Bunny people working at IBM's US chip plants face tough times.

IBM has confirmed reports that it will cut the pay of 3,500 assembly line workers at New York factories in East Fishkill and Poughkeepsie and another factory in Vermont. The workers will see their wages drop 10 per cent. Next year, shift employees will also lose out on 20 per cent premiums earned for working seven 12-hour days over the course of two weeks.

"We are making this change to improve our competitiveness and to ensure our pay practices and cost structure are competitive with other companies in our industry," an IBM spokesman told the Times Herald-Record .

News of the revamped pay structure was not received well by Alliance@IBM worker representatives, who pointed to IBM's stunning second quarter results issued last month.

"It is unacceptable that IBM slashes the pay of employees while IBM posts record profits and gives the executives double-digit pay raises," Lee Conrad, national coordinator of Alliance@IBM, told the paper. "IBM is able to do this because there is no union contract with employees that would negotiate such a drastic move as a pay cut." ®

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