[sjg007]

This is a SQL query.. in terms of a large organization, you should expect a large-scale performance review based firing to follow the demographics of the company. If your query has enriched for older people you have a problem. Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier. I would find it very suspicious if you said they performed poorly this year vs last year and that is why they were fired as most big companies have processes to improve performance over a time period. The statistics will tell the story. IBM needs to made an example of.

[rtkwe]

One thing I'm worried about is if companies will be able to argue that the older workers weren't fired because of their age but because their pay relative to their work was higher than other employees doing similar work. That is is there ruling that would prevent them from just trimming the top earners in every job post which should be a fairly accurate proxy for experience/age in the industry?

[cannonedhamster]

In which case the same employees could turn around and point out that CEO pay, which is ostensibly tied to performance, is only getting higher despite any real provable impact on company performance for most of them. The problem for any company comes when it is driven more by the economics of the company than the mission of the company to product something good.

[rtkwe]

I agree with your sentiment but I'm not sure that'd actually affect their case and the company's argument that 'we didn't look at age at all just price per position and started at the top (for the positions we were looking to cut).'

[gaius]

large-scale performance review based firing

But that’s not a layoff. A layoff is when the job doesn’t need to be done anymore. It’s completely orthogonal to the performance of the person doing that job. And as you say, performance review based shafting is a very easy thing for a company to do, and many do do it under the guise of “stack rankings”

[adrianN]

If you have a thousand people assembling doodads and the demand falls by 50% you eventually need to get rid of 50% of the doodad manufacturers. How do you choose who to fire?

[gaius]

Usually companies do that by closing an entire factory and/or shifting production offshore. The performance of any individual at a location that is closing is irrelevant to the decision makers.

[Soundest]

Under Intel both happened, sites were shut with people relocated to the main hubs (Portland in the US, Poland in Europe, somewhere in India too) and anyone with 'bad' (less than the median grade) were laid off too.

[solveit]

>Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier

I mean, presumably they were cheaper in the past.

[Rowaway45]

Also as you get older your possibilities to get sick go up. So maybe that person had sick leave more often this year. Maybe other person had family issues this year and year ago it was great for them. Some people might have worse periods. But for HR you are just as good as your last 6 months...