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HP Cuts Workforce By 5%, Looks To Probe GM Hires
dcblogs writes "Hewlett-Packard's reduced its workforce last year by 17,800 employees, more than half-way to its restructuring goal. But some key IT workers left unexpectedly and have taken jobs with HP customer, General Motors. GM, which outsourced its IT for years to EDS, announced plans last year to in-source its IT. HP acquired EDS in 2008. On Nov. 30, 18 employees of HP's Global Information Technology Organization in Austin 'resigned en masse and without notice' and 'immediately began working for General Motors in Austin in GM's new IT Innovation Center,' according to court papers. HP is asking the court for approval to depose some of the exiting workers to determine whether employment contracts were violated. 'HP expects that additional resignations will follow as the departed employees will likely seek to build out their teams by filling in with subordinate employees from HP,' the company said."
It used to be 'treat employees with respect'. Now it seems to be more like 'be such a crappy place to work that people leave, then sue them...'
..."you can't leave unless WE fire you". Nice way to build loyalty!
Employees don't want to work for HP anymore, and HP gets closer to its "restructuring targets" without even having to fire them!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If I were a recruiter I'd look at HP as a wonderful place, bountiful and full of talent ready and in fact desperate to be harvested.
I know three of the people who left and I had heard of their terrible work environment for months once HP got hold of EDS. GM offered several a good deal to come over since they were all experienced with their systems, gave them significant pay raises, decent benefits and control of their own group. Who wouldn't leave?
HP is like IBM, they have a reputation of being a company that decades ago you wanted to work for. However like IBM their present reputation is that of a company that you only work for because you /have/ to work for them. Nobody wants to work for HP anymore, and they bloody well know it.
They are wholly dependent upon the bad economy for keeping employees and the moment the economy perks up they know damn well they are looking at a mass exodus of talent. This is a shot across the bow aimed at internal employees and doesn't have a damn thing to do with GM.
HP will spend millions more in expenses for lawsuits to send the message across than it ever would have to spent to retain these same employee by treating them right to begin with and consider the money well spent. A telling sign on these things are really viewed is how the accounting is listed on taxes and investor statements for the government.
Obviously it doesn't apply here.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
HPers, you have been shafted for the last 10 years. Time to get your resume ready and then quit for those who know how to do things. I hear Google, FB needs qualified Unix personell. Refresh your basic computer science theory and they will gladly hire you.
Just go to their websites and apply today ? Why do you waste time at a terminally sick corporation run by clueless MBAs ? Join real engineers, join Google !
These guys actually did it, told their bosses to f' themselves and went to go work somewhere else. +1 to humane IT environments, too many people have landed in whipped IT departments with shitty management who doesn't understand anything about IT, running it, or creating in it. If we're gonna sit behind a computer all day, might as well wear jeans and sneakers right?
Fiona destroyed HP. She turned the company from an engineering and design heavyweight into a commodity hardware business.
Short term profits resulted and after a year or two and the death of the real engineering progress was complete they began the long slow slide into irrelevance. The fact is we live in a complex world economy where you innovate or die. HP stopped innovating because it was "too expensive". Yes they wiped out all those expensive engineering salaries and boosted short term profit. And several years down the line when HP hasn't innovated anything you see a huge dramatic loss of profit.
You don't want to be in the commodity business, there's no profit in it. You want to be in the innovative cutting edge area where you can charge premium profit margins (ask apple). Being in that space costs money and lots of engineering resources. HP surrendered that market under the leadership of Fiona. HP's board of directors has been a collection of has-been CEO's that are riding the company into oblivion since before Fiona was hired. The Hewlett and Packard families were railroaded a long time ago, the only ones left are trying to milk the cash out of HP before it deteriorates into nothingness.
HP could have owned the smartphone market and dozens of other highly profitable sectors had they spent the money on engineering and development instead of deciding that they only wanted to do printers and computers.
They probably consider it a violation of their non-compete clause, since they left HP and immediately went to work for a former customer doing exactly what they were at HP. In otherwords, competing against HP. Since Texas is a screwed up Republican state, the workers likely have zero protection from this and are likely screwed.
What language was this originally written in?
