Doing just the opposite
of what they said they’d do.
Near the tail end of last year,
President Trump (then only President-elect Trump) seemed to have made some
headway with the formerly recalcitrant tech industry. Along with an apparently
successful meeting with tech executives, the new president had received
assurances of cooperation with his plan to reclaim American jobs from those
very executives.
The most visible such assurance
came shortly after the president’s election, in the form of a letter from IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, who
promised to expand hiring by 25,000 over the next four years. Along with this,
Rometty also offered Trump a great heaping of unsolicited (and unhelpful)
advice on how to create “new collar” jobs. (Spoiler alert: it involved selling
out American workers to their new would-be tech masters.) Further, the
company’s already documented friendliness with China, the geopolitical
rival most often at loggerheads with the new president, remained a very live
concern.
Given all this, there was ample
reason for Trump to be skeptical of IBM’s promises, and to ignore their disingenuous
suggestions. Nevertheless, an optimistic observer could have suggested that
perhaps IBM was sincere and that, in any event, Trump should give them a chance
to live up to their promises.
We now know how utterly empty
those promises actually were. On Trump’s first Monday in office, Bloomberg and the San Jose Mercury News
reported that, far from its promises of
expanding employment by 25,000, IBM has actually gone on a firing spree.
Indeed, according to the IBM employees quoted, the open letter from Rometty was
only ever a bit of smarmy corporate PR intended to cover up the fact that IBM
was planning on shipping far more jobs overseas than it had any plans of
creating at home. Per Bloomberg:
Rometty’s hiring pledge prompted
current and former IBM workers to vent on message boards and Facebook
groups. Some complained that the new recruiting drive wouldn’t offset jobs sent
overseas in recent years. Others said Rometty had neglected to
mention whether and how many people would be fired in the meantime. Some urged
online communities to contact the Trump transition team and educate his
aides about IBM’s history of layoffs and outsourcing.
“Ginni Rometty is terminating thousands of IT workers and
touting herself as some hero who’s out to hire 25,000 workers,” says Sara
Blackwell, a Sarasota, Florida-based lawyer and advocate for Protect U.S.
Workers, who represents about 100 IBM ex-employees who have filed
discrimination and other complaints. “To me, that’s hypocritical.”
Ah, what a devilish thing fine
print can be!
In reality, there was no reason to
suspect that IBM would do anything else. The success of their stock in recent
years has come almost entirely from not merely ignoring American interests, but
arguably from acting against them. Nowhere has this been more true than China,
where former Chinese officials have openly touted IBM’s perverse willingness to
practically give away their own technology to the Chinese government in
exchange for fleeting access to the Chinese market. Never mind that, thanks to
IBM’s help, those same officials gleefully gloat about their ability to create
“a domestic tech industry that in the long run will no longer need to buy American
products.” Rometty will likely have her golden parachute and speaking spot
at Davos nailed down by the time that “long run” comes around.
President Trump has yet to weigh
in on this particular betrayal, though he obviously should. The president’s
inaugural address stressed that his administration will follow the simple dicta
that one should “buy American” and “hire American.” IBM is ensuring that China
will not follow the former while openly thumbing their nose at the latter.
Trump obviously prefers a dual carrot and stick approach to keeping industries
at home, and for that he deserves commendation. But in the case of IBM, it may
be more appropriate, to paraphrase the words of the man whose bust now adorns
Trump’s oval office, Teddy Roosevelt, to tweet loudly and wield a big stick.
