Dear Sir,
I’d like to draw your attention to something that is happening in the corporate world, especially in the world of technology. It’s called blacklisting. Here is my (long) story as I best can tell it:
Late 2005 Sun Microsystems bought the company where I was employed as a senior computer hardware designer/engineer. Shortly afterwards, it was announced we would be redesigning our old and quickly aging product. This was welcome news to all of us as it had been more than six or seven years since we had last done a full design cycle for this product and it was getting to be about time for us to go and do it again.
Soon after that announcement, Chuck (my first level manger) and Cliff (second level manager) did some kind of a manpower report and sent it in to their superiors. It was determined by these two managers that even though we had ten hardware engineers (surrendering a couple to sustain the old product) available for doing the new product, they would still be needing at least three more engineers to complete their manpower estimates. (I found this kind of suspicious, adding three more engineers when they already had ten, but attributed it all to the particulars of managements decision making process…you know political chaos and padding your employee count. I personally dismissed it all as not having any real bearing on my own employment — that turned out to be real stupid assumption of mine.)
The first new person they settled on was former software engineer who had been a former hardware engineer from at least ten years earlier. He had been given a premium position within the products design hierarchy, even though he had apologized in a department email about being a little “rusty” at the job of hardware design. He stated he would require patience and support from all of us full-time hardware guys as he improved his skills. (Already, things are going stupid goofy…a hardware engineer in a critical design position “needing” help from the other engineers in order to catch up on his old/new craft…wacky…goddamn wacky.)
The next two engineers were open requisitions that I thought were simply for nothing more than two good, general purpose, engineers — at first. Seems I was wrong. Management was looking for “specialists” in a particular technology field (but a field neither rare nor atypical for this type of engineering). This speciality was familiar to most of us, of course, but we hadn’t done it from the ground up in years, and if anyone was going to do it, I felt several of us “old timers” should have been selected for the chance. Why? We needed the work for own careers, as this played heavily as a desirable skill for most other companies, including the one we were working at. One could simply say because our loyalty and patience from years of service demanded it and our time away from doing it shouldn’t have been used against us, along with any other stupid reason they could provide. We needed the work to become ever better engineers which depended highly on us getting the chance to do such things. Without it, our skills and subsequently our careers, could falter, fade, and die. Mine pretty much did.
So far, everything I saw could be attributed to bad, dishonest or sloppy management, but one couldn’t quite call it overly unethical or immoral behavior, not yet anyways. This was going to change very soon.
This constant looking for two new engineers went on for the better part of a year. Then in the late spring of 2007 Cliff’s and Chuck’s third level manager wanted each engineer to make a personal work profile — essentially a resume — of skills and past product design experiences they had acquired and to hand it in directly to him. I’m guessing he was trying to determine why work on the project always seemed to be stalled and why they needed more engineers, especially when they were having so much trouble finding them and had plenty of engineers as it was. There also was this little problem where executive management had called for a removal of those two new engineer requisitions as part of a company-wide cost savings plan. I know every other department in the company had to give up their requisitions and pretty much did.
This request clearly made Cliff and Chuck a little nervous. I knew something was very wrong in my department, and I needed to make an effort to find out just what it was. So I made up a story and went to Chuck’s office and asked him if sending in an updated resume would work for my profile. He told me I didn’t need to do anything like that — he had done it for me! I instructed him that we (the employees) were supposed to write this profile ourselves and hand it in directly to the third level manager. Chuck basically spilled the beans on what he (and most likely Cliff) had been up to. They were writing these profiles and handing them in rather than letting the employees write their own profiles. I’m guessing their reason for doing this was to create (or preserve) a talent void in order to get the two geniuses they felt they just had to have, plus other reasons I would guess. (Chuck actually clued me in on some of his attempts — he was really doing it!)
In response to all my third degreeing, Chuck scolded me and told me that he knew what I “could” and “couldn’t” do as he saw it and used that as the reason for doing my profile instead of me, basically insinuating I would lie if I tried to write it myself. I called Chuck a “f**king bastard” and left his office. He never reciprocated or held me responsible for calling him that. I was to eventually find out why he did not retaliate or bring it to anyones attention but only much later when I was laid off, which came about one year from this incidence.
