Last month, I reported on a wave of IBM layoffs hitting U.S. facilities. Cuts were happening all across the country, and one source told me he’d been informed that one-third of the U.S. workforce would be affected. IBM quickly denied that number, and other reports put the numbers of those severed in the 20 to 25 percent range—something like 18,000 to 25,000 in the United States.
(We’ll never be able to know the exact percentage, simply because IBM no longer releases a U.S. headcount; worldwide, as of the end of 2015, the company had approximately 378,000 employees.)
At the time, U.S. employees suspected that what the company called “workforce rebalancing,” in order to “aggressively” focus on cognitive and cloud computing, had less to do with focusing on cloud and cognitive and more to do with moving jobs to countries like India, Brazil, and Costa Rica
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/ibm-layoff-epidemic-spreads-worldwide