http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/06/
alliance_at_ibm_suspends_organised_campaigns/
6 Jan 2016 at 12:05, Paul Kunert
The sole unionised outpost trying to give a voice to IBM workers
Stateside has frozen campaigns, citing sustained job cuts and a
resulting drop in membership as the reasons.
Alliance@IBM was set up in 1999 to organise protests against
redundancies as Big Blue started to move more roles, particularly in
manufacturing and services, to lower-cost overseas operations.
Lee Conrad, national coordinator for the Alliance@IBM, yesterday
wrote to its brothers and sisters, telling them the “union organising
campaign at IBM has been suspended".
“Years of job cuts and membership losses have taken their toll. IBM
executive management steamrolled over employees and their families,”
he added in the missive.
In the 1980s, IBM had 230,000 staff based in the US but this figure
has fallen to 71,000, the union claimed. The company hasn’t provided
clarity on its local headcount for roughly five years.
“We tried to push back when we could but we didn’t have enough people
power to change the working conditions or stop the massive job cuts
or offshoring at IBM,” said Conrad.
The union is understood to have only 200 paying members across the
local workforce in the States, down from a peak of 400.
But Alliance@IBM, part of the Communication Workers of America, has
helped to shine a light on the happenings at the veteran technology
organisation for employees, and tried to garner support for action.
IBM went through a massive restructure last year and made some
redundancies - it budgeted to reduce the global workforce by 6,500.
The company, like all of its fellow veteran tech firms, is failing to
offset falling revenues with cloudy stuff.
For the past 14 quarters - not including financials for calendar Q4 -
IBM revenues have declined.
As for Alliance@IBM, Conrad is reportedly going to provide a place on
the web for employees to share information and is building a new
website. ®
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