Monday, February 15, 2010

Five Silicon Valley companies fought release of employment data, and won

mercurynews.com
By Mike Swift
mswift@mercurynews.com
Posted: 02/14/2010 04:00:00 PM PST
Updated: 02/14/2010 08:47:17 PM PST

Google, the company that wants to make the world's information accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released.
So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle and Applied Materials. These five companies waged an 18-month Freedom of Information battle with the Mercury News, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause "commercial harm" by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. A sixth company, Hewlett-Packard, fought the release and lost.
But many of their industry peers see the issue differently. The Mercury News initially set out to obtain race and gender data on the valley's 15 largest companies, and nine — including Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay, AMD, Sanmina and Sun Microsystems — agreed to allow the U.S. Department of Labor to provide it....

The Labor Department data ultimately obtained by the Mercury News shows that while the collective work force of 10 of the valley's largest companies grew by 16 percent from 1999 to 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic.


Full Story: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_14382477?source=most_emailed

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