Mullets are cool.

The Empire Strikes Back is playing in theaters.

And International Business Machines or IBM is the world's dominant

technology firm.

It embodies the American Dream with a progressive agenda of equal

opportunity and prides itself on a stable workforce.

It's so thrilling to

see the new IBM personal system - in the hands of an old master.

According to this

handbook in over 40 years, full-time employees haven't been touched by layoffs.

People are a treasured resource and are treated like one.

Fast forward to the present.

ProPublica estimates IBM has eliminated

20,000 American employees age 40 and over in just the past five years.

That's about 60 percent of its estimated US job cuts during that time.

How did IBM go

from valuing its older workforce to systematically getting rid of them?

Through the '80s,

technology started shifting rapidly.

Among other things, Apple introduced the first Macintosh and took

a direct shot at IBM.

It appears IBM wants it all.

By the early 2000's IBM fell

further as new rivals like Google, Facebook, and Amazon took the lead.

In our world the speed and tempo of modern living are increasing at an

ever-accelerating rate.

And as it slipped, IBM had to deal with something most of

these competitors didn't have: a large number of experienced and aging

employees.

They reacted to new setbacks with layoffs

and many of them were older workers.

ProPublica heard from over 1,400 former IBM employees.

Here's what we know.

In making staff cuts, IBM has side-stepped

US laws and regulations intended to protect workers from age discrimination.

In the past, they would get two lists from IBM. One that had ages of people

staying and another with ages of those being let go.

In 2014

IBM stopped giving that information.

On top of that, the company required people

to sign away their rights to sue for age discrimination in court, in exchange for

their severance packages.

By signing the documents, laid-off employees waived the

right to go to court.

They could only pursue their age cases through

confidential arbitration.

They also have to do it solo, so they couldn't combine

forces with other workers who may be claiming similar age discrimination.

Studies show arbitration overwhelmingly favors employers.

Workers win only

19% of the time, when their cases are arbitrated versus 36%

of the time when they go to federal court and 57% in state courts.

IBM has also laid off and fired some older workers with review

techniques that effectively made their age a disadvantage.

Take the case of one

business unit that was using a point system to evaluate workers.

The more

points a person got, the more protected they were from negative changes to

employment.

But the system itself appeared biased.

Employees were given

points for being relatively new at a job level, so those who worked there fewer

years earned more points than long time IBMers.

The bias against older workers is evident when you compare the number of

points to years of service.

Those with no points worked there an average of more

than thirty years.

Those with higher points average fifteen years.

But the numbers don't reflect worker skills.

80% of older, more

long-term employees, the ones with lower points, were rated by the company itself

as "good enough to stay at current job levels or be promoted",

while only a small

percentage of younger employees with high numbers had similar ratings.

They've also converted many layoffs into retirements, forcing ex-employees to

accept a retirement package or leave with no benefits.

They've told remote

workers, including older ones who had worked from home for years, to relocate

to offices potentially thousands of miles away from their homes.

Their options were relocate or resign.

In response to all of these findings IBM

has said "we are proud of our company and our employees ability to reinvent

themselves era after era while always complying with the law."

The problem is

protection for workers under the law is eroding.

In the past few decades, rulings

in age discrimination cases have said former employees must prove that there

were no factors other than age involved in their job changes, but companies like

IBM have made it near impossible to prove that.

With nearly 400,000 employees

worldwide, IBM is still a tech giant.

And how it handles its older workforce could

encourage other companies to follow suit, even though a lot of these companies

have a younger workforce now.

Here's the thing about aging: it happens to everyone