“An old boss of mine once explained that it is always cheaper to get people to quit than to lay them off. Layoffs involve severance payments, retraining, and placement assistance, while quitting requires only accepting an ID badge and locking the door behind the departing employee. More employees have quit IBM this year than have been laid off. And it is not hard to see why. The work conditions are poor and the benefit situation is deteriorating to the extent that for many workers it may not be worth sticking around. IBM’s pension plan dies next week, for example, to be replaced by a 401K plan. One supposed IBM employee who wrote to me this week claimed his pension was untouched, yet all it takes is a Google search to give public details of the pension conversion that has been in the works for more than a year and not at all a secret. A possible answer to this paradox is that the IBM employee in question is from Europe, where local laws make it difficult to fire employees for cause, much less strip them of their retirement benefits. Or maybe he’s lucky enough to participate in a second IBM pension plan that isn’t being converted, a plan the company doesn’t like to talk about because it implies that some IBMers are better then other IBMers. What’s most interesting about the IBM pension plan conversion is something that has not yet been announced — how much money the company will deposit in the new 401K plan to cover its obligations under the old pension plan to workers who have yet to retire. IBM’s pension plan has been dreadfully underfunded for years and next month we’ll get an idea how bad “dreadful” really is.”