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• Job Cuts Status & Comments page
  • Comment 06/05/09: 16 months ago IBM sold its Network Services Division to AT&T, both IBM and AT&T held hands saying this would be a great thing for both organizations. NOT! Today, the IBM & AT&T relationship is strained and many issues exist regarding scope, costs and other areas. In fact, Price Waterhouse was brought in to mediate between the two orgs to resolve a lot of the issues. Its good to see IBM get a taste of its own outsourcing medicine. I hope IBM's cost case is blown wide open and they pay more for Network Services than when IBM had it. Now you know what customer feel! -Told You So-
  • Comment 06/06/09: IBM managers are only around now to see the RA's happen. Most have little if any technical skills, little if any IT savvy and need their staff pets to do their Microsoft Office work. Since they can't do any real IT IBM is forced to keep them as managers. That's pretty pathetic. -anonymous-
  • Comment 06/06/09: I was RA'd back in 05 but still speak regularly with former co-workers who are still with IBM. Whenever I mention this site and advise them to take a look and spread the word I'm met with silence or a quick subject change on their part. It's almost as I told them I just saw a UFO or something, they just don't seem to want to hear about it and I believe it's definitely the fear thing mentioned in the previous post. It's like "right now I still have my job and there's no way I'm jeopardizing it. Too bad because slowly but surely they're time will come. -reply to emotional response post-
  • Comment 06/06/09: I was always struck by the absolute power that 1st line and 2nd line managers apparently have in IBM, even though they either have no IT skills or are very rusty. I have seen ruthless behavior and vocal rudeness that is apparently unchecked and overlooked, and would not be tolerated in social groups or society outside IBM. Why are these managers not trained and supervised? A few behaved like guards in an Iraq prison IMO, or police in a 3rd world country. -Former IBMer-
  • Comment 06/06/09: IBMers trying to "keep their head down" doesn't mean they will still have a job. At will employee means you can always be RA'ed. An IBMer has absolutely no job protection. Yes, it is amazing that when they find out about the Alliance they generally ignore or dismiss the subject. I guess that kool-aid they serve is extra strong these days! -anonymous-
  • Comment 06/06/09: -Former IBMer-: I have seen ruthless behavior and vocal rudeness that is apparently unchecked and overlooked, and would not be tolerated in social groups or society outside IBM. Why are these managers not trained and supervised? I've known a couple of 1st line managers who said that they loved the "Blue" training, but that they're not allowed to practice it. IBM still apparently trains its managers for the IBM of yore. Then, dumps them into the IBM of today, where they quickly see that fear and intimidation are what those above them use to manage, and those are the tools they're given to manage down as well. I've known a few 1st line IBM managers who tried to treat their people with respect and as professional adults. All of them have since been whacked. It seems that the worst a*holes are the ones who survive. -irRational-
  • Comment 06/07/09: All, If you were RAed recently, please note the Job Cuts Stats tool in the sticky note at the top of this page. It will crunch the numbers from your RA package (PDF) and tell you the RA totals by age. Please report the totals here so we can all see. I wonder if IBM hit its goal of 16,000 yet? The "IBM Values" book was a cookbook!! -Cooked 25yrs-
• General Visitor's Comment page
• Pension Comments page
  • Comment 06/04/09: 401k+ plan transitional credits end on 6/30/2009 according to the NetBenefits IBM 401k+ plan description. -sby_willie-
• Raise and Salary Comments
• PBC Comments
• International Comments

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

• Washington Post: How the White House Hopes to Control Health Care Costs. By Ezra Klein. Excerpt: You've heard the line that "entitlement reform is health reform." Yesterday, at a meeting between Barack Obama and Senate Democrats from the Finance and HELP committees, that line grew up and graduated into something altogether sturdier: A policy. Senate sources confirm that the president argued in favor of a genuinely major Medicare reform -- a reform that could make Medicare the nation's most important laboratory for health care reforms.
• New York Times: Obama to Forge a Greater Role on Health Care. By Sheryl Gay Stolberg. Excerpt: After months of insisting he would leave the details to Congress, President Obama has concluded that he must exert greater control over the health care debate and is preparing an intense push for legislation that will include speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers, senior White House officials say. ...

