Older workers press age discrimination claims in challenge to IBM layoffs
They were a youthful brigade at Lotus Software in the 1990s, when the Cambridge firm was revolutionizing office work with its cutting-edge e-mail platform. When their company was swallowed by IBM, they helped the high-tech giant push into big data and digital health.
More recently, when they’d moved into their peak earnings-and-savings years — just as IBM was scrambling to remake itself for what it called “a new era of technology” — they were summarily fired.
Dozens of former Massachusetts employees, many of them Lotus veterans, are among more than 1,000 laid-off workers nationally who have charged IBM with forcing out older staffers over the past decade as part of a strategy to build a younger workforce. All of the employees were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s when they lost their jobs. IBM has been fighting the charges for over two years, saying they have no merit.
Taken together, the allegations — filed both in federal court and with hundreds of private arbitrators — amount to one of the largest age discrimination cases in US history. At a time of heightened attention to racial and gender issues, the ex-IBMers are spotlighting what they say is another pervasive, though often hidden, bias in corporate America.
