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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.
D'uh, don't you know that right to work is a management right, not a worker right.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bah. Non-competes are bullshit lawyer scare tactics. It's very difficult to win these cases in court. If HP wants to persue this they're just Trolling for some money from GM because apparently they can keep good employees or make money any other way.
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)"
... So you think you should be able to sign a contract agreeing to certain terms, then blow them off at your descretion, basically doing what benefits you whenever you want and expecting them to also do what benefits you?
Self entitled fuck wad. Don't agree to the terms of employment if you don't mean to stand by them.
I don't think a breach of contract has been established. If it had, HP wouldn't need the depositions they're requesting.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That power was created by the union's solidarity. Your statements are ludicrously deceitful.
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?
They're not competing against HP, since their not providing their services as employees at a company to other potential clients of HP's. If GM were offering to provide IT to other companies, they'd be competing, but not so with the way this sounds like it went. Also, Texas is not as crazy Republican as you think. Yes, it's swung red the last few elections, but particularly in Austin it's very blue, and Texas is an employment at-will state, which should go a long ways towards protecting the employees in an action of this sort.
Where I imagine they may have run afoul is that they may have signed a contract to not recruit from within HP if they jumped ship (a fairly common clause to see in employment contracts), and considering 18 of them left at the same time, it's very possible that some of them are, in fact, in violation of such a clause, assuming it was in their contracts.
IANAL though, so I may very well be talking out of my ass.
What I would give for an edit button to correct the obvious typos...
since they're not providing their services*
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
Don't agree to the terms of employment if you don't mean to stand by them.
Such terms of employment are industry standard. For most of the rank and file, you sign or you don't work. Sure, these have been ruled null and void in court in this state or that but nobody wants to be the test case. It's an intimidation tactic.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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.
If they want to choose to not belong to the union, then the union shouldn't be required to represent them. That's where "right to work" laws are flawed.
Sadly, no, just profoundly ignorant...
So here's the chain of events and absolutely, "Right to Work" is an employers right not a workers. In a right to work state, all employees get the same benefits as union employees, without belonging to the union. At first it looks like gravy for the nonunion employees, until everyone has their hand out for union advantages without paying dues. The union goes tits up, and then there is no union and everyone works for Walmart wages and benefits. Employer wins, employees suck gas. "Right to Work" is an employers benefit, and any idiot who can't smell his own ass on the griddle needs to go back to school or get his nose fixed.
It takes power away from unions and gives it all to the corporations.
There I fixed it for you.
This kind of reminds me when back in the late '90s I went for a job at Telstra, which at the time was the only real provider of land lines to any house or business in the country. Their employment contract stated that I was not allowed to work for any customer of Telstra if I stopped working there for any reason for 12 months after finishing employment. Between 12 and 24 months I could only take a job with Telstra's permission.
I asked about the fact that pretty much every single business in the country was a customer of Telstra due to the fact that they owned all the phone lines. The HR person told me that was not their concern and if I wanted to work there I would need to agree to their terms.
I didn't sign that contract, and didn't work there. I never heard of them actually trying to enforce that contract, but they didn't care what it did the their employees.
"Dues" are not the problem. It's strikes: union employees' dues help support them during strikes, but non-union employees don't collect any money if they strike, and in effect are automatic "scabs" if a strike happens. It helps reduce the impact of strikes, which seriously reduces the power of unions.
There are some benefits to workers. Some unions have, historically, been essentially organized crime centers rife with corruption, and held effective monopolies against businesses that chose not to cooperate with them, or simply didn't have the funds to cover union dues. The teamster's unions are _infamous_ for their corruption, and the Screen Actor's Guild have any number of very strange policies that interfere with small film makers.
"Right to work" really means "right to freeload on the union." Aren't you right wingers supposed to be against freeloaders?
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Hey, hey, hey! Don't be making sense! This is Slashdot, you know?
If you tell your employees you're restructuring, expect them to look for new jobs.
So you think you should be able to sign a contract agreeing to certain terms, then blow them off at your descretion
I thought we were talking about former HP employees here, not Hostess/Airlines/insert-name-of-every-other-company-that-uses-regular-bankruptcies-to-wipe-out-their-contracts.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
It is not freeloading on the union. A worker who declines to join the union is not covered by the union contract. They may get paid the same if that is the contract the non-union employee chooses, but they do not get any of the union benefits. They don't get the union pension, strike fund, or health care. If the union goes on strike, they have to work. If they chose to strike, the company can fire them and hire someone else. If they feel they are being treated unfairly by the company, the union won't back their grievance (unless it's also happening to unionized workers).
Not as much as MBA's reward each other for that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
Right to work ... takes power away from unions and gives it to all workers.
An early and strong contender for the WTF of 2013 Award.
Nice work!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Technically speaking, the only constitutional protection against slavery is the bit about "cruel and unusual punishment", which is _very_ open to interpretation. The constitution still allows slavery as a punishment for a crime otherwise, and I don't think it really addresses contracts of indenture. Technically speaking, it could be made a criminal offense to violate an employment contract, punishable by being forced to fulfil the employment contract. The Supreme Court might decide that the punishment was cruel and/or unusual, but I'm not so sure they would.
The next question is how severe the punishment can be for then refusing to work. Based on what I've heard out of prisons and jails where there are currently people performing slave labour in the US, they can, at the very least, put the non-compliant slave into solitary confinement and restrict them to a bread and water diet. Exactly how legal beatings are is up in the air. Prison guards are certainly allowed to use "compliance blows", pepper spray, physical restraint, etc. on prisoners who refuse to go where they're told or do what they're told. I'm not sure exactly where the courts stand on those techniques when the "where" is a workstation and the "what" is some form of labour.
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.
Amendment 13 - the one that banned slavery:
1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So according to the constitution slavery is actually explicitly permitted as punishment for a crime. And I don't think the legal status of indentured servitude ever actually changed, not by constitutional amendment anyway - it's just that more traditional employment is cheaper if the labor pool doesn't have the option of just starting their own farm instead.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.