"I made a mistake" is a pretty common theme in the investment world. John Pierpont Morgan lost chunks of cash on Edison Electric (as competition from Westinghouse power stations proved DC to be inferior to AC), George Soros lost chunks of cash in the dot com bust (prompting him to change his investment strategy), and Peter Lynch had years of underperformance back when he was a Fidelity asset manager (Black Monday, circa 1987). ...
Stocks like IBM should be moving higher on technical factors, but because the market anticipates a decline in the business' fundamentals, the valuation has shrunk, as various sell-side analysts have modeled negative sales growth in the current and next fiscal year. To address these issues, management has resorted to cost discipline as a means to improve operating performance. This is a decent response to falling revenues, but the drop-off in revenues shouldn't have happened in the first place, which is why managers and analysts should continue to question the potential returns from investing into the company. ...
In the past five years, IBM has had an awful tendency of competing in highly competitive markets. Instead of competing in nascent revenue pools, where the market size is small and potential to dominate is large, the company tends to wait until the business opportunity exceeds a billion dollars. What's strange is that the management team pats itself on the back for not investing capital in nascent business opportunities where the projected return on invested capital isn't as clear.
IBM throws its resources into arenas where competitors have established an early lead. For obvious reasons, I doubt the company will gain back some of the enterprise customers it has lost to Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon was one of the first IaaS providers, and quite frankly the nascent opportunity won support from the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos himself in the earlier stages. The same could be said for Azure, over at Microsoft, which resulted in the company's overwhelming capabilities in private cloud, platform cloud and infrastructure cloud. Clearly, ramping revenue came first and profitability came second. It also earned Satya Nadella his promotion to the post of CEO of Microsoft as he has positioned the commercial side of Microsoft for long-term success.
IBM's management team is more focused on the day-to-day metrics and functionality of the business, which leads to short-term investments and shortsighted divestitures. You can't attach a market premium to a business that's run like that, because the management team will be reactionary to its business environment and won't establish a business in categories that have yet to be developed into profitable pools. Eventually, IBM will take interest when everyone else is already moving onto the "next big thing" in technology.
Selected reader comments follow:
I only want to back my opinion up with one point. How many tech companies do you know that do well treating their employees like fast food workers? No one I know of in the tech business in the SF area ever talks about joining IBM. The best quote today is "the best 2 days of my life are the day I join IBM and the day I left IBM". For my wife the best day is in 1989 she decide to join Chevron and not IBM. At that time IBM and Chevron were about equal in most areas and both were great companies to work for with great benefits. If she had joined IBM she would have lost over a million dollars in retirement benefits (401K plus defined benefit).
One of the companies ultimate users of buybacks to boost earnings is IBM. Since 2007, IBM has spent more than $10 billion repurchasing shares in every single year except 2009, when it spent "only" $7.4 billion. The result has been a massive drop in outstanding share counts from 1.38 billion shares in 2007 to just 985 million shares as of the most recent quarter.
IBM's buybacks have masked a huge slowdown in net income growth. Between 2008 and 2014, IBM's EPS jumped from $8.89 to $11.90, which equates to a slow but respectable growth rate of 34% during that six-year time span. Yet on an absolute basis, IBM's total net income dropped slightly from $12.3 billion to $12 billion. Other key financial figures, such as total revenue, have also declined substantially, showing the weakness in IBM's overall business.
One of the worst things about IBM's buybacks is that they've largely been made at much higher prices than today's share price. Recently, while the stock has fallen to its worst levels since 2010, IBM has essentially squandered money it could have used to pay dividends or invest in growth. Barring a successful turnaround, IBM could turn into yet another example of buybacks gone bad.
In the last few days, IBM has been accused of reneging on commitments it made to hire in Iowa, with funding from the state and local governments, all the while hiring H-1Bs. But the firm may have chosen the wrong state in which to engage in this kind of thing, as it is the home state of Senator Chuck Grassley, a major critic of H-1B, who asked the company to explain its actions.
IBM has now responded to the senator. The thrust of its argument is that it is hires H-1Bs because the latter have skills for which there is a shortage of qualified American workers, citing among other things cloud and mobile computing, data analytics and security.
As quoted in one of the above links, Professor Ron Hira replied that the median wage IBM has been paying its H-1Bs is $74,753, far below what American professionals with those specialties make. This is a fundamental economic principle; a rare in-demand skill should bring higher wages, not lower ones. Expertise in mobile computing, for instance, commands about a 20% salary premium.
