IBM has dismissed up to 100k of its elderly staff in order to attract millennial workers, the lawsuit claims. Following this event, some of the former employees have brought legal action against the organization due to which IBM has faced a couple of lawsuits involving allegations that the firm is engaged in discriminative practices against the aged.

According to Alan Wild, the former Vice President of Human Resources, IBM had decided to “lay off 50k to 100k staff members in just the last several years.” IBM confronted issues with talent recruitment and determined a way of showing millennials that IBM was not “an old fuddy-duddy organization,” in an attempt to make itself look like a “cool, trendy organization,” such as Google Alphabet Inc. or Amazon.

The statements also come from Jonathan Langley, 61, who, in a distinct civil lawsuit against IBM, accused the organization of firing him because of his age after he had served the firm for more than 24 years. According to the IBM consulting department, millennials are ”generally more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”

ProPublica released a comprehensive report in March 2018 in which they found out that in the past five years, an estimated 20k U.S. workers aged 40 or older had been fired. The reports also state that IBM had encouraged the layoff staff to apply for other IBM positions, while secretly advising executives not to employ them.

However, there may be other reasons why IBM has laid off older employees. As one user stated on HackerNews, “I doubt IBM lays off its older workers solely to appeal to millennials. . . It’s more likely that older workers are laid off because they are more expensive due to higher pay, have more paid time off, use more healthcare, and are more politically calibrated to their organizations than younger workers.”