Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Cisco is dirty as heck wrt age discrimination. But as noted, they know how to play the numbers/percents to pass the low legal bar and still layoff all the 50+ they want. Could a well finance class action take them out since it's so blatant. Maybe, but a toss up at very best.

Now for an individual, remember you have to make more than the severance several years from now to even break even. Most decide it's not worth it and Cisco counts on that too.

@ag I did that song and dance too as an ex Senior Director, (left Cisco 3 years ago) but it’s all manipulated. If I say someone in my list has lower scores than someone else in the same team, same grade level, same role, etc, then nobody is going to call me on it. My VP never bothered to “challenge” me on any name I put there, and the first level managers were never consulted either. HR and Legal simply rubber stamped whatever I entered. One exception is when there was 0 women on the list and 7 men and they asked me to justify it from that perspective. It is really impossible for me who is better coder than the other or that level of granular details. Did 6 rounds of LRs and there was only one time question and push back from Legal, that’s it.

Maybe you can try, connect with those in similar situations, this time, hundreds or thousands over 50s, 60s impacted, so sue together maybe can get much more better package, previously IBM has successful case.

Most likely you will lose as I'm pretty sure Cisco will cover their an-s tightly.

I used to work in Employee Relations and to be impacted, a leader has to submit a business case to the legal team for approval. For each Job Role & Job Grade Group, they have to rank the employees on their team based on specific criteria.

Sample criteria...

• Technical Knowledge
• Ability to take the initiative to build relationships with influencers and decision-makers across the account
• Ability to solve basic problems using sound judgment, Cisco policy and procedure
• Interpersonal Communication - Engage and interact with others effectively to promote a productive working environment; adapting readily to accommodate individuals, groups, situations, styles and cultures
• Ability to identify priorities, set clear goals, and manage resources to achieve strong measurable results
• Execute - Delivering exceptional results by focusing efforts and enabling the team to succeed
• Ability to work as a team leader in assembling, driving, and facilitating cross function teams
• Industry & Sector Knowledge
• Ability to lead Sales efforts with Field Account Teams
• Sales Ability
• Effective Pipeline building
  etc, etc, etc

For each Role/Grade Group, there will be 5 criteria items. The rank for each category is 1 through 5. Max grade is 25. Depending on how many head count needs to be eliminated in that Job Role & Job Grade Group, the lowest 1 or 2 will be the employee eliminated.

The lawyers in ER have to review and approve or send back with instructions. It's been several years since I was on the team, so this part of the process may have changed. But the point is, they do NOT add employees to the impact list b/c of age or for performance. While this might seem like it's based on performance, it's not. The point is if we need to remove 2 out of 10 account managers, how do we decide which 2 to put on the LR list. I have seen one of the lawyers go back to a leader b/c an employee should have been put on a PIP based on the notes in the business case and they are not permitted to use an LR to get rid of a problem employee.

Hope that's helpful and I'm so sorry you're going through this. I've been on an LR list before and it's incredibly stressful. Good luck!

Also in my sixties. I wouldn’t waste your money … they have their basis covered legally.

I don't believe any individual can beat the powerhouse of Cisco's corporate attorneys. The terms & statements made in the company's severance package are already well protected in the company's favor.

They select just enough younger workers to keep it legal while remaining unethical.

@a5 I misspelled Lawyer a few times below. Sorry for that.

Probably a waste of your severance money, no matter how much your attorney overcharges you, Cisco will have even higher powered corporate attorneys who will beat you and your attorney into submission if you tried any type of legal action regarding age discrimination. You'd be dead and buried by the time you got any kind of settlement anyway, I can imagine it would drag on for years. Save your sanity, let it go, I'm sorry to hear this happened to you, but I would spend all time and energy on finding my next role, versus legal action against Cisco, as I am sure they have already greased the wheels for the relative handful of lawsuits they might see from this.

this is B$
Cisco must and has to hire local lowers depending on country or state
Corporate lawyers are for something else

If you have a solid case then you might stand a chance for a renegotiations (they will have to weight between paying a layer to go in court and pay you one or two ore salaries.

Most probably you will lose unless you anticipated this and prepared yourself with good evidences to support your case
The employment law allow any company in a civilized county to layoff employees based on workforce adjustments and restructuring. You can not argue with that if they decide your position must be eliminated

Probably a waste of your severance money, no matter how much your attorney overcharges you, Cisco will have even higher powered corporate attorneys who will beat you and your attorney into submission if you tried any type of legal action regarding age discrimination. You'd be dead and buried by the time you got any kind of settlement anyway, I can imagine it would drag on for years. Save your sanity, let it go, I'm sorry to hear this happened to you, but I would spend all time and energy on finding my next role, versus legal action against Cisco, as I am sure they have already greased the wheels for the relative handful of lawsuits they might see from this.

go for it. spend your severance having an attorney review your severance.

They will show u a spreadsheet to prove it isn’t age based. U will see age and band level. When it was me I saw my title band and age. I saw a younger guy under 40 same title and Lowe band also got laid off

Why? Unless you’re in a state that doesn’t have at will employment (there’s like 2?) then due to it being mass layoffs what case do you think you have? If you think it’s age discrimination you need to prove that they overwhelmingly got rid of older workers which based on what I’m seeing isn’t happening. It su-ks but there’s not much recourse in the U.S.