The supreme court of Canada recently made a very radical decision I think regarding a bunch of guys who left a big bank here. Basically the court decision was that people can work wherever the hell they want for whomever will have them. The court seems to have completely tossed out the idea of an employee having any kind of non-compete as violating their right to work. But the decision went much further. It wasn't just about working for the competition or even stealing former employees but the court even said stealing old clients and their phone numbers was fine as long as it was reasonable that the employee could have remembered that data. So if an employee even wrote some names and numbers down it was fine as long as it was a reasonably memorable list. In the particular case the employees were dealing with a fairly small elite clientele so the bank really lost big time. Again the court said that you can't make an employee forget stuff.
This of course is a Canadian supreme court case but I went to a lecture given by a supreme court justice who said that most supreme courts look to other supreme courts around the world that are based upon the English system of law as the same sort of cases tend to crop up in the various courts at similar times. So without a doubt the US courts will at least glance at this outstanding decision supporting workers rights.
To me the answer is quite simple. What is HP doing for any employee the day they leave? Absolutely nothing. So what should an ex-HP employee do for HP after they leave? Absolutely nothing. As for any contract. You could sign a slavery contract but any court would toss it out in a second. The key to a contract is that there is an exchange. If I promise to give you a gift of $1,000,000 tomorrow for absolutely nothing on your part you can't actually sue me when I don't deliver. There has to be an exchange. When the employee stops paying the employee the contract has ended regardless of what extra bits HP might wish for. I suspect that this will be going to the supreme court in the US as people will think that it is "unfair" for the employees to be so disloyal and some lower courts might be so foolish as to fall for this argument. But the law is not about fairness. It is about rules; and contract law is fairly old and boring that way. So it will be interesting to see how this all turns out. Personally I was surprised to see our supreme court side so thoroughly with the little guy when the other side was one of the biggest banks in Canada.
Did they offer another VSI? Back in 2005 this Voluntary Severance Initiative (VSI) notice with enhanced severance was offered to several employees.
It's no secret, see: http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050430/news_1b30hp.html and http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050505/news_1b5hp.html.
For the employee offered VSI, the gamble was clear: take VSI and voluntarily leave the company with enhanced severance pay, or decline VSI but take a risk at whether or not the employee would get a workforce reduction (WFR) notice later on, with less severance pay.
Well, I took VSI back in 2005 because they offered it to me, and before I accepted it I asked the manager I was reporting to and even a section manager about it, no one could tell me for sure whether or not I was going to be WFR'd if I declined VSI. The best I got was "I would hate to lose someone like you", but no nothing definite such as "you can decline VSI, you are safe from WFR". A year or so after I had VSI'd from HP, I heard unofficial rumors that those without college degrees were part of the total employees that were VSI'd regardless of their length of service at HP. Well guess what? I have some college experience but no degree, I guess I made the right choice in the short term, since I might have very well have been WFR'd at some point after VSI. I don't know for sure, of course, but that's the conclusion I can draw.
What about returning as a contractor? That's possible. If I recall correctly, it is a six month or one year waiting period before a VSI'd (or WFR'd) employee can return back as a contractor. But even returning back to HP as an External Temporary Worker (ETW) on a contract assignment from an agency is a maximum of 24 months, after which one must take a minimum of 100 days off. What that means: the employee effectively loses their job after the 24 months maximum and must reapply for another contract assignment after the 100 days is up (compare/contrast vs. Qualcomm where I am aware that the contract employee must remain offsite for 90 days after their maximum term, but in many cases they can return right back to their job after that).
Or, did they just do a WFR this time around? With a WFR there is no voluntary severance option, they are just notified they are part of a workforce reduction.
When my company outsourced, our top IT people were rebadged as HP and remained onsite. They are still valuable employees who know the company intimately, and should we ever insource, they'd be the first employees we'd rehire. This isn't rocket science.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
HP's employment contract is typical boilderplate "Employment at Will" means they can terminate you at Will, you can leave at Will. just don't take any trade secrets (in IT outsourcing? Really)
They're just trying to throw fear into the next batch thinking about leaving.
You can bet serious money that GM had its lawyers look very carefully at the employee contracts, at least for the 18 leaders (or the most important of them). Not to say they might not lose in court, but I am sure that GM thinks the contracts allow for this.
