Older Laid-Off Workers Press Age Discrimination Claim vs IBM

They were a youthful brigade at Lotus Software in the 1990s, when the Cambridge, Massachusetts firm was revolutionizing office work with its cutting-edge e-mail platform.

Photo Insert: IBM Security instructors at the company’s security business headquarters, simulate cyber attacks in the world’s first commercial cyber range at the IBM X-Force Command Center in Cambridge, Mass.

When their company was swallowed by IBM, they helped the high-tech giant push into big data and digital health.

More recently, when they’d moved into their peak earnings-and-savings years — just as IBM was scrambling to remake itself for what it called “a new era of technology” — they were summarily fired, Boston Globe reported.

Dozens of former Massachusetts employees, many of them Lotus veterans, are among more than 1,000 laid-off workers nationally who have charged IBM with forcing out older staffers over the past decade as part of a strategy to build a younger workforce.

All of the employees were in their 40s, 50s, and 60s when they lost their jobs. IBM has been fighting the charges for over two years, saying they have no merit.

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