IBM is well known within the American (and world) business community for its influential employment policies. This proposed panel would explore the fundamental aspects of those policies from the firm’s early decades through the present, and how and why those policies have changed over time, and with what consequences. The goal of each presenter is to give a clear sense of how IBM management approached employment issues, and how IBM workers experienced working at that firm in different chronological eras.
The first paper (given by David Stebenne) would address the formation of IBM’s overall employment arrangements during the tenure of CEO Thomas Watson Sr. (1914-1955); the second paper (given by Marc Wortman) would deal with them during the tenure of Thomas Watson Jr. (1956-71); and the third paper (given by James Cortada) would focus on them since Watson, Jr. left the firm in the early 1970s. The reason for this chronological approach is that each era was distinctive in terms of employment arrangements, although there was, to be sure, continuity across all of them.
Under Watson Sr. the firm first developed its influential “grand bargain” with its employees, during the 1930s and ’40s especially. Among its most famous features were high pay, generous benefits, and secure employment, in return for which employees expected to conform to a wide-ranging code of personal and professional conduct, work long hours, and accept frequent corporate transfers. The various papers would address the consequences of that arrangement for IBM’s workforce; how and why that bargain became more egalitarian and less repressive during the tenure of Watson, Jr.; but also, how and why that bargain eventually eroded thereafter.
In discussing these issues, the panel hopes to shed light on the reasons for the decline of the social contract between managers and workers more generally in recent decades, and what might be done to reverse that disturbing trend.