That great sucking sound isn’t NAFTA, it’s IBM (and their empty headed executives) thumbing their nose at 5k of IBM’s productive, loyal North American workers, while IBM sucks their jobs right from under them and the American economy. Layoffs are layoffs, most companies have been forced to take some type of action, either out of necessity or by riding the curve and trimming during the recession. Even Microsoft was forced to make a 5k layoff move, but at least Microsoft was hiring another 2-3k positions at the same time. But IBM’s move says much more about IBM’s declining commitment to the American market and its workers.
Yes, we live in a global economy but the US is still the economic engine that fuels the world economy. IBM will pay the price by being so anti-American towards its North American’ workforce. Those ditched workers who were dissed twice, first by being laid off and then by losing their jobs to overseas workers, will remember IBM’s actions towards them in their next IT positions. The political climate for blatant off shoring is also less favorable, and IBM faces a less favorable and negative viewing by US lawmakers, taxpayers and customers.
IBM claims its a “globally integrated enterprise” and as such it “continues to rebalance its workforce globally to improve its global reach and competitiveness and to reflect the changing geographic mix of business”. Well, rebalance this IBM. Lets hope the American IT manager “rebalances” her look at IBM and re-evaluates the type of strategic partners she chooses to align with.
The pendulum of outsourcing everything offshore is well on its swing back from nirvana. IT groups now know that not everything makes sense to offshore, and for those things where it can work, there’s a lot of hard work on this side of the pond involved in making it a success. And who’s going to work hard on this end to make it a success, that recently laid off IBMer whose job was offshored?
Outsourcing and offshoring contracts shorten and become less strategic where customers experience less than favorable or expected results, giving customers more power and flexibility if outsourcers don’t perform. Just as IBMs shortening it’s commitment to North American, those very same customers may just “shorten” their commitment to IBM, no longer viewing them as a partner but as just another supplier.
I give Microsoft a lot more credit. They are shifting a portion of their workforce through their announced layoffs, moving up to 5,000 out of jobs no longer needed and hiring back in 2-3,000 in new jobs, without just shipping them overseas, to better align the company’s resources around its new product and market strategies. IBM’s missed something that Microsoft figured out. With all of the layoffs our economy is experiencing, there’s a wealth of extremely talented workers here in the US. Now that talent pool is now longer available to IBM. What a very stupid move on IBM’s part.
Apparently IBM didn’t get any of the recent messages about retooling the American economy and workers towards more sustainability, waning tolerance for corporate greed and profit-only thinking, and taking self serving actions without regard to consequences for our economy and workers. It’s sad to say that good corporate citizenship by IBM is long gone as demonstrated by IBM’s actions.
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