  “We must attack the root causes of skyrocketing health costs,” Mr. Obama said, pointing to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and other institutions as among those that offer high-quality care at low cost. “We should learn from their successes and promote the best practices, not the most expensive ones. That’s how we’ll achieve reform that fixes what doesn’t work and builds on what does.”

• Yahoo! IBM Pension message board: "Re: The Many Hidden Costs of High-Deductible Insurance" by "cybertramp66". Full excerpt: Enjoy decent medical coverage while you're working. Many people are doing OK with their employer plan. The real trouble starts once you lose the job and the employer is out of the equation. Everyone is one layoff or firing away from financial disaster.

  US spends 15% of GDP on health care. All other industrialized nations pay 7% or less and they have universal HC -- no one goes bankrupt due to illness.

  Don't believe the TeeVee ads that warn against universal HC. The campaign is being coordinated by CRC Public Relations (paid for by Rick Scott and HC industry), the group that masterminded the "Swift boat" attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, and is inspired by the "Harry and Louise" ads that helped torpedo health-care reform during the Clinton administration.

  Rick Scott, is a multimillionaire investor and was the controversial former CEO of Columbia/HCA. Columbia/HCA plead guilty to a massive array of fraud charges - which resulted in a fraud settlement of $1.7 billion dollars, the largest in U.S. history. Details on Scott and these Ads here... http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/5/92910/15565

• New York Times: State Coverage Model No Help for Uneasy Insurance Industry. By Kevin Sack. Excerpt: In reasserting his support last week for a new government health plan for the uninsured, President Obama stoked the fears of private insurers that they would not be able to compete with a Medicare-like option and might gradually be priced out of existence. The Obama administration has sought to reassure the industry, with its substantial lobbying might, by pointing to the three dozen states that offer their employees a choice between government-backed insurance options and a menu of commercial policies.
• Kaiser Health News: Taxing Health Benefits Could Be Used To Pay for Expanded Coverage, Drive Out Unnecessary Care, Some Say. Excerpts: Economists say taxing health benefits not only could raise billions per year for health care reform efforts, but also could make the system run better, NPR and KHN report. The reasoning: "When you tax an activity, you get less of it. When you subsidize an activity, you get more. 'We're subsidizing health insurance,' said Katherine Baicker, an economist at Harvard's School of Public Health. 'So we're getting more and more and more health care consumed.'" Discounts skew decision making, NPR reports, and getting rid of the tax breaks for employer-provided health benefits could help rein in unnecessary treatments while boosting enrollment.

  "'Some estimates suggest 30 percent of health care dollars are going to care that does very little to promote health,' Baicker said. 'Meanwhile, uninsured people don't have access to care that would very much improve their health.'" But union leaders are fighting hard to keep the tax break they say they've won for their workers over years of hard negotiation and that taxing the benefits could provide a political torpedo to those seeking to derail reform. "Supporters say any tax could be limited to affect only the most generous insurance policies and perhaps only wealthier workers. Such a limited tax could still raise significant revenue to expand health care and could still make the system more efficient. In the coming weeks, though, as plans are debated on Capitol Hill, what's efficient is likely to take a back seat to what's politically doable" (Horsley, 6/8).

• New York Times: Overseas, Under the Knife. By Arnold Milstein, Mark D. Smith and Jerome P. Kassirer. Excerpts: One consequence of the high cost of medical care in the United States has been the rise of medical tourism. Every year, thousands of Americans undergo surgery in other countries because the allure of good care at half the price is too good to pass up.

  Average total fees at well-regarded hospitals like Apollo and Wockhardt in India are 60 percent to 90 percent lower than those of the average American hospital, according to a 2007 study by the consulting group Mercer Health and Benefits (where Dr. Milstein is affiliated). Even compared with low-cost American hospitals, the offshore fees are 20 percent to 50 percent lower.

  Most medical travelers seek cosmetic procedures like facelifts and liposuction, but an increasing number have high-risk operations like heart surgery and joint replacement in places like India, Singapore and Thailand. ...

  Which Americans consider this option? Typically, they are people who have either no health insurance or meager coverage. Though not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, they cannot afford a good health plan. But lately, even some people with good coverage have been encouraged to take advantage of cost savings abroad.

• New York Times op-ed: This Time, We Won’t Scare. By Nicholas D. Kristof. Full excerpt: Perhaps you’ve seen those television commercials denouncing health care reform as a plot to create a Canadian-style totalitarian nightmare, and you feel a wee bit scared.

