It's crazy that anyone could believe a corporation cares about anything other than profits.
If IBM actually had the ages of their employees available to the system that did the layoffs, then that would be age based discrimination. But I'd be willing to bet that wasn't a factor.
If you start with a pool of people with large salaries, and look for people not adding at least that much value to the business, you are going to find people who have that salary for reasons other than merit.
The discrimination, if any, was in their favor until the business couldn't afford to discriminate in their favor.
Discrimination doesn't have to be so explicit. Saying "I'm going to fire everyone over 50" is obviously discrimination, but so is "I'm going to fire everyone near the top of the salary range for their job family". It has the same impact, but it's discrimination is cloaked behind a layer of misdirection. The law isn't so blind
Depends on the company, but even in ones that do, it's usually new hires are paid on the higher end of the band.
That means a junior engineer hired yesterday makes more than a junior engineer hired two years ago, but it doesn't mean that the junior engineer hired yesterday makes more than the staff engineer hired a decade ago
If IBM actually had the ages of their employees available to the system that did the layoffs, then that would be age based discrimination. But I'd be willing to bet that wasn't a factor.
If you start with a pool of people with large salaries, and look for people not adding at least that much value to the business, you are going to find people who have that salary for reasons other than merit.
The discrimination, if any, was in their favor until the business couldn't afford to discriminate in their favor.