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Story: IBM to cut 10,000 jobs

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"IBM said it will eliminate its pan-European management layer to reduce internal bureaucracy."

This can be A Good Thing. IBM is top-heavy with unnecessary layers of management. However, at the grass roots level, first-line managers are overburdened with work, and many of the nonmanagement employees are grossly overworked. Can those working Beamers really continue to produce the high quality of products that has made IBM famous?

Cut back too far, and disaster awaits, as was experienced at Lloyds Register of Shipping in the 1970s. There, at LR, one manager was so determined to cut costs that, each time an employee left or fell ill victim to a stress-related illness, he simply spread that surveyor's work among the remaining staff, until about half of the department was off sick, suffering from stress-related illnesses.

I hope that those 13,000 employees are all from middle management, rather than from among the people who actually do the work. I hope also thatsome of the vast sums of money saved by no longer paying the salaries of those managers will be used to employ more working Beamers, to help produce products and services of the quality that one associated with IBM.

The idea of "moving" Global Services employees (or any employees) is a traditional ruse that IBM employs, to get rid of people. Those who have "outside" interests, those whose personal interests lie in a particular community, will choose to leave the company, rather than move to a new location. One IBM senior manager once proudly boasted, when he announced the closure of a software development location, that he had moved his children to several different schools, over the preceding years, to accommodate IBM's wishes. I wonder whather he ever discovered that there are more important things in life than the status quo of his own superior managers. Therefore, many Global Services personnel are likely to leave the corporation.

IBM used to claim that it was a multinational corporation. Are we seeing its return to a mere interational company, based in and wholly run from New York?

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