Thread regarding IBM layoffs

Some RAs happen because of funding. My team got extra funding pre-pandemic for a project. Manager used said funding for more developers. Guess what naturally happened when the project was done, and the funding gone.

IBM has its own terms to make everything legally, politically and socially acceptable. An RA ("Resource Action") is an involuntary termination of entire masses (hundreds or thousands) of employees at once. Typically occurring when IBM is exiting a particular line of business, the company prepares the division for eventual sale by executing a series of RAs. This has the immediate effect of permanently reducing labor cost and temporarily boosting stock prices.

Unlike layoffs, which are a temporary action, RAs are permanent in nature. Employees who are RAd are usually (but not always) banned from employment at IBM ever again, in any division and in any capacity. This differs from layoffs which typically involve a "right of return" based on union membership, date of dismissal and order of seniority. To put it bluntly, when an employee is "RA'd" they are fired/canned/terminated without the individual stigma of being dismissed.

At one time, employees who went through RAs were given decent amounts of severance and other separation benefits, in return for their giving up lawsuit rights. I understand this has declined pretty severely in recent years.

RA = Resource Action

Serious Question: what does RA stand for? I gather it's some kind of layoff from the posts here but what do the letters mean?

What happened to Arvinds ‘no more RAs’ comment?

As someone who has survived multiple RAs, I can tell you how one of the bigger ones played out in my corner of IBM Consulting.

For example, I saw 35+ people get RA'ed in under 30 minutes in-person at my office (Project Concord). They were supposed to be done via WebEx (even though everyone was in-person) but our area lead opted to do them in-person face to face out of respect.

The Area Lead was my (and many onsite's) second line manager. First Line Managers did not know there was an RA happening, and did not know their employees were about to be RA'ed. They found out afterwards.

The Second Line Manager was notified the night before. A list was presented to him with semi-finalized names. This list came from his manager - which means the 3rd line manager to most who got RA'ed.

Significant debate happened overnight and the morning of regarding the specific names on the list, and I can speak from first hand experience that even while the RAs were actively happening, this same Area Lead was working behind the scenes to reverse some of them. I can also tell you from experience that it is 100% possible to reverse an RA, and get someone off the list. I have the paperwork and email threads to prove it.

The 3rd Line Manager was basically the division lead for the particular group we worked in. As I understand it, he made the final decisions on who got RA'ed, out of a selection of names that were selected for him. Those selected names were based on a series of criteria - in our case, skills we no longer needed, people who hadn't been booked on projects in awhile, etc.

My takeaway is that when Management decides to do an RA, they determine the criteria by which to assemble a list of names of potential candidates. And from that list, the final selection is made, which gets vetted and cross-checked by others, including HR and Legal.

Depending on who you are and who you know (and who knows you), you may very well find yourself on a list, OR, have been removed from the list by someone who advocated on your behalf.

As far as horse-trading between different managers - it does happen, but not as bluntly as you might think, because they keep RAs quiet. But if you've been here long enough, and you start hearing conversations about people being asked to suddenly prepare lists of what they've been working on, or statuses about projects or sales opportunities, it's likely that someone at a higher level is sniffing around trying to determine who stays and who goes. If you know what to listen for, you know what to say to ideally protect your people.

Finally, it's not just based on numbers. Yes, every employee has a dollar value attached to them, but there's more. What does your sales pipeline look like? Are you the only IBM representative at a Client? Do you have large deals on the horizon? Do you have special certifications that few have? Are you working in a growth platform or a focus area? Do you not take any benefits beyond your salary? Are you a minority? Over 40? DEI? Plenty of factors that make up who stays and who goes...

I may be mistaken, but from what I understand RAs are like other corporate actions in that they follow the natural corporate division structure for each country. IBM US, IBM UK, IBM Canada, and so on for everywhere else in the world have their org structures, their own divisions and organizations, their own profit/loss issues, their own regional and local legal requirements, and hence their own versions of RAs. Employees do not, in general, work for IBM US unless they reside in the US. Instead, they work for and are paid by the IBM entity in their own resident country, wherever that happens to be.

An interesting but arcane fact (at least when I was at IBM) is that for projects involving staff in different countries, various contracts are drawn up between different IBM corporate entities (say IBM US to/from IBM UK or IBM Canada). These contracts dictate the terms of labor, how much money is being paid, what is required from the staff, etc. So if for example a US-based project no longer needs staff for whatever reason, the only thing that happens is that managers in IBM US inform managers in IBM UK or IBM Canada or wherever that their division's services will no longer be required. What happens to the employees in those countries is not the problem of IBM US, but rather it is an issue for IBM Canada or IBM UK or wherever.

Are all the RA lists created in the US or are they created in the country that will execute the RAs/where the employees reside ie. UK, Canada, Brazil etc…

The implication that females are "protected" has merit, although you will not find a single manager who will come right out and say it. DEI runs very strong in many parts of US society, if not Western society in general. IBM is not the only company that is loath to dismiss employees who are considered as a class to be underrepresented. Sometimes you don't have a choice...if you're out of money, then you're out of money and somebody has got to go no matter what race or gender they might be. But if you have a choice, then the official and unofficial policies in a lot of places are to keep the under-represented and let somebody else go instead. The wisdom of such policies is questionable IMHO, but that is something that American managers are going to have to learn the hard way. The US has never been a pure meritocracy, but as a society we strived much harder to be one than anywhere else on earth. That philosophy has been corrupted at best and abandoned at worst in favor of DEI.

Thank you OP. Reason I ask is that all of the RAs in my unit were male even though the unit was by and large female >2:1 ratio. Seemed very strange at the time and wondered how the lists are created and what was fair game as far as criteria goes.

@1bqd...I was (am) the OP. In my day, there were all sorts of mainframe programs that managers used to perform HR functions like employee lookups, org charts, stuff like that. In addition to that, there were numerous financial and business analysts in every organization who kept spreadsheets and other data files showing details on all the employees...names, position codes, bands, compensation and benefit amounts and things like that. "Preparing the cut lists" sounds like some exotic process, but in reality it just meant that somebody in HR or finance or wherever looked on their spreadsheets and did some quick database queries, and produced a list of RA candidates that the managers could look at. It was not the final result, but just something to start with.

As for your question on HR and legal...there are all sorts of arcane regulatory and legal issues that IBM is expected to follow. Think of it as a lot of bureaucratic baggage that has been accumulated over many decades, hundreds of thousands of employees, and tons of court cases. In my time, being disabled or DEI wasn't an automatic pass, but let's just say that those qualities helped a LOT to weigh the scales at critical decision points.

It depends. If the target is to reduce expense (salary) or headcount (people). If it is to reduce expense, there is a dollar target and the manager is responsible to reducing their department budget by the specified dollar amount for the RA. This could mean identifying 1 very high paid person or a number of lower paid people. If it is a headcount target, the manager needs to identify a specific number of people for the RA. This is tricky because sometimes the work does not go away with the people -- it gets spread around to those who remain. So the manager's decision depends on workload and who can carry the extra load after the cut.

Looking for more detail on listed item #3 above. "Start preparing the cut lists, using various criteria. This part was largely automated..." Who prepares the cut lists? Surely not 3rd line and above in listed item #2. And when you say "automated" how so? As in HR person is tasked with running a list to dump staff with the following criteria (as an example) - bad location, age, skills, salary....? Then such list gets presented to who? 2nd line manager? I understand the high level view - just looking for more granularity. Also does HR, Legal get involved for each and every name on the list? How does that work? And what are they looking for exactly? Example - if someone is disabled or on the DEI list do they get a pass? Looking for details.