Legal ‘pit bull’ steps in as employees tackle IBM over age discrimination
Thousands of workers have been fired over the past decade to cut costs and retool workforces, write Gerrit De Vynck
Shannon Liss-Riordan has been compared to "a pit bull with a chihuahua in its mouth". In a career of almost 20 years the Boston-based lawyer has gone after companies that have either harmed consumers or their employees. She has represented workers against Amazon, Uber and Google and has styled her firm as the champion for employees left behind by powerful technology companies. Now Liss-Riordan, 49, is gunning for IBM. Last week she filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of three former IBM employees who say the tech giant discriminated against them based on their age when it fired them. "Over the past several years, IBM has been systematically laying off older employees to build a younger workforce," the former employees say. In the past decade, IBM has fired thousands of people in the US, Canada and other high-wage jurisdictions to cut costs and retool its workforce after coming late to the cloud computing and mobile tech revolutions. A newer crop of tech giants has outpaced it in ...
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