Toxic Employers
Toxic EmployersThis page could contain names and cities of employers who have poor management practices (especially poor software management practices). Has this been discussed before?
If it's done with sufficient dispassion, in the way that well-known publications "rate" corporations as best/worst places to work, with standard criteria for such ratings, then I don't see an exposure problem. Yeah, sure, you'll have outfits that won't tolerate any discussion of their internal practices in public, but still, as long as there's no rancor and the reviews are "professional" rather than "I hate them because" then rating high-tech outfits from an engineers perspective has (or can have) real value.
Here's some posting-guidelines that I'm proposing (we welcome your comments)...
McWane? has been reported by the media as an employer that causes lots of deaths and disability of its workers due to lack of respect for laws offering worker safety protection.
Another one reported recently was James Hardie who was a big producer of abestos products used in construction. In recent years when it became apparent they are going to incur a huge liability due to compensation claims for deaths and disability, they set up an underfunded company to handle claims and skip the country where they made their profits. Investors in the new host country had pushed stock prices high afterwards. Guess what country accepted the corporate fugitive?
Guess: micro$oft
Uh, Microsoft, despite having $50 billion in the tank and having bought numerous legislators, doesn't quite yet qualify as a "country". The country in questions is the Netherlands, which allowed Australian siding manufacturer James Hardie (which, as stated above, was looking at billions of dollars worth of asbestos-related liability claims) to relocate it's headquarters to the Netherlands. (Or perhaps a "new" company was created). At any rate, JH now disclaims any liability for asbestos-incorporating products from its "older" incarnation; and the Netherleands government so far has protected it from being sued.)
Ack, does that mean that that fancy Hardie Plank siding has asbestos in it (it's so hard you can ruin your tools on it, unless you get the right kind)? I had that stuff on the only house I ever owned and loved it, I'd hate to hear that it was bad for you, or a good product from a shady company.
It's not the siding (at least not the stuff you can get today); it's other products manufactured by Hardie Plank in the past. And of course, the whole asbestos debate is an interesting one--while many have died from abestos-related lung diseases; it's also true that many companies have been bankrupted by asbestos-related lawsuits--some of them stretching the bounds of common sense. (Currently, lawyers in the US are suing the insurance companies of former asbestos manufacturers--not to collect on insurance claims, but under the theory that by providing insurance policies to asbestos manufacturers, the insurance companies themselves are liable for "enabling" the asbestos manufacturers to conduct business--such liability is not limited to the value of insurance policies. Don't know if any such suits have been successful or not). At any rate, Hardie Plank did a bunch of legal maneuvering to shelter itself--it created a new corporation that was asbestos-free, and left the old corporate entity behind to get sued out of existence (which is exactly what happened). The old Hardie Plank was given a rather large sum (hundreds of millions, I think) to settle claims; but that was exhausted rather quickly.
Ironic point in case is that TheNetherlands have strict anti asbestos laws.
Of course, this is getting rather OffTopic for the page--Hardie Plank's conduct regarding asbestos has nothing to do with software engineering and software management practices.
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(last edited January 22, 2005)
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