(Chuck had been my manager for that last year only. It should also be noted that everything I did I did well and to completion. This was reflected in my job reviews — all of them. It should also be noted I was 47 years old at the time, had been in this one line of work since I graduated college and had designed more than a dozen products under my technical leadership. I also worked as an aide with design responsibilities in almost a dozen other projects over those same years, plus tons of technical assistance involving everything from helping software and diagnostics to sustaining old products to the helping of hiring in of new people.)
After the inane incident with Chuck, I spent that next Friday having lunch with the other engineers in my group, a kind of traditional thing we did every Friday. I told them all about the profile forging stuff and they told me to shove the whole affair up my ass, or words to that effect. There was no surprise from these people — no “E.F. Hutton” moment where they’d shut up and just listen to what I had to say. They neither made eye contact with me nor did they ask any probing questions. They just looked away and told me to forget it.
So how had Chuck accomplished all this “truth surrender” moment in my fellow engineers? Well, I’m guessing he was close to most of these engineers in this group and I am sure he simply asked those people if he could supply the (phony) profiles for them, and I’m sure he also added that he would be “complimentary” if he did write them. Believe me, B.S. like this works just fine in StorageTek’s “managers-see-all-know-all” idiot work environment. The company was really was turning into something that I would best describe as manure.
As for me, I have no idea how Chuck was going to hand in his version of my faked profile in past me, but I evidently solved that problem for him when I left his office in a huff and he waited for the world to come crashing down around is head, and it didn’t. It didn’t when I decided to not turn in my profile, let these creeps pull off their scam I thought, and I would look for a better place to work; anywhere was better than StorageTek/Sun Microsystems. All I know is that all of these faked profiles had something to do with getting those two new engineers hired, that I’m sure of.
At this point I was aware that Chuck and most likely Cliff were falsifying the profiles, and they knew I knew. (I have stories that attest to this fact, but to save space and time I’ll omit them for now.) I also knew that if I told the third level manager about all this B.S., Cliff and Chuck would have most likely been fired. More importantly executive management would have canceled the project as it would no longer have the lower ranking managers needed to actually run it, plus they were never all that entranced with this project right from the very beginning. Or I could look for a new job. Either way I was kind of screwed. So I had a difficult decision to make: with no good outcomes for me no matter what I did, I just decided to bide my time and look for new work elsewhere while the project plodded along very, very, slowly.
They eventually hired the two new engineers. What was sad about these two guys was they weren’t any better than the many of the people we already had, and certainly not any more up to doing the speciality work Chuck and Cliff had envisioned for them. Nevertheless, Chuck and Cliff moved them up pretty high in the project design hierarchy and gave them the best, most desirable work to do. (And of course, I got the worst, least desirable work to do.) And as for my job search, it was seriously failing, but I kept at it.
In late April of 2008 Sun Microsystems failed to make it’s financial obligations — it tanked and tanked badly. And our project, after almost 2.5 years of stalling out and plodding along, was cancelled. At the same time there was an informal announcement there would be lay offs. I wasn’t concerned. I had spent the last year trying to get out of StorageTek and hopefully into a new job, so even though this wouldn’t be my most desirable way to exit a company, it would still suffice.
I was, as I predicted, laid off in July of 2008, thanks to a forged profile that I knew didn’t even begin to tell the real story of who I was. But I was happy as a clam though a little bit concerned about what I was going to do now, and because I had been campaigning for work that entire prior year, I decided to take a break for a few months.
During these first several month after being laid off, Cliff, the second level manager tried to hire me back into the fold, but evidently he had problems created of his and Chuck’s own design. Seems the degree of name and reputation destruction he and Chuck had put in my faked profile was much more vicious than even I had estimated it to be. This was partially evident in the first job posting I saw, directed solely to me, on Monster. This posting listed all the “side and incidental” tasks, duties and skills I had done, but completely eliminated any and all actual hardware skills I had been trained to do and was originally hired for. I ignored it; no way was I going back, not for anything.
When that last posting failed to get a response from me, he sent out another posting soon after that one, also on Monster. This one was absolutely designed for me, as it was written with a type of panicky urgency and desperation and clearly was targeting one specific individual: me. In it he said if the “right” person responded to it they would be hired and trained to be a hardware engineer. Trained to be a hardware engineer? Sh*t. I was so mad when I saw that that I punched my wife’s computer flatscreen, broke the bezel around the edges, and badly cut my hand.
I was hoping all this ignoring of his advances would send a message to Cliff that I had no interest in working for StorageTek/Sun Microsystems anymore, and he could quit trying to get me back into StorageTek/Sun. It didn’t seem to take, at least not at first. But with time they eventually seemed to stop, at least for a while.
