IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty says she plans to hire about 25,000 people in the U.S. and invest $1 billion over the next four years, laying out her vision for filling technology jobs in America ahead of today’s meeting of industry leaders with President-elect Donald Trump.
Bloomberg reports that Rometty, who is on Trump’s advisory panel of business leaders, will join Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Alphabet’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt at a summit with Trump in New York that is said to focus on jobs.
During the runup to the election, Trump made employment issues a mainstay of his campaign, promising to scrap trade deals he viewed as draining jobs from the country and impose tariffs on imports if necessary. He has since claimed credit for preventing thousands of manufacturing jobs from moving overseas and used state incentives to strike a deal with Carrier, a unit of United Technologies Corp., to pull back on its plans to move some operations to Mexico.
Rometty is continuing what is emerging as a formula among technology companies: in conjunction with meetings with Trump in his Manhattan tower, pledge to create jobs and invest billions of dollars in the U.S., even if the plans had already been in the works since before he was elected.
The advantage for companies is that it can deflect criticism from the new administration that the industry is shifting jobs offshore, while also giving Trump a way to take credit for job creation goals that may have little to do with his election.
IBM said in March it had more than 25,000 positions open globally and that it had started to cut some U.S. jobs as part of a “workforce rebalancing” in an effort to add staff with cloud and other specific skills.
An IBM spokesman confirmed the restructuring plans to Daily Report, but would not provide details on whether cuts were planned at the company’s Baton Rouge Client Innovation Center. In October, Daily Report obtained figures showing IBM fell 67 jobs short of the 500 full-time-equivalent positions it was suppose to create by June 30 under the terms of its 2013 cooperative endeavor agreement with Louisiana.
IBM, nevertheless, remains in compliance with the agreement as the state allows the company to carry forward jobs created in previous years that exceeded the requirements for those years.
