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Google, Apple Call Workers' Race & Gender Trade Secrets
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google, whose stated mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released. So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Materials. The five companies waged a successful 18-month FOIA battle with the Merc, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause 'commercial harm' by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. Law professor John Sims called the objections — the details of which the Dept. of Labor declined to share — 'absurd.' Many industry peers see the issue differently — Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Sanmina, and Sun agreed to allow the DOL to provide the requested info. 'There's nothing to hide, in our view,' said a spokesman for Intel. Some observers note it's not the first time Google has declined to put a number on its vaunted diversity — in earlier Congressional testimony, Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
First PSOT?
It's funny how one of you two is actually advocating grand social experiments.
It's, of course, the lefty, "dangitman". The one that accuses everyone of racism just for disagreeing with him. It's quite a popular tactic these days. After all, anyone disagreeing with a lefty clearly is not just of a different opinion, he must be a malevolent white capitalist pig.
Did you know that Hitler did that for about 12 years ? Accusing everyone and everything of racism. It was quite effective, too, espeically in getting other countries to adopt nazi policies. Of course that was before the large social experiment that "communism-lite" was started to include the holocaust. Not that executing the holocaust stopped Hitler's complaining about the "racism" that drove the war against the third reich ("communism-lite", what we call nazism, central control, but no total destruction of all markets (eg. 98% corporate tax instead of 100%, this is supposed to make a large difference))
Sorry for proving Godwin's law once again, btw.
The GP rightly pointed out that the GGP was talking about the wrong thing. It's important to know what you are talking about in any online discussion, otherwise everyone is just going in circles based on flawed assumptions. In other words, he was right and not just in the very technical sense (since the GGP clearly didn't know the difference). Not only that, it's clear from his post that he disagrees with affirmative action. That you have a particular bee in your bonnet about it doesn't excuse you from basic politeness and the need for exercising some reading comprehension.