IBM to fire 100,000 people?

The Reg heard that the 1,300 person layoff from IBM this week may be the start of a massive reorganisation.

Cringely from PBS claims that IBM may be planning to fire at least 100,000 people from its 350,000 people strong workforce. However, the Reg believes Cringely may be widely overestimating the job cut. So perhaps you should take this article with a grain of salt.

"LEAN began last week with a 10-city planning meeting for Global Services, which wasn't, by the way, to decide who gets the boot: those decisions were apparently made weeks ago, though senior managers have been under orders to keep the news from their affected employees," the Cringely person writes.

"LEAN is about offshoring and outsourcing at a rate never seen before at IBM. For two years Big Blue has been ramping up its operations in India and China with what I have been told is the ultimate goal of laying off at least one American worker for every overseas hire. The BIG PLAN is to continue until at least half of Global Services, or about 150,000 workers, have been cut from the U.S. division. Last week's LEAN meetings were quite specifically to find and identify common and repetitive work now being done that could be automated or moved offshore, and to find work Global Services is doing that it should not be doing at all. This latter part is with the idea that once extraneous work is eliminated, it will be easier to move the rest offshore.

"All this is supposed to happen by the end of 2007, by the way, at which point IBM will also freeze its U.S. pension plan."