Letter To Sam Palmisano - The CGT IBM France

We are part of a trade union called La CGT, standing for "La Confédération Générale du Travail", which is one of the 5 representative trade unions throughout all the French IBM sites as well as France.

We received your short note entitled "Performance and IBM's values", and this note, plus the one received from Tim Stevens, entitled "Evolution du programme PBC et de la paie variable", are raising a legal issue with respects to the Labour Law in France, and which moreover, are starting some turmoil among the IBMers' ranks in France.

The legal issue is that neither you, as the IBM US Chief Executive Officer, nor Tim Stevens, as the IBM France Human Resources Director, can communicate on this subject prior to consulting the IBM France works council (CCE in French). In fact, this is not the first time that IBM infringes the French laws. For example, the business conduct guidelines certification applied by IBM France is an illegal document with regards to articles L-122-36, first subparagraph, and L-122-39 of the French Labour Law. Regarding this sensitive topic, we all think that the news on misconducts in South Korea is bad enough for IBM to stop these infringements in France.

In adition,and still according to the French Labour Law, the manager cannot evaluate a salary by referring himself to subjective facts such as behaviour, culture, attitudes, and so on ... but must he refer to concrete and quantifyable facts and only those which are directly related to the performed work itself. Having said this, what we are challenging is not the form of the PBC but rather its contents.

We do not think that you heard us loud and clear, unlike you stated. You are rather strengthening the PBC process to justify the coming lay-offs of IBMers, thus letting you relocate jobs from the United States and Western Europe into other countries such as China, India and Eastern Europe where the workforce is cheaper and more docile (what justifies this analysis is that, on the one hand, as announced on 20 January, in eChannelLine USA, among the 15,000 jobs to be created, "4,500 of the new hires will be in the US[…]most of the rest will be joining Big Blue operations in China, India and Europe "and on the other hand, we are experiencing in France the Wagner project which aims at relocating French jobs into Czech Republic).
We will not let you lead the IBMers who were noted 4 to the slaughterhouse.

We also read the document from IBM Canada about the planned changes concerning the PBC and Variable Pay to get a better understanding. What is really striking, is that, as always, more and more is expected from IBMers while the means given by IBM to achieve these goals are NEVER EVER written by the manager in the very PBC form. For The CGT, this process is either a poison pill or the Russian roulette for IBMers.

Moreover, teamwork is stressed out in the document from IBM Canada, and we have often seen this point used to justify a scapegoats policy for whoever might want to improve the existing processes or contradict his/her first or second line manager.
We do not want to become assimilated to Pavlov dogs reacting on the sole goodwill of their managers .

For all these reasons, we encourage you to respect the French law and the collective labour agreement of the French Metalworking Industry by letting managers set objectives for the IBMers they manage. We also demand that IBM pays for the jobs created in China, India and Eastern Europe by using the huge profits it derived from all the IBMers hard work and total dedication, rather than through the use of a short-sighted labour cutback policy."
Best regards,
The CGT IBM France