Hundreds of IBM employees at their Research Triangle Park campus in the US, are volunteering their time last week to pack meals destined to feed the hungry in Haiti.
“We’re setting up assembly-line-type operations on-site to do this,” said Bob Greenberg, IBM’s top executive in North Carolina. “The goal is 100,000 meals.”
The 100,000 figure is no arbitrary number. It was picked to commemorate IBM’s 100th anniversary as a company which comes up this Thursday.
One hundred years later, IBM has more than 425,000 workers worldwide and last year’s revenue came in just under $100 billion – $99.9 billion. Among the company’s lengthy list of inventions and discoveries is the bar code, which was born in the Triangle.
The volunteer work for Stop Hunger Now, an international hunger relief organization based in the Triangle, is part of a worldwide “Celebration of Service” day for employees of the company once known as International Business Machines.
“It’s about the heritage of the company,” Greenberg said. “IBM has always looked at itself as playing a leadership role in doing things that make a difference for people around the world.”
Today IBM has about 10,000 workers in RTP; IBM doesn’t disclose how many employees it has locally or statewide. In recent years it has cut jobs in the Triangle and across the world, but without specifying the depth of those cuts and usually without even acknowledging that cuts were implemented.