After my short break I tried finding work again and ignored everything thrown at me by StorageTek/Sun. I applied and sent resumes to every company that I thought had anything that aligned with my skill sets. When that didn’t work, I tried all kinds of related type jobs such as product management and that still didn’t do any better. I had a few inquires, but they ended almost immediately once I told them I was no longer working and was in search of a new job. Very often I told them I had been laid off they would say something like “you were? — we’ll get back to you”, and they never did. This was all happening during the years 2008-2010, when corporations went negatively on people who had been laid off or possibly because of some agism, as I was 48/49 years old at the time. But now I don’t believe that was the whole story. Again, read on.
In 2010 I was getting worried; I hadn’t seen a shred of any real interest from any company in the area. So I had some money left and thought I’d get a Master’s degree in some kind of technological field. (In this case it was a Master’s of Information Systems and Services.) I figured being involved in such an activity would make me look as if I was still current with the latest in digital knowledge, and I kept trying for the occasional job while I working on my school stuff. No luck getting work at that time, but I graduated in August of 2013 with my Master’s in hand.
After graduation, I attacked the world with more enthusiasm than I had ever had before. It was already six years since I last worked and I was starting to get very, very anxious. For the next year, with barely a peep, with barely a whisper from any company, I kept trying. I was getting sloppy and applying to anything and everything. Than, in the summer of 2014 I caught on as a contractor for a New Jersey based company called CTG. They contracted me out to a local company called Ricoh. Where, after more than six years, I finally started working again.
To be honest, I really did not like the work all that much and the pay was barely half of what I made six years earlier, but it was a job, better than nothing.
After a fashion, my manager took a liking to me and my work ethic and ability, and made a play to hire me in as a full time employee. I initially resisted, but then gave in and applied out in the public sector with anyone else who might also be interested. I waited around for a couple of months for some kind of reaction from my manager. I was especially patient since my contract was good all the way through summer and thought maybe he was taking his time. But things were beginning to drag along too slowly and I was becoming somewhat concerned.
I finally approached him about the application. He indicated that he had never gotten it — maybe I had done something wrong? So I proved to him that I had sent it in by showing him the receipts and other stuff that had been sent to me by the corporate software when I applied. He was a bit perplexed, but he told me to come back later as he went looking for my application.
He found it. Seems it got “caught-up” in the hands of the executive aides who managed the application software and for some reason hadn’t been sent to him as they should have done. I was very suspicious that this was just an accident.
Now, at this point in my personal adventure, I had read an article or two about corporate blacklisting, which was new to me and I didn’t even fathom anyone could do such a thing. When my manager said he never got my application, I had a theory as to why. The theory was simple: could my work troubles be because I had been blacklisted, specifically by Cliff? Interestingly, the answer was pointing to “yes”.
My manager was reluctant to say just what exactly had happened to my application. The subject made him visibly angry while he sat there and stewed in his own juices. So I asked him point blank: “Was I blacklisted?” He did not move or flinch. He didn’t respond to my question, he didn’t even react in any way that was what I’d call animated. I had my answer, even if he hadn’t openly said so.
My manager moved the conversation forward by indicating I would have to go through extra measures to get this job. This was not the usual hiring process in a company that big by any means. Seems I would have to suffer extra interviews and it would even require me to take one with the VP of Engineering.
I did as my manager had told me, even enduring an interview with the VP of Engineering. The VP was — what would you say? An asshole? He played with me like a big fat cat plays with a wounded mouse. It was humiliating actually.
(There were other incidents that happened to help confirm I was being blacklisted, but I’ll skip them for now.)
On the last day of my contract, my manager comes to me and says they are taking the company in a new direction and the job I was being evaluated for was being scraped. Big lie. Within a few weeks of my exit, there it was as big as life: the job I applied for now existing on a number of job boards unchanged and still looking to be filled. (Does anybody from the corporate world actually tell the truth? Uphold honesty? Do what’s right? Bullshit.)
This ain’t the end I’m afraid. I will say I was furious at finding out I had been blacklisted and I even let Cliff know I wasn’t happy by sending an email to one of his phony recruiters he had enlisted in this farce. (A story unto itself.) I don’t believe he ever stopped arranging jobs for me. Problem was that most were basically much lower in rank and pay then what I was getting back before he framed me at StorageTek/Sun Microsystems or were out-of-town. Worse, I had already suffered seven years of pay loss. At more than $100k plus per year, that was a lot. And then of course when you add the next four years to that also, things are becoming astronomical high for a guy that lives in regular house and has a mortgage.