Using the standard argument the industry lobbyists have been making for almost 25 years, IBM says once again that H-1Bs are needed for the short term, but the long-term solution is beefed up efforts at education and retraining in special skills. This has been the greatest red herring in the entire H-1B debate, and I’ve written extensively about it. No need to go into that here; let’s just say that it is certain that IBM rejects many American applicants who are well qualified for those jobs, and that many existing IBM workers could quickly learn new material to perform that work as well.
Selected reader comments follow:
It’s widely acknowledged in the wireless industry that IBM is no longer an employer of choice for engineers. I’d say that’s been the case for about the last 15 years.
To some, a salary of $74,753 might seem very attractive, but that has to be considered in light of the fact that this mobile computing job probably requires:
What is the opportunity cost to gain such skills?
Bright engineering students and recent new grads look around, see the opportunities at startups, in the financial industry where their skills are also in demand, and quickly realize that there are better paying, more secure opportunities than working at IBM for $74,753 a year.
In today’s economy, there is no way that you could pay off student loans, purchase a home, raise a family, pay for college for your children or hope to retire with dignity on a salary (with no or little pension) on $74,753 a year.
Yet, you’re right, there are probably many older engineers at IBM who would be happy to go back to school for six months to pick up whatever skills that IBM desires.
Yes, IBM doesn’t bother with this, because they:
I’ve reached the point that I don’t care that this is going on. I just wish the National Science Foundation, political leaders and CEOs would stop telling us that there is a “shortage” of science and engineering grads (usually required to have an advanced degree) willing to work for in a job that requires long hours, inadequate benefits, and relatively low pay.
It’s disingenuous and clearly, very self serving.
As an engineer, I’m tired of being a “STEM” football. Let’s just tell it like it is. The leader ship at IBM, and most tech companies, don’t really care about the long term viability of there organizations. They care about short term profit, and squeezing their workforce, including their technical workforce, as hard as they can to maximize short term revenue.
$12/hr offshore and $35-$55/hr onshore is the end rate to the body shops in our area. American consulting firms all bill out at much higher rates, but the offshore developers that come here puts downward pressure on all of us.
Rates to independent consultants has remained stagnant for years. This is most likely high. The government has allowed companies to game the system and tamper with the supply side.
Or think this employer I’m talking to now about a gig. They outsourced the development to India, and when they turned it on in production it didn’t work. They US crew has now been working 60-hour weeks for a year, testing and patching and yelling at the outsource company, who of course respond in realtime at 3AM.
They asked me how I felt about joining a project that would continue working 60-hour weeks for the foreseeable future. In spite of the wonderful money involved in billing that many hours, I wasn’t much for it.
This is too, too common: commodity developers cost MUCH MORE in the end than increasing salaries, hiring high skills, and hitting the target earlier. If IBM or anyone really saved money importing cheap labor I could understand it – but they DON’T. Not even near-term, it takes 2x more commodities to do what even 80th percentile developers could do. Maybe 5x, when you figure in all the extra overhead and corruption.
American business PREFERS IT THIS WAY, they’d rather spend 2x the budget just so they don’t have to pay mere engineers high salaries. That’s where we are today, folks.
IBM was a pioneering offshorer beginning in the 90s, mostly to India. They began to sell their offshoring expertise to other companies as consultants.
‘In September 2007, IBM applied for another patent on what it evidently thought was an even smarter blueprint, promising clients a computerized “Workforce Sourcing Optimizer” to assess the pros and cons of moving out of one country (unnamed) to other countries such as India, China and Hungary (named). IBM’s application boasted that its program could help clients achieve “50% of resources in China by 2010.”When the U.S. Patent and Trademark office made IBM’s patent application public in March 2009, it was a bombshell. Congressman John Hall of Dover Plains, New York, a Democrat to whom IBM had made campaign contributions, denounced IBM as “downright unpatriotic and un-American.”
Within twenty-four hours, IBM pulled its patent application.’
Most Western companies have been resisting these demands, but the one that seems to be complying is IBM. The situation is complex however, and IBM says that it is a project that they already have in place with other countries and companies.
