IBM Layoffs – IBM has slowly and silently started laying off its employees worldwide according to a report.
IBM said back in April it has plans to shrink its work force and spend $1 billion on severance and other costs to get there.
But Laurence Balter, an analyst at Oracle Investment Research says that this would add up to somewhere between 6000 to 8000 jobs.
That range of layoffs “sounds about right,” IBM union organizer Lee Conrad told us. Conrad has been sounding the alarm on smaller IBM layoffs for months.
IBM is cutting all kinds of employees, from ” rank-and-file staff to executives,” according to Frier’s sources.
The tech and consulting company had 434,246 employees worldwide at the end of 2012, so these cuts would amount to less than 2%.
IBM in April missed Wall Street’s estimates for the first time since 2005.
The company’s Research Triangle Park, N.C. location, where IBM does engineering for many of its server and storage products, reported 200 jobs cuts today, one IBM insider told us.
Needless to say, the mood there is grim.
“From what I saw at work today, IBMers were pale, antsy, and stressed out. It’s not pretty,” the IBM insider said.