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IBM Canada can't duck channel exec's systematic age discrimination claim
'They actually replaced me with a younger employee'
By Thomas Claburn
Sun 4 Aug 2024
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/04/ibm_canada_cant_duck_systematic/
Three years ago, Bruce Maule, worldwide president of channel marketing at IBM, was informed by bosses that his position was being eliminated.
But allegedly the position wasn't eliminated. "When IBM fired me, their stated reason was that they were reducing headcount, but they actually replaced me with a younger employee," Maule told The Register this week.
Since 1997, Maule, an employee of IBM Canada, had been working out of New York in the United States, because that's where Big Blue's worldwide jobs like his were based.
He sued IBM Canada in June 2022 for age discrimination in a Toronto, Ontario court, claiming the subsidiary has been following systematic age discrimination policies adopted by IBM US in 2013. Many fired IBM employees have made similar allegations, which have been supported by reporting from ProPublica and by the US Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
Maule said in the years prior to his termination, he saw many examples of age discrimination. His complaint says that he became aware that IBM US and IBM Canada might be targeting older workers in 2015 when his superior was terminated without cause after 30 years of service and then replaced with a younger executive with no experience in channel marketing.
In February 2022, IBM Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux denied that the IT giant had a systematic plan to get rid of older workers. "Discrimination of any kind is entirely against our culture and who we are at IBM, and there was (and is) no systemic age discrimination at our company," she said.
Extinction event
LaMoreaux's post – dismissed by IBM's own employees on internal message boards – was published in response to media reports about damning internal company communications that surfaced in conjunction with a document [PDF] filed in Lohnn vs International Business Machines, an age discrimination lawsuit brought by the widow of an IBM exec who took his own life after being laid off. The document describes an unidentified executive who used the disparaging term "dinobabies" to refer to older workers and endorsed their extinction.
Another document [PDF] in that case discussed the tech giant's "dated maternal workforce," and called for a headcount shift toward a greater percentage of "early professional hires" – young employees. IBM settled the Lohnn case six months later.
"I was fired from IBM without cause in September 2021, after 34 years of service, 24 years in an executive role," said Maule.
"I was a worldwide VP at the time of my wrongful dismissal. Paradoxically, I was under a retention contract at the time, as in November of 2019 IBM induced me to stay with the firm by offering a financial incentive, and this contract was in force at the time of my firing."
Maule is seeking a ruling that requires IBM to provide an appropriate layoff notice period for workers, which is between 24 and 36 months under Canadian law. He is also seeking damages for wrongful dismissal and punitive damages amounting to CA$150,000 ($108,000, £85,000) for being subject to systematic age discrimination.
In the USA, the older workers cost the company more in healthcare expenses. In Canada, that is not very much the case.
It was in the Gini era that things turned truly toxic in there. I'm out now (was IBM Canada) and the second half of the 2010s was unreal and unbearable. I spent most of that decade being in my 50s with zero actual futire. Bad times.