Note that GM is (was) a client of HP. This is an unusual thing to do a client; it basically guarantees that HP will never get GM's IT business again. I would not be at all surprised if GM has some major issues with EDS; they may even have a suit planned. (I.e., I bet that this particular bridge has already been burned, so HP has no reason not to get what they can out of the ruins of the relationship.)
When there's no job security, employees will start looking for alternatives.
What language was this originally written in?
I think it's what you get when you babelfish English into Neanderthal and then back to English.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Recruitment seems to be the issue here. FTFA: "In the case of the two IT managers, HP alleges that their hiring agreements included a clause that prevents them from soliciting HP employees."
Genetically Modified?
Getting probed?
I thought my hiring process was rough.
No brain, no pain.
As IT professionals, we are one of the few sectors this economy with any job portability. After years of dealing with the specter of outsourcing hanging over our heads, I say kudos to the ex-HP, current GM employees. If companies respect IT talent and want to keep it, the ought to start treating IT employees better.
I think we have all, at one point or another during our careers, thought something along the lines of... "If I leave this place, they are going to be in trouble and have a real hard time replacing me." or "This place sucks, I am going to go somewhere else where I will get better (pay, benefits, respect, etc)"
Orignally, they started by making world-standard test equipment. Now, that would be Fluke. Later, they provided high-quality 'mini' computer-and-terminal systems to medium-size businesses. That business is long-gone. They used to make high-quality desktop computer systems. Now, they still 'sell' computers but they don't seem to have much to do with the hardware and software but just put the H-P badge on plastic junk. Asus is probably the rough equivalent, now, of what HP used to be in computers. In printers, HP invented 'inkjet' printers but have long-since lost their lead to Canon and Epson. They invented the first 'laserjet' relatively inexpensive desktop laser printer but have lost most of that business as well. So what exactly is HP's business these days? Calculators? I guess they still sell a couple models of those but their products were designed decades ago and are probably pretty much legacy business now. As a company, HP is the victim of years of horrible mismanagement at the top. Even if we assume that they have somehow, against all odds, managed to develop some actual management ability from within, can a company as broken as HP ever recover? The workers jumping to GM are just carving out a little piece of what's left of HP for themselves to preserve their jobs. Can anyone blame them?
LSD is a psychoactive narcotic and should not be ingested in large quantities.
HP Managers should refrain from their LSD addictions before making Corporate decisions.
QED
what was GM to do hire new to GM people and not the people who have been on site under the old outsource? People who know the site and how stuff works?
this just part of why outsourcing sucks and some of the pit falls others are people being bounced site to site / client to client some times with out your control / input.
Not having full control over who makes it on site.
The paper work gap / time off gap that happens with when the same people stay on site but the outsource companie changes.
against your own company, and laugh at the SEC and CFTC and the New York State Insurance Commission and any other regulatory body, because they are prohibited by law from doing anything even remotely related to Credit Default Swaps.
then when your company tanks, cash in your CDS contracts and move to the caymans
if every company on the entire planet requires you to sign some kind of oppressive contract before you can work there, then we might as well repeal the 14th amendment.
i imagine that some douchebags in the Old South had 'contracts' with their slaves, making them mark an 'X' on their own bill of sale and other such myopic horse shit.
they never 'got it' until Sherman came down and burned their fucking empire into the ground but whatever.
what was GM to do hire new to GM people and not the people who have been on site under the old outsource? People who know the site and how stuff works?
Yep. That's part of the price to pay when it comes from doing a big transition like this, and something that the people managing the transition should have accounted for when it came to calculating time frames and costs.
this just part of why outsourcing sucks and some of the pit falls others are people being bounced site to site / client to client some times with out your control / input.
Not having full control over who makes it on site.
Totally agree. But the fault for that lies with GM, who were the ones who chose to out-source then in-source, not with HP.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
So HP lays off almost 20,000 people.
They have several employees that have worked to do outsourced work for GM.
GM announces they will no longer outsource the work that these employees were doing. They will do it in-house now.
HP Employees conclude from this, that they will soon lose their jobs, as the contract will get cut.
They smartly apply at the very place they've been doing work for... and easily get the jobs because they clearly know how to do them.
Nothing in violation of their contracts had to happen here. Those employees jobs were in clear jeopardy. If HP doesn't want their employees looking for work, they need to make them feel secure. This was obviously not happening.
Inevitable when a company grows too big for its own good, when productivity takes a back seat to showing off how much money you have.
