Lawyer sues IBM for age bias; firm says cuts about skills
Shannon Lissriordan has been compared to “a pit bull with a Chihuahua in its mouth.” In a career spanning almost 20 years, the Bostonbased lawyer has gone after corporations that have either harmed consumers or their own employees. She has represented workers against Amazon, Uber and Google, styling her firm as the champion for employees left behind by powerful tech companies.
Now, Lissriordan is gunning for International Business Machines Corp.
On Monday, she filed a classaction lawsuit on behalf of three former IBM employees who say the tech giant discriminated against them based on their age when it fired them. “Over the last several years, IBM has been in the process of systematically laying off older employees in order to build a younger workforce,” the former employees claim in the suit.
In the last decade, IBM has fired thousands of people in the U.S., Canada and other highwage jurisdictions in an effort to cut costs and retool its workforce after coming late to the revolutions in cloud computing and mobile technology.
The waves of firings spawned a legion of disaffected former employees who congregate online to air their grievances. To them, the firings are a mockery of the values they signed up for upon joining the company. IBM has argued that change in its workforce is necessary to stay fresh and competitive.
“Changes in our workforce are about skills, not age,” IBM spokesman Ed Barbini said in an emailed statement. “In fact, since 2010 there is no difference in the age of our U.S. workforce, but the skills profile of our employees has changed dramatically. That is why we have been and will continue investing heavily in employee skills and retraining — to make all of us successful in this new era of technology.”
But the company is under mounting pressure to change its behavior.
In March, Propublica published a damning report making the case that IBM systematically broke agediscrimination rules. Meanwhile, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has consolidated complaints against IBM into a single, targeted investigation, according to a person familiar with it. An EEOC spokesperson declined to comment.
Lissriordan expects many former IBM employees to join her lawsuit. “A lot is at stake for IBM — how they’re going about making these decisions for their workforce really needs to be addressed and reassessed,” Lissriordan said. “It will be in the thousands of people who will be affected.”
If she’s successful, IBM may be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and may take a hit to its reputation as a company once renowned for being among the world’s most benevolent employers.
Over time, IBM has decreased the amount of severance it offers in most cases to a mere month, say former employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. For some, the offer was so inconsequential they decided to leave the money on the table and retain their right to sue later.
These are the people Lissriordan is counting on. “IBM was offering people that it’s been letting go a very, very stingy severance,” she said. “We expect there are many others who didn’t think that was adequate.”