A former IBM Corp. employee who lost his job in a round of nationwide layoffs last year has filed a lawsuit accusing the company of purging older workers in favor of younger, recent college grads.
John McCormack, who worked at IBM”™s Hopewell Junction plant in Dutchess County, said in a lawsuit filed May 5 that he was informed last summer he would be laid off in December 2013. He applied to 15 positions within the company but was rejected in each case.
“IBM managers and supervisors told Mr. McCormack that these positions had been targeted for young persons who had graduated college in 2012 and 2013,” the suit says.
McCormack received a college degree in 2012, according to the suit, although he is now 46 years of age.
“IBM”™s policy to hire young college graduates is the proximate cause of McCormack”™s injuries,” the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified punitive damages, says.
McCormack and two other former employees who live in Florida are seeking class-action status in federal court, according to paperwork from their attorney, Michael H. Sussman of Sussman & Watkins in Goshen. If class action is granted, other former employees can join the suit.
The other plaintiffs, Mark Lingl, 58, and Ron Shelton, 49, took severance packages in which they were required to sign agreements that released the company from liability from age discrimination. In the suit, Sussman asked the court to set aside those releases, which he said were offered in bad faith.
“Plaintiffs Shelton and Lingl would never have signed such general releases or accepted said severance payments had they known that IBM intended to replace them with recent college graduates in a practice which so plainly reflected age discrimination,” Sussman wrote in the lawsuit filing.
Shelton had worked from his home in Riverview, Fla., and an office in Tampa starting in 2011. He was a technical solutions architect and was laid off in July 2013. Lingl, an advanced information technology specialist who worked out of a West Tampa office, was also laid off in July 2013. He twice worked for IBM, from 1998 until 2002, then from 2006 until his layoff last year.
IBM laid off more than 3,000 workers last year, with roughly 697 employees losing jobs in Dutchess County. At least 100 more were laid off in Westchester County, where IBM headquarters is located. Those layoffs, part of a $1 billion international restructuring, came as IBM advertised job openings for applicants who had graduated college in the last three years.
Sussman, in the lawsuit, said, “Such advertisements were nationwide in scope and reflected a like policy to discriminate against older workers and to exclude them from consideration from a whole range of jobs for which many would qualify.”
Bloomberg recently reported that IBM had changed its severance policy to settle former workers”™ age discrimination claims through private arbitration rather than lawsuits.
A federal jury in January ruled in favor of a former IBM employee who was let go at age 60 after 41 years with the company, according to the Connecticut Law Tribune. The total settlement was for between $3.5 million and $4 million, including lost wages and damages. In that case, Connecticut resident James Castelluccio hadn”™t signed a severance agreement, according to the Tribune, which said an internal investigation by IBM into the circumstances of the firing would have been halted if Castelluccio had signed the agreement.
A call to IBM representatives seeking comment was not returned.