Still, I occasionally applied for some of these jobs, but no own ever responded, most likely because Cliff hadn’t been totally honest with them. My guess was he wasn’t “building me up” to be someone desirable as I could or should have been. There just seemed to be a need in him to drive me down to the level of a peon which was how he described me back in the days when he and Chuck were writing my phony profile. (I don’t know why he did this exactly, I’m guessing there was someone looking over his shoulder at the time, or maybe if I took a lesser job he could claim he was right to do what he had done to me. I just don’t know all of his “whys” I guess.)
During the years between summer of 2016 and 2018 I tried a number of things, one of which was to become self employed as a iOS developer and programmer. No luck at all. In May of 2018 I submitted my first game to Apple’s iTunes, but it did little to revive or charge up my career.
In January of 2019 I got a call from Lockheed Martin. They were interested in hiring me as a full time Senior Hardware Engineer. That was it! That was my real job! First I had to pass the phone interview, which I did. Then I needed to go down there for a face-to-face interview. But shortly after that the HR person called and said my interview would need to be rescheduled for a future time and place — but don’t panic, they were still interested in me, she said. She also told me to not pass up the opportunities to other jobs that Might. Just. Come. My. Way.
I could smell Cliff all over this. I went and looked on the LinkedIn employment page and there they were: two Test Engineer jobs from Cliff’s favorite helper companies outside of Oracle. (Note: Oracle had bought Sun Microsystems in the interim of all this.) One was a Test Engineer role for Seagate, and the other was a Test Engineer job for Spectra Logic, nearly the same exact descriptions for both. (Please take note: very few companies advertise for “Test Engineers”. Most of the time this role is done by a group of technicians. If an engineer is required, it’s always a low ranking job, typically filled by — ta-dah! — technicians.)
I ignored these jobs out of principal. I can not nor will I ever take a baloney job that pays less than half of what I used to make especially after ten years of pay loss simply because it makes Cliff “happy”. I’m sorry, but he can go f*ck himself.
A few weeks later, Lockheed Martin sent a rejection notice via email. Another lying, gutless company. At this point I largely gave up finding work. I am currently 59 years old and very close to 60. I’ve decided to give up and retire early. I’ve become sick and tired of looking for work, especially with that prick most likely influencing the companies I could still apply to. (But I at least got two trips through Colorado’s unemployment insurance gig; that should bring some attention to what this blacklisting can do to a person, and what that person can then do to the state.)
For this last year I’ve resigned myself to the simple idea I’ll never get a good job like the ones I used to know prior to some idiot actively interfering with my job search, shaping my image and reputation all along the way and doing it to the point I would never look desirable to anyone else ever again.
The years away from this specific discipline have made it even harder for me to get a good job, as you are now viewed as “being behind the curve” sort-of-speak. This is especially important in the tech business, even though it’s really bullshit.
Let me reiterate my story, but I’ll make it quick: A couple of overly ambitious engineering managers tried to get the best people hired into their new project, going so far as to falsify the actual profiles of the people they already had in order to create a vacancy at the desired positions they wanted. When the project was cancelled before completion, those faked profiles lived on and acted as the guide that upper management would use in deciding who would stay and who would go. I know it led to my happy layoff. Not so bad so far, as I wanted to leave that crap house, but wait!
This led to a six year search for work for me. Six effin’ years. When I did find a job, it was only working as a contractor on a one year contract. I was eventually invited to apply for the position permanently about half the year through. When I did apply, I found out something interesting — I had been blacklisted. (Seems working for a company outside the underground blacklisting network was the trick to avoiding the blacklisters and their stupid job-banning games. But when I applied through normal channels, me and my trumped up sins were detected and my application “lost” until my manager went and fetched it back from — in this case — the executive aides who were part of that creepy blacklisting network.)
I was blacklisted because Cliff felt that if I were to tell the story about all the lying and misdirection he and Chuck had been playing on their higher-ups, and then told these stories to the right person (another company’s manager or something similar) who worked/lived locally, it could ruin his career. It probably would have. He would probably never have gotten a job as a second level manager if that were to ever happen, at least not in the front range area.