Bought EDS. ROFLMAO
This is the new HP: rather than do smart things to create a great business, it sues others for the negative results of its own stupidity. HP stupidly paid $11 bln (which Whitman approved when she was a board member) for Automation and, rather than acknowledging executive management and the board of directors was stupid and lazy and try to make the best of a grossly overpriced acquisition, HP sues the former executives for Automation for accounting fraud. I would think that if a company is going to spend $11 bln, it would do a better job of vetting the financials of the company it is acquiring, vetting out actual sales, accounts receivables, vendor financing agreements, and current sales pipeline.
Now this: HP is such a bad company to work for that 18 people resign, en masse, without giving notice. Individual employees typically don't quit companies in such a fashion unless they are extremely unhappy where they are working, nevermind a situation where 18 employees quit simultaneously.
Texas is an at-will employment (workers can quit at any time, companies can fire workers at any time) state and I seriously doubt HP will be able to enjoin these workers from working for GM. They're probaby suing for interference, which will be difficult to prove (hiring managers would have to admit to actively soliciting workers while workers may have solicited coworkers) and difficult to enforce (would HP be willing to sue a customer?)
There will likely be more of these ugly stories coming out from HP as long as Whitman is the chief executive. Rather than having a genuine strategy on how to fix the company and executing on it (and no, mass layoffs are *not* a strategy, it's something even a retarded monkey would know how to do), she's looking to assign blame for everything that goes wrong with the company due to terrible past management decisions and will go wrong with the company in the future due to her lack of a real plan.
but progressive income taxes and food stamps punish success and reward failure.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
If you tell your employees you're restructuring, expect them to look for new jobs.
Again, this bozo MBA continues to destroy HP. Between the likes of fiorina, apotheker, hurd, and dunn, HP is quickly being destroyed.
What kills me is that it took decades for Hewlett and Packard to build the company up, but all of the executives are hard at work to get their money out, and are taking less than 2 decades to destroy it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
notices supersede an implicit non-compete clause? Basically they might argue that the company had put them on notice that they all should look for other opportunities, so maybe an implied non-compete gets thrown out the window? I have no idea what the legal precedents are.
I'm surprised no one, not even the article, mentioned that EDS was at one time owned by GM, purchased in 1984 and then spun off in 1996 as an independent company. After it was sold, GM contracted a lot of work from EDS for IT services. While 1996 was quite a long time ago, I'd imagine that the IT work that HP did for GM through EDS was very intimate given the nature of the relationship between the companies.
How come HP has to ask the court to determine whether employment contracts were violated?
HP forgot to hire people to read the employment contracts, or what?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
what was GM to do hire new to GM people and not the people who have been on site under the old outsource?
It was GM's decision to "fire" HP - GM voluntarily signed the no-poaching agreement with EDS/HP.
I think such things suck for the people, I've been in the middle of them before myself when I didn't know any better. But if GM signed the contract with HP, its their responsibility to honor the terms or face the consequences.
What will probably happen is that a bunch of lawyers will get some work to do for a few months and in the end GM will end up paying some sort of penalty or poaching fee to HP and the actual people will go on about their business as if none if it happened.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
In effect, GM shed the cost of Account Executives from the cost of their IT and development shops.
My experience at EDS was not all too bad, except for Account Execs and they way they carried out business, often stealing money from developers who earned overtime pay with a client's blessing... and being rewarded with all sorts of bonuses and perks.
I had a couple of bad managers, as well.... but many good ones, too.
I have heard of a similar situation here in Michigan - developers switched over to GM, working for HP on Friday, and GM on Monday. What were they supposed to do? Their managers told them to do it.
GM had to reduce costs, and perhaps the take HP should get out of all of this is that we developers are NOT what is sucking the profits out of IT contracts - the middlemen are. Streamline the layers of management (more than they have in the past) and eliminate account executives (at least every one who has had client complaints lodged, since their only job is to keep those customers happy, and most fail in this)
Get rid of the "Good old boy" network, because it is the last vestige of the mildly corrupt system of business that greased over-priced contracts in the 70s and 80s.
The employer can not keep you from working for a competitor once the employer/employee relationship is terminated.
The best that they can do from their perspective is pay you your salary for the period of time up to the length of the non-compete period, and after they quit paying you, then you can work for whoever the hell you want.
