Official: About 200 Dubuque employees affected by IBM layoff

DUBUQUE, Iowa (AP) - About 200 employees at the Dubuque IBM facility have been affected by the company's mass layoff, a leader of the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation said Wednesday.

Formal notice of layoff numbers has not yet been released, corporation president and CEO Rick Dickinson told the Telegraph Herald (http://bit.ly/1v6gKsr ). The layoffs in Dubuque are part of companywide reductions after IBM announced a $600 million workforce rebalancing in its fourth-quarter filing for 2014.

IBM North America spokesman Clint Roswell said in a prepared statement that the mass layoff is "not news" due to IBM's prior rebalancing announcement. He said the workforce reductions stem from the company's need to keep up with what other companies are doing.

"We need to remix and re-balance our (workforce) skills to keep up with the transformation in the industry that is going on," Roswell told the newspaper.

Lee Conrad is the national coordinator of Alliance@IBM, a union representing some IBM workers. He said job cuts would have a "big impact" in Dubuque and that layoffs across the U.S. have involved a broad cross-section of employees, including management.

Tom Coffas, IBM Dubuque's operations manager, didn't immediately return the newspaper's messages seeking comment.

IBM opened a global delivery center in Dubuque in 2009.

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Information from: Telegraph Herald, http://www.thonline.com