In England, the management of a department store suffering tough times had this brilliant idea for how to tell all the employees they were being laid off: pull the fire alarm, and then when everyone is out of the store, standing in the cold drizzle, tell them that they no longer have a job. As the linked blog put it, the good news is, there’s no fire. The bad news: you’re fired.

The American approach these days seems to be a bit more subtle. IBM laid off 1,315 employees recently, which does not seem like a big deal for one of the country’s largest companies, with a workforce of 350,000. But as the PBS blog, I, Cringely, reports, this may just be the beginning of a long and steady bleed of US jobs:

[…] The IBM project I am writing about is called LEAN and the first manifestation of LEAN was this week’s 1,300 layoffs at Global Services, which generated almost no press. Thirteen hundred layoffs from a company with more than 350,000 workers is nothing, so the yawning press reaction is not unexpected. But this week’s “job action,” as they refer to it inside IBM management, was as much as anything a rehearsal for what I understand are another 100,000+ layoffs to follow, each dribbled out until some reporter (that would be me) notices the growing trend, then dumped en masse when the jig is up, but no later than the end of this year.

LEAN began last week with a 10-city planning meeting for Global Services, which wasn’t, by the way, to decide who gets the boot: those decisions were apparently made weeks ago, though senior managers have been under orders to keep the news from their affected employees.

If you work at IBM Global Services, ask your boss outright if you are on the list to be fired. It puts the boss in a bind, sure, but might lead to a sort of “Alice’s Restaurant” effect in which hypocrisy is confronted and exposed.

LEAN is about offshoring and outsourcing at a rate never seen before at IBM. For two years Big Blue has been ramping up its operations in India and China with what I have been told is the ultimate goal of laying off at least one American worker for every overseas hire. The BIG PLAN is to continue until at least half of Global Services, or about 150,000 workers, have been cut from the U.S. division. Last week’s LEAN meetings were quite specifically to find and identify common and repetitive work now being done that could be automated or moved offshore, and to find work Global Services is doing that it should not be doing at all. This latter part is with the idea that once extraneous work is eliminated, it will be easier to move the rest offshore.

All this is supposed to happen by the end of 2007, by the way, at which point IBM will also freeze its U.S. pension plan. [full text]

h/t Bullnotbull.com for the IBM link.