blog The new year has not started well for Australian technologists in terms of the jobs situation. Qantas is cutting IT workers, Sensis is cutting workers, Telstra is cutting workers, the Victorian Government is looking into offshoring, and now, according to The Australian newspaper, IBM Australia has embarked on another major redundancy round. The newspaper tells us (we recommend you click here for the full story):
“IBM Australia has again begun slashing jobs, which could see about 500 people lose their positions following last year’s cull of more than 1500 workers.”
As you may recall, it’s not precisely the first time IBM has engaged in a major round of redundancies in Australia. Just last October, the ABC reported that Big Blue was set to cut some 1,000 staff locally. In May it was reportedly around 200 positions. In 2010 the Australian Services Union reported that a slew of jobs were set to head offshore. Of course, IBM is also concurrently hiring staff; in late 2012 it announced plans to add 150 new jobs at its Ballarat facility. But overall the picture does not look rosy.
One quick note to readers, especially those employed at IBM: We receive a lot of tips through Delimiter’s anonymous tips form regarding job losses at IBM. We thank readers for their tip-offs in this area. However, because it is IBM’s standard practice not to comment on job losses, and because IBM often restructures internal divisions (making a small amount of roles redundant but adding jobs in other areas), it is sometimes difficult to get a full and accurate picture of what’s going on during major redundancy rounds. It would be ideal if readers with news of job losses at IBM particularly could hit us up with any available evidence, if they want to tip us off regarding the situation. Cheers!
Having worked for IBMGSA back in the day, unless things have changed dramatically, the people that end up being let go won’t know until they get asked into a short-notice meeting with their line manager, his/her manager, and a HR representative. They don’t do it delicately.
Same for a lot of larger IT companies. It sucks for anyone involved.
They say we care for the staff etc. no they just care about the bottom line and short term dollars forgetting that they need long term dollars in order to survive.
I think it would be news if they didn’t put off staff. They have been shrinking on a regular basis since the mid to late 80s when they lost a lot of custumers to other companies like Fujitsu that were popping up with mainframes that were way better bang for the buck. They then compounded it by really screwing up with the AS400. Customers with computers they couldn’t use for more than a year due to lack of an OS, running on little RTs waiting for IBM to get their act together. They lost faith with so many long time IBM customers over that one. They were just to big and fat and slow to respond to the developing market.
AS400? Surely the RT users were destined to go RS6000 path until they got to IBM i. I do recall they were stranded though. If the site didn’t know how to use AIX then a call to IBM wasn’t necessarily going to help them.
IBM gave them the RTs to run on while they waited.for an OS for their AS400. The RS6000 was a little later. They had sorted the AS400 by then. The main difference was all the terminals didn’t slow to a crawl every time the band printer started up on the RS6000 like the with the RT.
They need to trickle the redundancies out, like iiNet, because those never get reported.
Lionel – the first round of IBM layoffs in Australia was in the early 90s (92 or 93 I think) when about 1/3 of the total workforce was let go. Before that IBM had the “Full Employment Policy” i.e. no redundancies. This was in the days when John Akers was IBM CEO before Lou Gerstner took over.
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