Wednesday, December 14, 2016

NO, IBM'S HIRING IS NOT THE RESULT OF A "TRUMP EFFECT"

Right-wingers are giving Donald Trump credit for this:
US technology giant IBM has said it will hire 25,000 people in the United States over the next four years, ahead of a meeting between President-elect Donald Trump and tech industry leaders.

About 6,000 of those appointments will be made in 2017, IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty wrote in opinion article published in USA Today....

Rometty is a member of Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum, a group of US business leaders focused on boosting economic growth and jobs.
Anyone looking to credit this to a "Trump effect" apparently missed headlines from May such as "Looking for a Job? IBM Has 20,000 Openings." That story, from CNN, cited a report in The Wall Street Journal that said IBM was looking to fill "more than 20,000 open positions."

The leap from "more than 20,000 open positions" in May, when very few people thought Donald Trump would be president, to 25,000 open position today is not a massive one. It sure looks as if IBM is trying to flatter Trump by allowing him to take credit for hiring the company was planning to do anyway.

IBM was looking to hire back in May even as it was firing people, according to the Journal, all because of a shift in business strategy:
International Business Machines Corp. this week quietly laid off employees, continuing a wave of job cuts the company announced in April.

IBM declined to say how many jobs would be cut overall. The total layoffs could affect more than 14,000 jobs, according to an estimate by Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

The job cuts come after four straight years of declining revenues as the rise of cloud computing threatens the company’s software and services business. IBM has said it would restructure its workforce to retool for cloud services and data analysis, and could hire an equal number of new employees by the end of the year.

The company said on Friday it had more than 20,000 open positions.
So (a) most of not all of the hiring was in the works months ago and (b) it's going to take years before the number hired at IBM equals the number fired this year. Winning!

2 comments:

Grung_e_Gene said...

Think of the scene from Life of Brian news conservative propagandists can spin as another Trump miracle will spread across the incestuous right-wing internet, while reality which they can not spin Terrorist attacks, Russian expansion, fleecing of the Treasury and SSI, deaths from Paul Ryan CouponCare will be because Obama did more damage than they thought. Repeat for 4 years.

Ken_L said...

Virtual President Trump deserves 100% of the credit for this landslide boom in IBM jobs on home soil, all brought back from Mexico and China. Whereas Virtual Ex-president what's-his-name deserves precisely ZERO credit for any of the 1.85 million new jobs created in the US this year. They were probably for counting endangered frogs or capturing escaped carbon, stuff like that.