  Back in the election campaign, some people spread rumors that Barack Obama might be a secret Muslim conspiring to impose Sharia law on us. That seems unlikely now, but what if he’s a covert Canadian plotting to impose ... health care?

  Rick Scott, a former hospital company chief executive, leads a group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights. He was forced to resign as C.E.O. after his company defrauded the government through overbilling and is now spending his time trying to block meaningful health care reform by terrifying us with commercials of “real-life stories of the victims of government-run health care.”

  So here’s a far more representative “real-life story.”

  Diane Tucker, 59, is an American lawyer who moved to Vancouver, Canada, in 2006. Like everyone else there, she now pays the equivalent of just $49 a month for health care.

  Then one day two years ago, Ms. Tucker was working on her office computer when she noticed that she was having trouble typing with her right hand. “I realized my hand was numb, so I tried to stand up to shake it out,” she remembered. “But I had trouble standing.” A colleague called 911, and an ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital.

  “An emergency room doctor met me at the door, and they took me straight upstairs to the CT scan,” she recalled. A neurologist explained that she had suffered a stroke. Ms. Tucker spent a week at the hospital. “The doctors were great, although there were also a couple of jerks,” she said. “The nursing staff was wonderful.” Still, there were two patients to a room, and conditions weren’t as opulent as at some American hospitals. “The food was horrible,” she said. Then again, the price was right. “They never spoke to me about money,” she said. “Not when I checked in, and not when I left.”

  Scaremongers emphasize the waits for specialists in Canada, and there’s some truth to the stories. After the stroke, Ms. Tucker needed to make a routine appointment with a neurologist and an ophthalmologist to see if she should drive again. Initially, those appointments would have meant a two- or three-month wait, although in the end she managed to arrange them more quickly.

  Ms. Tucker underwent three months of rehabilitation, including physical therapy several times a week. Again there was no charge, no co-payment.

  Then, last year, Ms. Tucker fainted while on a visit to San Francisco, and an ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital. But this was in the United States, so the person meeting her at the emergency room door wasn’t a doctor. “The first person I saw was a lady with a computer,” she said, “asking me how I intended to pay the bill.” Ms. Tucker did, in fact, have insurance, but she was told she would have to pay herself and seek reimbursement. Nothing was seriously wrong, and the hospital discharged her after five hours. The bill came to $8,789.29.

  Ms. Tucker has since lost her job in the recession, but she says she’s stuck in Canada — because if she goes back to the United States, she will pay a fortune for private health insurance because of her history of a stroke. “I’m trying to find another job here,” she said. “I want to stay here because of medical insurance.”

  Another advantage of the Canadian system, she says, is that it emphasizes preventive care. When a friend was diagnosed as being pre-diabetic, he was put in a free two-year program emphasizing an improved diet and lifestyle — and he emerged as no longer being prone to diabetes.

  If Ms. Tucker’s story surprises you, you should know that Mr. Scott’s public relations initiative against health reform is led by the same firm that orchestrated the “Swift boat campaign” against Senator John Kerry in 2004. These commercials are just as false, for President Obama is not proposing government-run health care — just a public insurance element in the mix.

  No doubt there are some genuine horror stories in Canada, as there are here in the United States.

  But the bottom line is that America’s health care system spends nearly twice as much per person as Canada’s (building the wealth of hospital tycoons like Mr. Scott). Yet our infant mortality rate is 40 percent higher than Canada’s, and American mothers are 57 percent more likely to die in childbirth than Canadian ones. In 1993, the “Harry and Louise” commercials frightened Americans into abandoning health reform. Let’s ensure those scare tactics don’t work this time.

• Wall Street Journal: How to Stop Socialized Health Care. Five arguments Republicans must make. By Karl Rove. Excerpt: It was a sobering breakfast with one of the smartest Republicans on Capitol Hill. We can fix a lot of bad stuff President Barack Obama might do, he told me. But if Mr. Obama signs into law a "public option," government-run insurance program as part of health-care reform we won't be able to undo the damage. I'd go the Republican member of Congress one further: If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state. To prevent this from happening, there are five arguments Republicans must make.
• Wall Street Journal: Obama Stumps for a Public Insurance Option. By Laura Meckler. Excerpts: President Barack Obama gave his most enthusiastic endorsement yet for creating a government-run health plan to compete with private insurers, the most contentious aspect of the developing health-care legislation. The idea is backed by most Democrats in some form, with liberals particularly committed to it. But Republicans and many industry groups are fiercely opposed, saying it would inject too much government control. ...

