According to Lee Conrad, the national coordinator with Alliance at IBM, the company told them there will be 4 to 5 thousand cuts nationwide. About 1,600 of those will be in the Application Services division, and some of those jobs are based in RTP.
More cuts are expected in the System Technology group and the Global Technology Services group.
The Alliance is the union that represents IBM employees.
IBM is notoriously secretive about layoffs when it makes them, and pinning down exact numbers of Research Triangle jobs to be affected will be difficult.
Conrad said Wednesday that it's been several months since IBM has hired significantly in the U.S. and Canada. Most of the new IBM job postings are in India, China, the Asian Pacific and Latin America.
"It's shocking. It's abrupt. Every U.S. citizen should condemn IBM, for shipping American jobs overseas," Conrad said.
IBM employees have already labeled Thursday as "Black Thursday," anticipating what will come out of the meetings.
