Did IBM fire 100,000 employees in last few years just to look 'cool'?

In a shocking revelation by a former vice president in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit, International Business Machines Corp (IBM) has laid off as many as 1,00,000 employees in the last 7 years. The deposition further said that IBM took the step to enhance its appeal towards millennials and look "cool" and "trendy" as Amazon and Google. It is to be noted that the Armonk-based IT giant is facing several lawsuits accusing it of sacking older employees, including a class-action case in Manhattan and individual civil suits filed in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

In a statement, IBM said, "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".

As per a report published in Bloomberg, IBM's revenue has been shrinking since last seven years. In order to cut down on costs, the company has fired thousands of people in the US, Canada, and other high-wage markets. At the end of the year 2018, IBM's workforce has slumped to its lowest point in six years with 3,50,600 employees globally which is 19 percent since 2013.

The latest revelation by Alan Wild, former vice president of human resources in one of the lawsuits, claimed that IBM sacked 50,000 to 1,00,000 employees in just the last several years. In a submission to the court Wild said IBM face huge recruitment problems and with the objective to show that IBM was not "an old fuddy-duddy organization" and show itself as "as [a] cool, trendy organization" like Google and Amazon, the company sacked older employees. The document further added that following this strategy, IBM fired Texas-based Jonathan Langley, 61 after 24 years of his services in the company who filed a case. IBM filed a motion requesting the court to dismiss his case, in turn, Langley's lawyers filed an opposition to that motion.

Last month, IBM sacked more than 2,000 employees. The company had said, "We are continuing to reposition our team to align with our focus on the high-value segments of the IT market – while aggressively hiring in critical new areas that deliver value for our clients and IBM."