IBM Venture With China Stirs Concerns
‘In the past 16 months, IBM has agreed — and received permission under United States export laws — to provide the Beijing company, Teamsun, with a partial blueprint of its higher-end servers and the software that runs on them, according to IBM announcements and filings from Teamsun. As the chief scientist overseeing the IBM project on behalf of the Chinese government, Mr. Shen is helping Teamsun, and in turn China, develop a full supply chain of computers and software atop IBM’s technology.The goal is to create a domestic tech industry that in the long run will no longer need to buy American products, thus avoiding security concerns.’
But last week a French software engineer, Théo Négri, who has been running a job search web site for tech professionals, released a much more user friendly version of that database, and suddenly, the numbers look very interesting.
“This tool tells people how much engineers are being paid at a company they might be interested in,” Négri says. It also indicates “which companies are hiring foreigners,” so engineers from outside of the United States can better target their applications. ...
After weeks immersed in the data, Négri offered me a few insights. (You can browse the data yourself here.) ...
A big surprise for Négri: He found that the best paid software engineers appear to be at Netflix, where senior software engineers are, according to the labor department data, being paid $240,000 to $250,000 and up for positions for which the official prevailing wage is $153,000. (By comparison, Google applied to hire a host of software engineers at $100,000 to $110,000; the prevailing wages listed are $88,000 to $99,000 for those positions.)
Négri also said he was surprised that several of the technology companies with the largest number of visa applications submitted over the years he analyzed, including Infosys and IBM, don’t appear to hire many software engineers at all; instead, they hire “technology leads” or “consultants”. In Négri’s opinion, that could be a trick to bring in a technically skilled worker at a lower cost: “If the title says software engineer, you pay a lot” to stay in compliance with the H-1B laws that require immigrants to be paid the prevailing wage, he says. “If the title says ‘consultant’, instead of $130,000 you might pay $60,000, the gap is that big.” He pointed to a “technology lead” for Infosys in Sunnyvale, Calif., listed in the database as having a salary of $87,000. “That’s not much for Silicon Valley,” Négri says.
Pros: IBM is only great if you're just about to start your career. Once you've learnt everything and have something to show on your CV, move to another company where you are actually appreciated.
Cons: There is not enough time in the world to list all cons. IBM is a great place of fake talent. Everybody is faking, especially those people who have "expert" in their job title.
Management is exploiting employees to the fullest. If somebody leaves the team, they don't hire someone new but you will need to do the leaver's job too as a default from then on. Appreciation in return? None. Even if you would be willing to work overtime, it's not paid, or if it is, it's just simply not worth the effort.
There is a process for everything and that would make you think everything is working smoothly but quite the opposite: IBM is chaotic, bureaucratic and trying to live off of its old reputation. Well guess what: it doesn't live up to its name at all and it's simply a miracle that it still hasn't sunk yet.
Advice to Management: Put the employee first, instead of the client. Underpaid, undervalued and overworked, over pushed, over frustrated employees won't be able to make any customer happy!
Pros: Great coworkers, very talented. Work from home is encourages, most of the time.
Cons: Benefits and pay sucks; constant layoffs. I started in 1984, and it was the best place to work; now one of the worst. Morale is horrible, and management does not care. No chance of upward mobility. Clueless management, except for a 1st level once in a while. Right now you have entry-level kids, and gray beards with 20+ years. When they leave there will be no skills or expertise left. IBM can't fulfill commitments now with lack of talent.
Advice to Management: Go back and take a basic business class about how to retain employees. It is NOT always about the share holder. EPS will not come if no talented people work for you. Offshoring skilled positions does not work. Company and management needs to be blown up
Pros:
Cons:
Advice to Management: Do try to appreciate your staff and think of them as people who need to be engaged and motivated to perform well and be the best they can be. Your progress is as fast as your slowest team member. Little things make a difference.
Pros: Huge company with lots of different technologies to work on. Groundbreaking research in analytics, natural language processing, etc. IBM is very progressive with their work from home programs.
Cons: Lackluster and uninspiring management. There are zillions of layers of management at IBM and they seemingly only create more and more bureaucracy while whipping everyone into a frenzy telling them to 'do more, faster' and to 'transform' all without supplying the leadership, tools and guidance to do so.
The IBM model is to buy small fast growing businesses and stuff their products into IBMs sales channels. So, you could say they have outsourced product innovation. At the same time they shed businesses and products which have lower margins, so you could be laid off or sold off at any time. It is a typical MBA mentality of business portfolio management. The results have been disappointing at best and IBM recently backtracked on its commitment to make $15/share in 2015.
