It looks to me as if IBM didn't want to lay these people off on their watch, instead they sold them to GF and added enough money for GF to lay off the ones who are superfluous while keeping IBM's hands clean. Reportedly similar things happened with the sale to Lenovo of their low-end server business which got stuffed with an excess of IBM employees who were not needed.
From the Press & Sun Bulletin (upstate New York) in January:
Yet IBM's situation in New York is unique. It's heavily invested in research in the state, and IBM vowed to keep its jobs in New York in a $1.5 billion sale last year to GlobalFoundries of its semiconductor manufacturing facilities in East Fishkill, Dutchess County, and in Vermont. A GlobalFoundries spokesman Monday confirmed that the company has offered jobs to all the IBM workers that are part of the sale, which is expected to close in the coming months.
And last week from the Albany Times Union:
The Dutchess County and Vermont fabs were recently acquired from IBM as part of a deal in which IBM agreed to pay $1.5 billion to GlobalFoundries and sign a 10-year supply agreement for next generation chips. The buyouts are not expected to dramatically impact the 3,500 employees at the company's $15 billion, Fab 8 chip factory in Malta. Rather, there is more of a hope that the buyouts will painlessly reduce the number of legacy IBM employees it has taken on since the IBM deal, according to sources who asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing their jobs.
And the next paragraph says "The majority work at the factories in Dutchess County and Vermont, less advanced sites than the Malta fab, which is arguably the most sophisticated and costly in the U.S." Well, you can argue anything but I find it hard to say that Malta is more advanced than Intel's most advanced fabs, or Samsung's huge Austin fab, both of which are already running 14nm in production. Like The Economist last week, journalists don't seem to bother talking to anyone who knows all this stuff off the top of their head.
