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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.
If RIM had a division in California, they could hire anyone they wanted since California law essentially forbids non-compete clauses.
There was a recent Slashdot discussion about this when a Former IBM Exec Ordered To Stop Working For Apple.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Interesting to see how the paragons of capitalism don't believe in the free market.
A company I once worked for once had a written policy that anyone who had ever worked as a direct employee could not be hired at a later date as a contractor (contracting is very lucrative in this industry). I always thought that sounded legally dubious but despite some efforts the media had no interest in pursuing it.
I eventually left that company to contract at a competitor. On my last day the director of engineering told me "You realize I can't approve of this." To which I did not reply, but always wished I had "I can not approve of the way you accept public subsidies and then exported my job to Ireland."
Can't wait until I get a little older so I can name names.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
I can't believe that anyone is even allowed to fire someone and then to prevent them from attempting to get another job anywhere they want.
One thing is when someone quits and there is a non-competition agreement, another thing is when someone is fired. Has anyone ever lost in court to a company that fired them when they started working for a competitor?
Everyone: if you are a 'permanent' employee, don't sign non-compete clauses, and if you do, at least modify them to say that if the company terminates your employment, then this clause does not apply.
Nice of Motorola, by the way, to attempt and stop people that they fired from trying to find employment, especially in this economy. If anything is going to hurt economy of the USA it's going to be millions of unemployed people.
You can't handle the truth.
For what? A dispute with Blackberry? Screw you Motorola, you've just lost my business forever.
Motorola is having a lot of troubled times lately. They might be laying off people, but I think they are probably playing the 'end of the year' game I see so many large companies do. Basically what they're trying to do is lay a bunch of people off to make the end of the year budget, but after the first of the year they'll hire a signicant percentage of those laid off back when new budgets kick in. I've seen this pattern a thousand times, especially in the auto industry. Of course, the people they'll hire back will be taking a pay cut.
That's why they want to keep RIM from hiring them off.
Kinda dirty.
My blog
Since the US is far behind being 2nd in education - most notably math - wouldn't being 2nd be an improvement?
Perhaps we should retain our high-value educated workforce by preventing them from leaving the country, to make sure they carry out their patriotic duty! Maybe we could set up some sort of iron... curtain... or such, to make sure they stay.
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.
Regardless, if you lay someone off and aren't paying their wages, you shouldn't have claim to block them from picking up somewhere else. Regardless of your self serving plans to hire them back at a pay cut a couple of months later.
However, Motorola wants to keep these people unemployed.
I see a massive and expensive class-action suit in the offing. Motorola shareholders should contact the company's general counsel and tell him in no uncertain terms to cut that shit out.
-jcr
I doubt the shareholders give a damn, in fact, it's the shareholder's general lack-of-interest in ethical behavior that has bought corporate America to its current state. All Motorola's management would have to say is, "by doing this we're going to raise the share price." That would be the end of the matter so far as the shareholders are concerned.
You're right though: it would certainly be in the employees best interests to get organized, talk to a good law firm, and apply for class-action status.
Does anyone know exactly how many people we're talking about here? The articles linked were rather skimpy on details (in fact the first two were links to the same text.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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"
I own two Motorola GSM telephones & judging by their performance I was under the impression Motorola had no engineers left.
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.
Damn right. Let's get rid of limited liability too while we're at it since that's another unnecessary government interference in the marketplace.