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RIM Accuses Motorola of Blocking Job Offers
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday December 26, @11:48AM
from the if-i-can-have-you-nobody-will dept.
from the if-i-can-have-you-nobody-will dept.
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."
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T-Mobile has already made plans to use Android as well. Xconomy has a related interview with a member of the MIT team that won a $275,000 prize in the Android Developer Challenge by creating an application to automatically modify a phone's settings depending on its location, which they say "wouldn't even be possible on an iPhone." We've previously discussed the Challenge itself and some of the other winning apps.
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Motorola Moving to Android, Windows Mobile for Smartphones 136 comments
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Sorry Motorola (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Sorry Motorola (Score:5, Insightful)
If they really want to keep RIM from having their castoff engineers, just keep paying their salaries.
Can we get a +6 insightful?
I hope Motorola's lawyers get spanked so hard, the stockholders have hand prints on their butts.
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Re:Sorry Motorola (Score:5, Funny)
So, in punishment for preventing people from getting RIMjobs, you hope Motorola gets spanked? Aren't you just all in the butt.
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Re:Sorry Motorola (Score:5, Funny)
Sigh. It's bad enough that I can't get my girlfriend to give me a RIM job.
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Re:Sorry Motorola (Score:5, Funny)
Wal-Mart after a payday?
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Re:Sorry Motorola (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Sorry Motorola (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cheaper" is just another word for exploitation. I think you're the one displaying hatred -- why do you think that workers in other countries don't deserve the rights, benefits and salaries that you get? I got mine, fuck the rest!
How's this: companies can outsource to people from these "shithole countries" to reduce their costs as long as they also reduce their salaries and bonuses to what execs in that country get.
We as a society need to remember that corporations exist at the pleasure of society, and must not be allowed to destroy society to make a buck.
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Adam Smith is Outdated (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Move to CA (Score:5, Interesting)
If RIM had a division in California, they could hire anyone they wanted since California law essentially forbids non-compete clauses [wikipedia.org].
There was a recent Slashdot discussion about this when a Former IBM Exec Ordered To Stop Working For Apple [slashdot.org].
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Re:Move to CA (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Re:Move to CA (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-compete agreements are nothing short of employee abuse. When people are in need, they will sign just about anything to get that need taken care of. And when people want to earn money, these are exactly the people we don't want abused. Sometimes I think people honest enough to work for money are a rare breed of people indeed. There is no way you can honestly connect anti-competitive activities like that with free market. Such agreements need to be fair and balanced. For that arrangement to be fair, they should be paid for the duration of the contract whether they work or not.
In the end, it should be only fair that if an employee, especially one that was terminated for reasons that are NOT his fault, should be free of any restrictions to find new work and feed his family. The rights of individuals should trump the rights of companies each and every time. There used to be a thing called loyalty to the employee. You are probably too young to remember that ideal ever existing. Meanwhile, people are expected to be loyal to their employer regardless of how they are treated. And beyond all other reasoning, it is fair free market idealism to be able to choose not to work for someone who no longer offers "a good deal." You shop for better deals when you go shopping don't you?
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So... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting to see how the paragons of capitalism don't believe in the free market.
Motorola is no paragon of capitalism. They've been part of the military-industrial complex for a very long time.
As for responding to that clown on your last day, I tend to say something along the lines of "your approval is neither sought nor required" in such a situation.
-jcr
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
No one who is a paragon of "Capitalism" believes in "Free Market" regardless of the mouthings their PR tasked people make. The aim of any successful capitalist is to leverage yourself into the position of having all the capital and therefore controlling the market. The only time free market is observed as a "good thing" by true capitalists is when forcing their competitors into one gives the capitalist an advantage.
Economic theorists aside, only failed capitalists actually follow the theory of modern capitalism. In a way, it's much like Scientology in that respect. The initiates believe and the 'true believers' don't.
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fired vs quit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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An improvement? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the US is far behind being 2nd in education - most notably math - wouldn't being 2nd be an improvement?
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I'm shocked (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Pathetic. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Pathetic. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Northbound Brain Drain (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Northbound Brain Drain (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Northbound Brain Drain (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Re:out of work and a place to go (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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