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RIM Accuses Motorola of Blocking Job Offers
theodp writes "Taking a page from the insanely-jealous-husband-playbook, Motorola management has adopted an if-I-can't-have-you-nobody-can stance on its fired employees, reportedly blocking RIM from offering jobs to laid-off workers. In a complaint filed in state court, Motorola is charged with improperly trying to expand a previous agreement 'to prevent the RIM entities from hiring any Motorola employees, including the thousands of employees Motorola has already fired or will fire.' Through its Compete America membership, Motorola has repeatedly warned Congress that failing to accommodate the lobbying group members' 'principled' demand for timely access to talent would not be in the United States' economic interest and would make the US second-rate in education and basic research."
But if you aren't playing with your toys, you have to share with the other children.
If they really want to keep RIM from having their castoff engineers, just keep paying their salaries.
Since the US is far behind being 2nd in education - most notably math - wouldn't being 2nd be an improvement?
As much as people like to bitch about outsourcing here in the USA, why should we allow our talent to migrate to Canada?
Allow your talent to migrate? Jesus fucking christ, is this the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA or SOVIET RUSSIA?
A FREE COUNTRY does not lock in its citizens and prevent them from leaving. Are you building the new Berlin wall?
Is this the USA? The FREE WORLD? Or did someone cut off your country's balls?
Doesn't allowing High Tech workers to work for foreign companies support Microsoft's contention that we need to increase H1Bs because the talent isn't here anymore?
If you are FIRING the talent, you can't claim that the talent isn't there anymore.
In case you didn't know, RIM has offices all over the world. RIM employs quite a few people in the USA.
WTF?
Company A laid off people...
People have no jobs....
Company B said, "hey you know we could use you..."
Company A says, "oh no you can't work there because well we don't want you to kill our business completely..."
GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK!!!! Yes I am screaming here, but this patriotic act is completely misguided. The issue here is that people are laid off and they would like to put food and bread on their table. And if they need to travel to Canada so be it! This is what competition and capitalism is all about.
Want to know what might result?
Instead of hiring out of work American workers they will hire out of work workers from some other place. And then what spot is America? With more unemployed bitter people who say the government gets in their way!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Motorola is no paragon of capitalism. They've been part of the military-industrial complex for a very long time.
Yes, and China suckered them out of a lot of money and technology too. Motorola is only reaping what they've sown, so far as I'm concerned.
I tend to say something along the lines of "your approval is neither sought nor required" in such a situation.
Back in the mid-eighties I worked for an outfit that really tried to nail their developers to the wall, contract-wise. When I was hired, I was given a bunch of papers to sign ... one of them was this completely outrageous non-complete/non-disclosure agreement. It said (among other bits of obnoxiousness) that any software I wrote, any products I developed, whether relevant to my work or the industry, or not, even if done on my own time, for a period of five years after I left employment with the company was the property of the company. In addition, I was not allowed to work as a software developer during the same period. I mean, what the Hell? Was I supposed to just switch careers after leaving the place? Anyway, that incredible document went on for some time in the same vein ... I'm not even a lawyer but I could see the ridiculousness of it. Probably it wouldn't have been enforceable, but I had an attorney look it over. He didn't even finish reading it before he said, "You'd be nuts to sign this." So I didn't.
... was that stupid NC/NDA. Sneaky. But I told her I had no intention of signing it.
Well, I got hired anyway, and apparently nobody noticed that I hadn't signed the thing because a few months later the HR guy's secretary comes by with a bunch of papers on a clipboard, and asked me to sign it at the bottom. "Just routine", she said, or words to that effect. I immediately noticed that there were several rather innocuous sheets on top, and underneath
She went away, and back comes the HR guy himself. He was nice enough, but he tried to convince me that I had to sign it, "Why is it a problem? Everyone else here signed it." I told him that if my continued employment was dependent upon that "agreement", that I would happily clean out my desk right then and there. He went away, and that was the last I heard of it. I was serious, however, and if they'd pushed the matter I'd have walked out right then and there. As it happens, I work in an "at-will" State: sometimes that sucks, but sometimes it works in your favor.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
So how do you prevent someone from quitting or being poached and taking their technical or company specific knowledge to a competitor?
Pay the person what they are worth to your company!
cat sig >
She went away, and back comes the HR guy himself. He was nice enough, but he tried to convince me that I had to sign it, "Why is it a problem? Everyone else here signed it." I told him that if my continued employment was dependent upon that "agreement", that I would happily clean out my desk right then and there. He went away, and that was the last I heard of it. I was serious, however, and if they'd pushed the matter I'd have walked out right then and there. As it happens, I work in an "at-will" State: sometimes that sucks, but sometimes it works in your favor.
Thank you. It's tough to do the right thing sometimes, and you took a big risk. Your integrity helps all of us, and our entire industry.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
From a more practical perspective, we are already running a huge trade deficit. Some economists say this doesn't matter, but others say it risks nasty bubbles and major instability. If the US continues being the dumping ground for cheap products and services, this bubble risk grows as the trade imbalances create credit bubbles. Economists tend to under-estimate bubbles, perhaps because they are overconfident in their ability to "fix" them, so I will take the view of the "bubblers".
Further, many times those countries are cheaper because they lack regulations that keep us safe and healthy. They may have 60-hour work-weeks in asbestos-festered offices or work with dangerous chemicals and pollution in factories. It's unfair if we have to compete with regulations that they don't have.
Further, it would push us to all be Walmart greeters and shoes salesmen as "non-face" jobs shift to where the labor is cheaper. Diversity in careers would diminish, and lack of diversity is also a bubble-risk.
The "open borders" labor thinking just has too many unsolved problems. Adam Smith's equations need a rewrite to reflect risk and uncertainty better. Maximizing an economy based over-simplistic models is partly what got us into the current mess.
Table-ized A.I.