For years and years IBM has spent tons of cash on stock buybacks and reduced employee benefits rather than investing in product development and research, all in an effort to stabilize the stock price and appease wall street. The stock performance has been dismal over the past decade, but does throw off a dividend.
Morale in many areas is very poor, not because of the lackluster business performance, but because IBM pits their employees against one another in a Darwinian rating system which marginalizes 2/3 of the population. This is madness because most folks are very talented, self motivated and hardworking.
Advice to Management: Remove at least 1/3 of the layers of management; 50% would be better. Replace the employee rating system which pits employees against one another and foster a more cooperative framework for collaboration. Spend much more on product development, on par with Microsoft, Google and other worthy competitors, as a similar percentage of earnings. Restore the concept of 'respect for the individual' and change the mentality of employees as a cost towards a more balanced view which values them as assets to be invested in and developed to their potential.
Pros: Muchísimas oportunidades de entrenamiento y desarrollo de carrera. Buenos salarios. (Many opportunities for training and career development. Good wages.)
Cons: Demasiada burocracia, pocas herramientas, el bienestar del empleado no es un factor importante para IBM. (Too much bureaucracy, few tools, employee well-being is not an important factor for IBM.)
Advice to Management: Los empleados necesitan contacto frecuente con sus líderes para plantear ideas, preocupaciones, riesgos, necesidades de crecimiento y desarrollo de carrera. (Employees need frequent contact with their leaders to raise ideas, concerns, risks, need for growth and career development.)
Pros: Great resume builder to work for a company as big and well known as IBM. Great healthcare benefits for full time employees. As an employee you get a lot of discounts from various companies.
Cons: Because of the size of the company it's extremely hard to get recognized for good work. Pay raises are based on a ranking system that is unfair. I say this because senior management tells your direct manager how many people they can select for each ranking. 1 is the best. 4 is the worst. Only 10% of staff can be a 1, 10% can be a 2, the 80% left need to be 2's and 3's. Only people with 1's get a raise.
Advice to Management: Recognize people for there hard work. Get rid of this unfair ranking system or don't tell managers how many people in there staff can be each ranking. Increase pay to keep experienced employees.
Pros:
Cons:
Advice to Management: Top Management is deaf :-) Processes, mostly the ones with immediate financial impact are so "strict" that even managers can do only miser things to properly reward the employees.
Pros: Depending upon which location you work in, lots of opportunity for cross-functional teaming and some upward mobility.
Cons: Company is not only outsourcing its administrative team to contractors. It's also sending a lot of these roles to countries outside of the U.S. and while some of the assistants in these countries are IBMers and not contractors, they're not being as well trained as they should be.
Advice to Management: Keep your administrative assistants and don't resource them just because they've reached a certain age and support only a certain level of executives. Yes, we affect the bottom line as a cost, however, a lot of the executives we support would be lost without us and sending them assistants outside of the US isn't the answer.
Pros: My original company was bought out by IBM, so the team that I worked for still has a previous company culture. Flexible work time and people I worked with were mostly age 33 or above so they value their life besides working hard. Good benefits, especially health insurance.
Cons: Management team got changed to IBM folks who basically grew up with IBM. Since then the culture is getting more bureaucratic and I didn't feel individuals are appreciated as before. Not much salary raises...so you should be high salary when you start.
Pros: Plenty of continuing education opportunities available direct from company. Real good opportunity from someone starting out their career fresh out of college. Work/life balance entirely dependent on job role and group within company, but especially in client-facing roles, very generous.
Cons: Fortunes of whole teams and groups impacted by the ups/downs of executive management politics. Senior level non-executive professionals at constant risk of cost cutting and offshoring without strong executive patron. Quality of health care related benefits have continuously declined although employee portion of premium has stayed reasonable.
Advice to Management: Remove the internal silos and budget resources (both human and financial) on long-term success and return to focusing on providing quality services to customers. Have meaningful employee evaluations that actually impact HR's decisions on layoffs so the best/brightest are retained instead of lost, especially since the ability of direct management to influence is directly related to the political clout of their executive.
Pros: Work/life balance, flexible work schedule, generally good management direction, little to no micromanagement, ability to work independently, professional atmosphere.
Cons: Overall salary/compensation package is generally below average when compared to other companies. Internal movement is limited. Career advancement is limited. Continuing education and job training is subpar.
Advice to Management: Good place to start out, but don't expect to retire here. Put in a few years and move on out to the real world. The company has changed for the worse over the past 10 years.