  "I … strongly believe that one of the options in the [health-care insurance] exchange should be a public insurance option," the president said. "And the reason is not because we want a government takeover of health care...but we want some competition. If the private insurance companies have to compete with a public option, it will keep them honest and it'll help keep their prices down."

• Wall Street Journal: More Small Firms Drop Health Care. By Dana Mattioli. Excerpt: Accelerating health-care premiums and sharp revenue shortfalls due to the recession are forcing some small companies to choose between dropping health insurance or laying off workers -- or staying in business at all. Sheryl Weldon, owner of Commerce Welding & Manufacturing Co., saw health-insurance payments increase to more than $800 monthly per employee from about $200 five years ago. With monthly revenue down 10% since December, Ms. Weldon stopped providing health coverage to employees, including one being treated for prostate cancer, for the first time in the 64-year-history of the Dallas sheet-metal company. ...

  That follows earlier declines in coverage, with just 38% of small businesses providing health insurance last year compared to 61% in 1993, according to the trade group. In 2007, 41% offered coverage. A Hewitt Associates survey found that 19% of all companies plan to stop providing health-care benefits in the next three to five years.

• New York Times: Obama Takes His Health Care Case to the Public. By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Robert Pear. Excerpts: President Obama, taking his case for a health care overhaul directly to the American people, on Thursday vigorously defended his call for a government-sponsored health plan to compete with private insurers. But back in Washington, a leading Senate Democrat seemed to be looking for a compromise that would limit government involvement. Mr. Obama came to Green Bay, a city he praised for getting “more quality out of fewer health care dollars than many other communities,” as part of an intense push for overhauling health care, his highest legislative priority. But with his insistence on a “public option” generating increased skepticism on Capitol Hill, he defended it as necessary to spur competition in the marketplace. ...

  “Right now a number of my Republican friends have said, ‘We can’t support anything with a public option,’ ” he said. “It’s not clear that it’s based on any evidence as much as it is their thinking, their fear, that somehow once you have a public plan that government will take over the entire health care system.”

  But Mr. Obama neglected to mention that some centrist Democrats have qualms about a new government health plan. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, who is leading an effort to draft a health care bill, said Thursday that the public plan could take the form of an insurance cooperative that would be owned and operated for the benefit of its members, but not run by the government. “I am inclined, and I think the committee is inclined, toward a co-op,” Mr. Baucus said. “It’s not going to be public, we won’t call it public, but it will be tough enough to keep insurance companies’ feet to the fire.” ...

  In the Senate, Republicans expressed alarm at the shape of legislation being developed by Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, both Democrats. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, called the bill “the most liberal bunch of gobbledygook I’ve seen in my life — a complete liberal mishmash of ideas.”

News and Opinion Concerning the U.S. Financial Crisis

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

Vault Message Board Posts

Vault's IBM Business Consulting Services message board is a popular hangout for IBM BCS employees, including many employees acquired from PwC. Sample posts follow:

• "Business Plan Hit" by "Tweetie_Bird". Full excerpt: Obama is making good on his election promises, whether IBM and other tech companies like it or not. The charade of the alleged lack of tech workers in US is about to come to an end. It'll come out that the real problem is lack of cheap, slave tech labor is the real problem as far as IBM sees it. Their only answer is to move the company HQ overseas, which has always been part of the plan. Unfortunately, doing it too soon could hurt the brand permanently.
• "Is it too little, too late" by "civilliberty". Full excerpt: I suspect IBM is beyond the point of no return. Anything Obama does is a belated effort to address a long entrenched problem. Now IBM has developed its greedy appetites arising from the wage differential of lower cost resources, they'll just find another way to frustrate the governments of this world who seek to stymie their efforts.

  The only way for this to turn around is for significant company failure as a result of off-shoring so that it falls out of favour, but who will have the skills (or the inclination) to help rebuild an on-shore effort of that happens. Many people in OZ are steering away from computing as they are sensible enough to see it is heading off-shore. There will be a generation that has no idea about system design, development and project management because companies like IBM no longer invest in western resources.