Why did I not tell StorageTEK/Sun Microsystem upper management when I had the chance? Because I felt there was a 95% chance that the project would be cancelled because Cliff and Chuck would most likely be fired, leaving the project with no lower level leadership. Plus upper management felt this was a minor product and would probably love to cancel it and let many of the engineers go. So I decided just to look for new work and quit when I found something or possibly got laid off, whichever came first. (Turns out to be the dumbest, most costliest thing I have ever done…should have ratted on the bastards when I had the chance and taken my own chances with a non-blacklisted job hunt.)
Now for the reason I wrote this long story and what I was hoping you might have some say in it all.
I tried to sue after I first found out I had been blacklisted back in 2015, and then again about half a year ago, sometime after the Lockheed Martin incident. No lawyer ever seemed interested in the job, and frankly, I wasn’t all that interested in suing either. (And I still didn’t think suing them was going to be all that likely, I don’t know why exactly, but I did.) This year, however, I looked at the laws guiding such cases and pretty much understood why no one was interested. The laws guiding such a lawsuit were awful and failed to protect the employee, while allowing “wild west” tactics for the employer, at least as far as I could tell.
Their were several laws pertaining to blacklisting and references, and they largely useless in protecting applicants as far as I was concerned. These laws say if a companies Human Resources/Talent Acquisition/Executive Aides don’t want to abide by the rules of anti-blacklisting laws they are pretty much free to do so, with almost no chance of penalty. Well, they don’t say that exactly, but they might just as well say that. I also would like you to note that these laws I’m talking about don’t include the ones that deal with health and credit occupations, which is different than this common, business stuff I’m discussing here.
Getting caught blacklisting is a misdemeanor in Colorado. A fairly simple misdemeanor. If convicted of managing, keeping, communicating etc., any kind of blacklist list, they may be charged up to a $250 fine and/or spend 90 days in jail. Gee, that’ll get a lawyer up and workin’ for ya, now won’t it?
Plus it seems to me if you were terminated from company A, so you went to company B to interview for a job, and that interview for some reason didn’t go well, can company B now forewarn all the other companies about your “bad” interview with them? I didn’t pick up anything in law preventing that scenario, and it might be there, but I can’t see it.
As for references, any company can provide a reference about any former employee as long as that reference is done unbiased and fair, even if the former employee did not give their permission for such information to be provided. Plus, if any written information were passed on to the requestor, a copy of it must also go to the applicant. Yeah, maybe, but what if someone is “informally” asking via telephone and doesn’t want written information? Does the former company still send a copy of what they told them back to the applicant? I can’t seem to answer that one, but maybe it’s covered and I missed it.
All this is fair enough, as they say. But what or who is qualified to give a “fair” or “unbiased” testimony of your abilities? How do measure that accuracy? Currently, I am waiting to get my “unbiased” and “fair” assessment from Oracle (formerly Sun Microsystems). Supposedly a former employee can do that. We’ll see what happens, and what I can do about it. (In my case, my managers completely deleted my entire hardware identity when they rewrote my profile, so I am anxious to see what I get from Oracle/Sun Microsystems.)
Note: Seems the move from Sun Microsystems to Oracle, and that having happened 11 years ago, has made getting a reference nearly impossible. If I do want a reference from a particular person, they’d be more than happy to set up a personal call between that person and whoever was interested. In other words, too much time has passed and references like this are nearly impossible unless you have a particular fellow in mind. Big deal.
I personally find these laws weak and banal, it’s not hard to see how damaging a manager could be to a person’s employment career outlook if they desired to be; these stupid rules are easily sidestepped or directly disobeyed and he/she can do what ever he/she wants as long as he/she has a willing group of Human Resources/Talent Acquisitions/Executive aides to help him/her. I mean, what idiot working in these departments wouldn’t act on the “advice” of a second level manager? And what if they don’t hire a great employee because they have been misled? They really don’t give crap…there’s always someone else who they can hire who’s less complicated.
All I know is these “underground” communication channels need to be severed. When terminating or quitting a company, the process needs to be treated like a divorce, where any and all criticisms by the parties needs to be put out in the open. None of this “secret, underground” crap…some of us can’t survive that.
One needs to understand why blacklisting is done and what it’s target objective is. One of the main reasons is, naturally, to keep a company from hiring a bad employee. Makes some sense; if I believed my sources of information (Human Resources/Talent Acquisition/Executive Aides most likely) were absolutely accurate and positive about what they knew about a potential employee, I’d act on it. If what they knew was negative in nature, I probably wouldn’t hire them. I get that, I really do.