Pros: Work from home, but even that comes with a price.
Cons: Too much management. Most are clueless. Execs in company only care about their stock options and stock price. Employees and employee benefits are used to make their numbers. No education budget for employees.
Advice to Management: The work environment is extremely toxic. Everyone fears for their jobs. First line management are even scared. They spread their paranoia (justifiably) to their employees. Every month there is a new rumor of what sector is getting hit next with layoffs.
Pros: Lots of job opportunities and working for a company that has distinguished itself over the years.
Cons: The company gives you a feeling that you are just a number. The company is very impersonal and all your answers and questions can be answered by some internal website, not a face to face encounter. I think the Employment Assistance Program is a joke; if you go there for help you may find yourself unemployed. The company tends to have you do so many things that it is sometimes hard to perform what you were hired for!
Advice to Management: IBM is a very large US computer company yet we get connected to India for desktop and connectivity issues; I think there is talent here at home. This is a "one size fits all" company, but the technologies and functions are sometimes diverse so one size does not fit all. The PMR is the worst system I have ever worked with. This is a bean counter operation!
Especially managers play a great role. We all have been hearing this since dogs were tied with sausage how ‘people leave managers’ and yet managers pay least focus on people. Some of them are oblivious and some do not care – in either case they cost organization more than they create value. In turn these managers become the biggest cost heads for organizations.
Selected reader comments follow:
In IBM process is not paramount, it's sacred. Profit will not save you from the process violation sin. Putting people before process is an even greater sin. Preaching the gospel of people over process is career limiting in the extreme.
The people IBM used to value have become resources and costly ones at that. They are also the first target for cost cutting when profit numbers become problematic.
Unfortunately this problem becomes self perpetuating because those who climb the management ladder into positions of influence are inevitably those who are committed to the numbers and process philosophy. They very seldom have good people management skills and they look to grow others like themselves.
Process standardisation is a key factor in many large organisations, but processes should enable good business not replace it. Sound human capital management is key to good business in my opinion.
I believe IBM needs to change its management philosophy in order to survive in the long term, but it's going have to come from the top, firmly and persistently.
IBM has wonderful, talented, hard-working people. I now realize the best way to take a stand back then would have been to join. I felt like, as an IBM US employee, I was the 'bad guy'. I felt labeled as stupid, lazy, overpaid, uncaring. Bull feathers.
We were, and I presume you still are, dedicated, caring folk who want to provide superlative service and products to the customer. Take a stand and make it happen. -Anonymous-
A good article in Motley Food exposing IBM's smoke and mirrors, we need more of these: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/05/26/3-dow-stocks-hiding-weak-growth-prospects-with-sha.aspx. -WaitingForACallFromMyManager-
We already saw indisputable evidence of giving good employees bad performance ratings/reviews, and labels like 'distracted' just to justify kicking them to the curb.
What's next, accusing people of intra-office affairs to get rid of them? Sure, why not destroy people's personal lives along with their careers just to dump them overboard because the company is sinking due to the greed and stupidity of the executives at the top.
How many out there could survive an intense expense audit? I doubt that many hands are up. You may be next.
Join the Alliance today so that you have someone at your back, you may be the next one to get the call. -HelpYourself-
Go ahead you all, roll the dice, take your chances still and don't join the union and the Alliance, and see what will happen if and when you travel for IBM when they want to cut resource cost! Ask for the blindfold; but you'll pay for it as well as the cigarette, gun rental, and the lead bullet. -Anonymous-
Alliance reply: IBM management isn't the only group watching the lack of growth on the thermometer. Our parent organization tracks it and we give monthly status reports to the organizing department. If anyone here thinks this can go on forever they are mistaken.
Alliance reply: There have been changes from the National Labor Relations Board that have made it easier for unions to organize. But the Republicans have been fighting this. Elections have consequences.
Then the expense system would hold up a $5000+ expense for a measly $20 cab disputed charge. I would then get penalized by American Express for being late.
These are the types of games greedy IBM execs are playing so they hold on to the funds longer and the worker suffers. Several times I had to pay late fees because of this type of ordeal. I am sure others have similar stories.
Employees remaining: JOIN THE ALLIANCE. Don't wait like we did to get pushed out because we were old, or making too much money, or had too many benefits. A union would've helped us protect our benefits and jobs! -GLADTOBEGONE-
When I read about joining the union, is it going from one extreme to the other? I do not deny people their right to earn bundles, I do not like it it is off our backs with NOTHING in return but more emotional beatings. Having the ability to post Union posters or contact colleagues about joining the Union does not sound appealing and will add to that abuse.
