To: Liatris Spicata who wrote (2983 ) 12/4/1997 8:48:00 PM From: John Koligman Respond to
Larry - I'm not kidding, in one fashion or another they cut close to 200K people!! I worked for them from 1980 till leaving this past summer, so I was in the thick of it from the late 1980's till the mid 1990's, and it's still going on in small bits and pieces (PC division just a month or so ago), although on balance IBM has been hiring over the past few years in the tech fields and in their outsourcing division. You can check out employee numbers in old editions of Value Line thru the years. They did not let them all go at once, the buyouts started in the late 80's, and continued for years. When they finally could not entice enough people to leave, wholesale layoffs occurred. I'll give you a quick example. I live in the Hudson Valley (upstate NY). In the mid 1980's IBM employed around 30,000 people in three large plants. Kingston and Poughkeepsie for mainframe operations, and Fishkill for chipmaking. Last I checked, the employee count was between 10 and 12 thousand. Pretty big hit for just one geographic area! If you remember when Gerstner signed on, they had already had several multi-billion dollar chargeoffs for this stuff, and he added an additional 'big one' which was in the neighborhood of 7 billion as I recall. As far as Federal Systems, that was pretty small when looking at the overall number, but you are correct, they were sold to Loral, and I think had around 10,000 folks.