This applies in most jurisdictions, due to an 8th district appellate court decision involving my cousin; the case law is rather easy to look up. It boils down to any contract being unenforcible unless consideration is involved.
In other jurisdictions, such as California, they are simply void.
In all jurisdictions, a CNC requires that there be a legitimate business involved; in the case under discussion, there's no legitimate interest, given that HP could not expect to keep GM's business after GM's announcement of intention to insource.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Every contract with an anti-poaching clause which I have ever signed requires you to agree to not pach employees after leaving the company. It is rather common for groups of employees to get together on the idea of leaving prior to actually leaving, which means that they are still within the letter of the anti-poaching clause when they decide to leave en masse, as in the described case.
Unless HP can prove recruitment by someone after they had signed an employment agreement with GM (unlikely in an en masse walk out like this), it's unlikely that they are going to have a legal leg to stand on, any more than Apple did when they went after Google for hiring away one of their executives.
This is just a harrassment lawsuit.
If I am correct then this is HP CDS. The story really doesn't surprise me as CDS management really is incredibly incompetent. They know nothing about employee loyalty.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
Years ago, they split the company in two. The part that did the original work in electronics that started in the 1930s became Agilent. The part that specializes in selling printer ink kept the HP brand.
i was really feeling sorry for new employees at general motors.
getting probed by meg whitman not the most pleasant thought i've had so far this year....
You can't just come out and say, "I'm an Apple fanboi who never misses any opportunity to demonstrate that I am one", can you?
pwnt.
"HAY GUYZ, we will keep people as employees and rent them to you AT MAD PROFIT" is not a viable business model.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Unless the outsourcing company is EDS. They were so greedy getting contracts, they often didn't bother doing proper research and got themselves in contracts where no documentation existed and as a result of that, they couldn't reduce or split up the team they took over. The team didn't really bother documenting anything and HP couldn't get anything changed, because there was no clear definition of the service in the contract. The end result is that all the capable people in the team left because they couldn't do their job any more under the new regime and the customer is left with a dead IT system and nobody around that can fix it. This has happened on numerous occasions and it is one of the reasons why HP/EDS are in such dire straits at the moment. HP decides to solve their financial problem by firing a lot of of their staff and reducing payments, bonuses and such. Guess what the last few capable people in HP do....
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Hi Tim. How's the new iCrap going ?
If a company shows employees no loyalty then the employees should show the company less than no loyalty.
In Texas, employees can quit at any time and for any reason. I'd hope HP could even fall afoul of "malicious use of process" laws if they pursue any action against their ex-employees.
That said, there are reasonable chances that GM signed a contract not to steal HP employees when they outsourced IT services to HP. I'd expect HP lawyers want to depose ex-HP employees to find out if their contract with GM was violated. I'd hope they fail to achieve even that much, but that's less problematic than going after ex-employees.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Internally management has been talking about it for a couple of years. Before I was "rightsized" a few years ago on that account GM was already making their plans. This is nothing new to the people in the know. It is a sign and should be seen by others as such. nuff said.
Hi Tim. How's the new iCrap going ?
iNsanely great.
When is a startup not a startup?
Looks like HP is probing just about everyone, including themselves. Vale.
Worker Rights and Union Rights are not the same.
Worker Rights benefit the worker who labor 40 hours for her paycheck.
Union Rights benefit the executive who stand on the backs/labor of the worker and produce nothing.
Union Rights are the same as Corporate Rights but with a different set of executives.
By the way, Michigan, one such state that you obliquely referred to, was the state where unionism in the USA started. No small and unimportant state.
Seems like whenever HP screws up royally (Like the Autonomy issue) they suit someone else because apparently HP is never wrong so everyone else is screwing them over! Sounds a lot like my ex-wife :-)
were those EDS employees, who might, just might, have once been GM employees who stayed at the desks and became EDS workers?
or were those slaves bought off the boat and chained so they wouldn't cause trouble?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
In HP's home stare of California a lawsuit like this would be laughed out of court. An important contributor to the success of Silicon Valley is the ease in which employees can transfer to start ups without fear of legal retribution. Shame on HP. I suggest sending an email to HP's CEO, Meg Whitman since she may still harbor political ambitions after she loses this job.
