Three weeks after 419 employees worked their last days at IBM’s plant in Essex Junction, a company official confirmed that mandatory furloughs in the hardware unit have been ordered.
Starting either Aug. 24 or 31, members of the Systems and Technology Group will be required to take one week at one-third pay, Bloomberg reports. STG executives will take no pay during that week.
The news comes the same day that International Business Machines Corp. announced an alliance with Google to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technologies, using IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture. The companies Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan also are involved in the OpenPOWER Consortium.
New additions to IBM’s portfolio of server technologies also were announced Tuesday.
IBM announced layoffs on June 12 after lower than expected second-quarter earnings. Worldwide, more than 3,300 employees were let go, according to the Alliance@IBM.
Lee Conrad, national coordinator for the workers’ website Alliance@IBM, called the furloughs a “slap in the face.”
