Dear Michelle and the Mercury News,
A lot of press has been spent on "pretexting" and the allegedly illegal acts that HP engaged in while violating board members, employees, and reporters' privacy. There has been hardly any coverage on the much more offensive and already determined as wholly unlawful acts that happened under Carly's watch. I have never heard her, or any HP managers or board members, publicly apologize for these atrocious violations of human rights. I believe that the slack enforcement and penalties for these grave infractions leads to a culture of corporate corruption and to boards like HP's inability to determine right from wrong.
http://www.nlrb.gov/...
While Carly once notoriously said that "no American has a god-given right to a job," the fact of the matter is that according to the Declaration of Independance and the UN Declaration of Human Rights
http://www.unhchr.ch/... we do have certain inalienable rights. One of which is to join together for mutual aid when our jobs and the continued strength of our community are put in jeapordy. In other words, god gives us the right to stand up for our jobs and right to make a decent living despite the pressures put on the job marketplace when we are forced to compete globally against scofflaw nations that ignore the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Standing up for our community is exactly what I did at the HP spinoff, Agilent Technologies, when I attempted to organize an independant employee run union to save local jobs making high tech equipment used in Dept of Defense applications at www.agilepeople.org. The Mercury News even did a story on my activities when I asked management to allow me to use the electronic bulletin board to post notices for meetings related to employee concerted activity. Agilent and HP are highly virtual workplaces and the lunchroom is no longer a common area for employees who are seperated by thousands of miles and often work on different continents.
I still blog regularly about labor issues, although I am not a big fan of the status quo labor orgs and am far more capitalist than socialist. Here is one of my stories about HP http://www.dailykos.com/... and one about Carly's book http://www.dailykos.com/....
Although my group Agilepeople is mostly dormant at Agilent (for background on what I mean by dormant, read the last few pages of Germinal by Emile Zola), considering the latest attacks from the Bush appointed National Labor Relations Board on individuals' rights to join together for mutual benefit, I expect it to become more active in the political debate. Note: Agilepeople and Agilent are still embroiled in a debate about trademark misuse, something I have believed was always just a pretext to pressure me into submission at work since Agilepeople and Agilent are not engaged in competing industries where a consumer might be mislead.
Best regards,
<my sig>
http://www.agilepeople.org
PS. I've posted the letter on my diary as well. Thanks for your time reading.
Disclaimer: Agilepeople is not endorsed or affiliated with Agilent Technologies, Inc.
Agilepeople Note: The above disclaimer was placed at the request of Agilent Technologies to prevent confusion over sponsorship. Agilent does not sponsor Agilepeople. The founder of www.agilepeople.org is an ex-employee of Agilent that resigned in protest over their outsourcing practices and the inability of the National Labor Relations Board to resolve labor disputes in a timely manner.