees for every supervisor. So when Intel lays off hundreds of people at one time - 784 Oregonians lost their jobs in April's layoffs - that floods the market with people competing for a relatively small number of jobs.
The effect is particularly acute in Oregon, where Intel is the state's largest private employer. The company had 19,500 workers in Washington County before the job cuts began in April, and may reduce headcount by more than 2,000 altogether with buyouts, early retirements and project cancellations counted.
In hindsight, Frishberg said, he wishes he'd picked a single direction in his job search - taking a lower-level job, for example, or relocating to another city.
"Go all in one direction," he advises. "Today, I still haven't committed."
Prospective employers have negative stereotypes about older workers and about people who have been laid off, according to Jacquelyn B. James, co-director of the Boston College Center on Aging & Work. She said employers prejudge their productivity, their health, their commitment to the new job.
"Most of those stereotypes are easily refuted," she said, "but it's difficult to unhinge from employers' perceptions."
It took 11 months of "looking every day" for Chuck King, 64, to find another job after Intel laid him off last year at its Folsom site. While he was looking, King went back to school at the University of California Davis, taking advantage of a state program for the unemployed to earn a certificate as a business analyst.
Eventually, he said, that opened the door to a job with Blue Shield of California, the health insurance company. It pays $60,000 a year, compared to the $125,000 (including bonuses) that King pulled in at Intel. But the pace of work is more measured, he said, and his colleagues more collaborative than the ones he left at Intel. King said he's lost 20 pounds and feels better about himself.
"My wife said: I was so glad you got laid off," King said.
Still, he said he's stung by the perception that older workers aren't as innovative, that they don't work as hard, that they're passing the time until retirement.
"Being the old guy, I feel like I have a lot to contribute," King said. "They don't feel that way."
-- Oregonian data visualization specialist Dave Cansler contributed to this article.
-- Mike Rogoway
mrogoway@oregonian.com
503-294-7699
@rogoway