The stock market has been brutal to IBM. Last fall, IBM lost nearly half its value in the stock market plunge of 2008 when its share price dove from a high last August of 130.93 per share to a mind-numbing low of 69.50. The company's stock price is beginning to creep back up now and currently stands at 89.23. Yet that type of loss to investors--literally billions of dollars--doesn't come without a price: someone is going to have to pay. Many employees at IBM are beginning to wonder if it will be them, and the answer for many could be a distinct "yes."

IBM has approximately 386,558 employees worldwide, and when you have more people on board than live in many major American cities, there is bound to be some slack. You can almost hear the chorus reverberate down the executive hallways: "Cut, cut, cut-we need to trim costs!" Although IBM has a policy of not forecasting its own layoffs, the rumor mill is tossing around anywhere from 4-to-10 percent as a possible, yet unverifiable number. If that were to prove true, it would mean that anywhere from 15,000 up to 38,000 IBMers could be looking for work come this summer.

Will it actually be this many, and where will these cuts be taken from? No one is sure, but the IBM Employees Union, CWA Local 1701, AFL-CIO has a lot of members feeding tidbits of information and rumors into its Web site at http://www.allianceibm.org/jobcutstatusandcomments.php. There is a fear among union members that sometime in January, the company will slash thousands of jobs. Members are speculating on January for a variety of reasons including possible policy shifts on offshore jobs by the incoming Obama administration to the impending release of IBM's fourth quarter financial results. One poster who claims to have an inside track says there will be a layoff in January and another in June.

Meanwhile, shifts in company policies having to do with working-at-home and commuting are starting to emerge along with signs of a companywide reorganization that together are making IBMers feel insecure at an insecure time. As one pundit said recently of the economy, "We probably haven't seen the bottom of this yet." But were they referring to stock market losses or job losses? And what effect--and by when--will the government bailout have on jobs?

Chris Smith was the Senior News Editor at MC Press Online from 2007 to 2012 and was responsible for the news content on the company's Web site. Chris has been writing about the IBM midrange industry since 1992 when he signed on with Duke Communications as West Coast Editor of News 3X/400. With a bachelor's from the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English and minored in Journalism, and a master's in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Chris later studied computer programming and AS/400 operations at Long Beach City College. An award-winning writer with two Maggie Awards, four business books, and a collection of poetry to his credit, Chris began his newspaper career as a reporter in northern California, later worked as night city editor for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and went on to edit a national cable television trade magazine. He was Communications Manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. in Long Beach, Calif., before it merged with Boeing, and oversaw implementation of the company's first IBM desktop publishing system there. An editor for MC Press Online since 2007, Chris has authored some 300 articles on a broad range of topics surrounding the IBM midrange platform that have appeared in the company's eight industry-leading newsletters. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..