HP has laid off over 17000 employees with the goal of doubling that soon. That's what you call "en masse".
The departure of 18 individuals among such massive layoffs is what statisticians like to call "nothing at all".
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Platt had a mechanical engineering degree and an MBA. Not really what you need for HP to understand its electronics-based product lines on a really deep level. Bill and Dave failed to put their next CEO through some real nitty-gritty R&D, production engineering, research, salesguy experience. You must be able to design, solder, test and qualify and electronic circuit if you want to be a proper HP CEO, in my opinion. You must be able to analyze, troubleshoot and rectify an major quality crisis in a major product line. By yourself looking through a microscope and discussing technical issues with the developers of that semiconductor. By doing some reliability experiments yourself. If you think that can all can be "skipped" and "replaced by people skills to direct your technical experts", then you have eaten the poisonous MBA theory. All great companies are run by people who have done some real work themselves. People who have worked "against nature" instead of "against employees". You can nicely talk to engineers, but nature won't argue with you when you burn a chip. It will be dead without negotiation possible.
Instead, Platt got fast-tracked for management from day one. (At least that is what I can see from the public bios)
As a former HP employee, I only remember some really clueless and uninspiring messages from Platt. He had some clue about the HP Way, but not a deep one. If he had deep clues, he would not have disposed of the family silver (PA RISC, compiler development, Selling Oracle instead of Allbase/SQL). He would have not though it proper to "just let some cheap Indians develop the HPUX/PA RISC C Compiler". He would have known which technologies actually "contribute" and are therefore of strategic importance.
Platt had a mechanical engineering degree. Not really what you need for HP to understand its electronics-based product lines on a really deep level. Bill and Dave failed to put their next CEO through some real nitty-gritty R&D, production engineering, research, salesguy experience. You must be able to design, solder, test and qualify and electronic circuit if you want to be a proper HP CEO, in my opinion. You must be able to analyze, troubleshoot and rectify an major quality crisis in a major product line. By yourself looking through a microscope and discussing technical issues with the developers of that semiconductor. By doing some reliability experiments yourself. If you think that can all can be "skipped" and "replaced by people skills to direct your technical experts", then you have eaten the poisonous MBA theory. All great companies are run by people who have done some real work themselves. People who have worked "against nature" instead of "against employees". You can nicely talk to engineers, but nature won't argue with you when you burn a chip. It will be dead without negotiation possible.
Instead, Platt got fast-tracked for management from day one. (At least that is what I can see from the public bios)
As a former HP employee, I only remember some really clueless and uninspiring messages from Platt. He had some clue about the HP Way, but not a deep one. If he had deep clues, he would not have disposed of the family silver (PA RISC, compiler development, Selling Oracle instead of Allbase/SQL). He would have not though it proper to "just let some cheap Indians develop the HPUX/PA RISC C Compiler". He would have known which technologies actually "contribute" and are therefore of strategic importance.
No, to conclude, he was an absolutely clueless fuck.
just like the bailed out Goldman on it's CDS related to AIG
what was GM to do hire new to GM people and not the people who have been on site under the old outsource? People who know the site and how stuff works?
this just part of why outsourcing sucks and some of the pit falls others are people being bounced site to site / client to client some times with out your control / input.
Not having full control over who makes it on site.
The paper work gap / time off gap that happens with when the same people stay on site but the outsource companie changes.
No, GM should have talked to HP and offered to take over the contracts of the team members currently working on this job. Doing it the way they did is slimy, and now the employees, who certainly appear to be guilty of violating the terms of their contracts, and in two cases of encouraging others to violate their contracts, are suffering. The employees are guilty and suffering for it, but GM blew an opportunity to be the ethical, respectable party in this, and took the low, or just easier, road.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
I am familiar with a company that outsourced their IT to HP and and hired the former IT staff. HP now treats those employees terribly. The only ones that seem to make out are the HP management (which is Bloated to say the least). When given a chance, people flock to get out of HP and are immediately treated terribly when they give their notice. The 18 people that HP is so desperate to go after were probably former GM employees that were forced to work for EDS/HP which was owned by GM until 1996. So out of about 350,00 HP employees, any of which could be laid off as part of HP's active work force reduction, HP will send an Army of Lawyers to make sure that these 18 suffer because they didn't stay at their post long enough for HP to fire them.