Ok, but what if some piece of garbage manager or other employee “feels” like putting a negative spin on some poor sucker who is as innocent as the driven snow? Now it gets complicated. This stupid, inane standard we have in our society that “managers” are always people you can count on as being honest in their appraisal of human behavior, skills and talent is incredibly bullsh*t. I mean, I am almost 60 years old and I have seen manager behavior that would make your hair curl.
For example, I’ve seen managers steal from the company by ordering extra computer equipment and taking it home. (“The extra printer? Oh, that’s for my kid — he’s going into college soon!”) I’ve seen an executive, using his power position, corner a pretty girl who wanted nothing to do with him and pin her to the wall at the corporate Christmas party, much to her disgust. I’ve seen managers put a layoff “hit” on someone who was good and useful and well liked but because they felt that person was a threat to their own career goals they just had to “let them go”.
And I have seen management so devious that they would take a highly experienced employee and ruin their name and reputation with the intent of making this person (and other personal) disappear as possible candidates for a new project so they could hire fresh people who were “currently gifted” with the latest skills and techniques rather then allow these loyal old timers the chance to acquire these necessary, career-advancing, knowledge, experience, and skills. This happened to me, and I feel it was personal.
If the real reason for blacklisting someone isn’t to keep “bad” people from being hired, then the remaining reasons are definitely a little less defensible. Those reasons are to keep a person quiet and hopefully out of contact with those who could cross pollinate information with a lot of other people who could make it tough on the perpetrator. That was the main reason in my case. My manager was doing all he could to get me out of the region or out of the job class, whichever worked mattered little to him, just so I was out.
Again, in my case, when I wouldn’t allow myself to be rehired by Cliff, he began to feel the pressure from what I could potentially do to him, including ending his career if ever I bent the right ear in my direction. So he had me blacklisted, figuring I would never know and with time I would give up pursuing any engineers job here in Denver/Boulder area or give up engineering completely. (One of the jobs he tried to get me to do was to be an insurance salesmen; he sicced several of those guys on me over the years and I can tell you, they don’t give up easily.)
Once Cliff tried to get me blacklisted, he had a lot of help. The community of Human Resources/Talent Acquisition/Executive Aides and other types responsible for stocking a company with new “talent” loved the information this second level manager had fed them, and of course they accepted it as gospel. When they came upon this information, they were more than happy to share it with their peers at other companies, after all one hand washes the other and I’m sure there was a lot of hand washing going on in the front range. They loved knowing who was “good” to hire and who was “bad” to hire. And if the information ever proved to be wrong, they didn’t care; they never gave a sh*t.
I would like to make clear that I do not believe I have been the only one blacklisted, in fact I think it maybe more common than most people know. One needs to understand that when someone is blacklisted, they almost never know about. Most of the time the blacklisting achieves what it was meant to do — drive someone out of the area or drive them into a completely different career. For myself, if I hadn’t been hired by a New Jersey company to work here in Colorado, which allowed me to do an end-run around this stupid game, I’d have never known. (I’ll bet that really pisses ‘ol Cliff off, don’t you think? Still, I believe he won this game as he is still employed and I have lost an estimated million plus dollars because of him. Slimey bastard.)
I did my own experiments for a while when Cliff kept sending me recruiters who were interested in hiring me for some job, usually out-of-state, that I did not want. I’d ask them if it was OK if I had been blacklisted first. You know what answer I got? I never got a single “You were what?” Nope. I got “What were you blacklisted for?” I got that response every time I asked it. Every time. Seems blacklisting isn’t unknown in the world of selling people as meat, in fact, it seems omnipresent if you ask me.
I know of one federal bill that’s trying to get passed, authored by Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren I believe, called “No Poach” law, or something similar. It’s not designed exactly for blacklisting, but it would suffice just the same in that it prevents stupid corporations with their continuous fetish for “talent” from colluding over perspective employees. (In engineering, I believe “talent” is really a name for “skill” obtained by “experience and practice”, but hey, what do I know…I’m not as smart as those corporate brainiacs.)
What I would like someone to do, on the state level, is change those state laws and put some teeth in them. Maybe make a state law that mirrors what Booker/Warren are trying to do. I don’t know. I’m hoping you do.
Sincerely,
John R. Becker
Former Engineer
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