Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News writes that some of the country’s largest tech companies have fought off freedom of information requests by the paper for information about their workforce.
Swift writes, “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.
“‘There’s nothing to hide, in our view,’ said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel, which contacted the Mercury News to share its employment data after learning of the newspaper’s federal FOIA request filed in early 2008. ‘We just felt that we’re very proud of the (diversity) programs we have in place and the efforts we put forth, and we don’t have any trouble sharing it.'”
Read more here to see what the Mercury News found in the data.
