If you are being criticized for an unpopular policy, stop telling people about it. That is the tack taken by IBM, which this year quietly stopped revealing how many workers it employs in the United States, where its work force has been steadily shrinking.
Big Blue”™s silence on job numbers needs addressing according to one state assemblyman who calls the practice “absolutely ridiculous” in the face of government help IBM reaps here.
The decision to withhold the U.S. head count became clear when IBM’s annual report was issued in mid-March without the U.S. work force numbers included in all past editions. The company has about 400,000 employees worldwide.
IBM had 105,000 US workers at the end of 2009, down from 115,000 in 2008, continuing a trend that saw its domestic work force shrink from about 134,000 workers in 2005. That”™s a drop of some 30,000 workers or 20 percent of the domestic work force.
“IBM wants to hide the information because of their constant offshoring of IBM U.S. employees’ jobs to India, South America and China at the same time that they have their hands out for tax breaks for job creation in the U.S.,” said Lee Conrad, national organizer for the Alliance@IBM, a union-affiliated organization that tracks events inside Big Blue.
Big Blue spokesman Doug Shelton did not return a call seeking comment.
IBM is the largest employer in Dutchess County, but the size of its work force has been shrinking steadily there, as in the rest of the nation, even as it is growing at work sites in other nations.
At the end of 2009, the annual report says IBM employed 399,409 people. No mention is made of the cessation of the U.S. head count.
The report says: “The company continually assesses its resource needs with the objective of balancing its work force globally to improve the company’s global reach and competitiveness.”
According to the last company statement for 2008, IBM”™s two Dutchess sites employed 10,700 people, a number that includes non-IBM workers at the IBM site. That figure preceeded last year”™s “resource action” ”“ corporate speak for job cuts and other changes ”“ which, absent any clarification from IBM, appears to mean the company is firing U.S. workers and shipping their jobs to cheaper locales overseas.
Approximately 1,000 workers lost their jobs in Dutchess due to that round of resource actions, according to Alliance@IBM, which also maintains this year about 3,000 additional workers in the U.S. had their jobs cut.
According to the Alliance, IBM hired tens of thousands of workers overseas in 2009, citing IBM reports as thesource. Big Blue hired some 13,300 workers in the Asia-Pacific region outside Japan, where about 850 workers were hired. IBM hired 18,800 people in India in 2009, and 7,000 in Latin America.
The revelation that IBM would no longer release job numbers led to dismay among local state officials who noted that IBM is receiving tax breaks from the state. If some law requires head count reporting, IBM has said it will do it. Such requirements can be part of incentive programs in which governments assist IBM or reduce its taxes.
Several grants from New York state’s government went to IBM over the last 10 years, usually accompanied by projections of job creation or retention and announced by political leaders amid fanfare and press coverage.
But little followup, if any, was done to ensure IBM met the terms of the deals. The absence of IBM employment counts is a reality state Assemblyman Greg Ball calls “absolutely ridiculous.”
Said Ball, “As a Legislature, we need to know, before allotting dollars to a multinational corporation, how many workers they have in this state at any time.”
