The 100k salaries were the reasons they've outsourced the mainframe jobs to Argentina/Brazil.
They've also restructured their service delivery. They're doing what they can to control OT, but there's never enough people. They're trying to take a shot at pooling the overworked people in effort to try to get even more productivity out of them... it's rather crazy.
And yeah... the top employees still get worked hard. We've got some people that were suppose to be mid to high-grade in classification... which don't even know the products or the specific functions of the products they're dealing with.
I've heard the call-center half is dismal as well, from a friend.
IBM needs a union for it's FTEs and contractors. It's well-earned.
The contracting companies they've restricted to don't pay benefits (if they do, it's unsubsidized), and low-ball you. The budgets are dramatically slashed. Everything for a dime if they can help it. And they still want ~2000 employees across the board for the endeavor.