Perhaps if the Union noted that we could join, yet be free of expectation to be public, at least for now, there might be more interest. There is a silent majority out there, but the key word is silent, lest the beast be unlashed even further. I am one of those who have been teetering on joining for a few years now, yes years, but cannot hit the enter key. Instead i just wait to exhale when they tap me on the shoulder. -Whoz2say-
And you've been "teetering" for YEARS?? Seriously?
I'm an Alliance member and have been for 16 years. I've been active. I've made IBM aware that I'm here. They know who I am. I've been to several pickets. I've written letters to the editor of my local newspaper. I've recruited new members, and those members have, too.
I've seen many IBMers come to this site and ask for help to understand their 401k, pension, medical, vacation pay, service time, vested rights and even how they manipulate their retirement money once they leave IBM with barely the shirt on their back after they are Fired...that's what it's called: FIRED. IBM chooses to call it "layoff" or "resource actions" or some other 'Orwellian' nonsense—but YOU, -Whoz2say-, YOU can decide what you want to call it. And YOU can choose to SHOUT IT OUT LOUD. Alliance members have had sixteen years of vacillation back and forth, taking baby steps when we should be taking giant steps. Why? Because of people like you -Whoz2say-
A large silent majority? A silent majority can never be proven to exist as a "potential" for moving this organization forward into an "action oriented" body that gets things done. Won't happen. You need to put your "big girl or big boy pants" on and do something.
Whether you like reading this or not, this is reality: Get busy fighting for your job PUBLICLY, or Get Busy Losing your job SILENTLY. Understand? Joining the Alliance isn't just all about paying money every month. It's about growing a large group of people that are determined to take some action and get something done. The Alliance has been struggling because its total membership does not act as a single body. Silence may be golden; but you can't spend it anywhere -Whoz2say-.
My advice to you is simple. Join or not. If you decide to "hit that enter key" then go the rest of the way. Make the effort to understand how to take action and mobilize your co-workers, regardless of where they are located in the US. This web site has enough information to teach you, believe me. You have to take the initiative to read it.
If you decide NOT to join, then don't come here asking for help anymore. I'm not speaking for the Alliance; I'm speaking for me: I didn't pay dues here for 16 years so that you can get free advice and not do anything to further the Alliance@IBM cause. If that's what you want to do, then just go away, will ya? -are_you_comfortably_numb?-
With this kind of paranoia, no wonder the Alliance numbers are so low. Do you have a computer or cell phone at home that is neither IBM property nor connected to IBM? If you are so scared of IBM tracking your every move, you should use that personal device to join the Alliance. IBM cannot find out. Also, where did you get the idea that members are expected to be public. If you would rather be a "silent" member, that's fine. Your name is required by law to be kept completely confidential by the Alliance@IBM/CWA. http://www.endicottalliance.org/aboutmembership.htm -DeepThroat-
You do have protections under the National Labor Relations Act Section 7. And this applies to all communication channels not provided for by the employer.
US Mail, though slow, is not tracked and cannot be tracked by IBM. Good 'ole word-of-mouth also works well and probably is the best communication channel we have. So get the word out! The "old archaic" communication channels still work and need to be used. IBMers need to use all the communication channels available and without fear. FEAR is what IBM management is using TO CONTROL YOU, if you let it. If you don't stand up with the Alliance and join to fight "Big Bad Brother Blue" then who will? -Anonymous-
Everyone counts! We are all in this in our own way, together.
As a public Alliance member since 1999, who was RA'd in the big one in 2009, it hurts me to this day knowing I can't hand out fliers and try to organize within IBM. But I still try to get the word out whenever I can. Even wearing my IBM Alliance tee shirt in public places.
We all need to act bravely and do our part, public, private, associate, even anonymous contributor/donor. We all need to do it for the greater good to bring fairness and a return to respect for the individual, whether employee, ex-employee, retiree, or customer, with regards to IBM! -sby_willie-
You have three choices. Sit back and take it (which will, one way or the other, be over shortly). Get out and don't look back. Or, fight the power (collective bargaining, litigation, throw-shoes-into-factory-machines). In the immortal words of Gen. James Cartwright, who grew up in a Pennsylvania coal-town, "stop whining, get back up, and defend yourself." -SimpleMath-
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