No Ethics/No Work Oracle protest

"About 300 Oracle employees walked off the job on Thursday to protest founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison's decision to hold a fundraiser for President Donald Trump the previous evening, Bloomberg reports.

 It was a rare sign of dissent for a company known for its stodgy corporate culture. But the circumstances of the small-scale protest also suggest that Ellison has less reason to worry about future employee revolts than some of his fellow tech moguls.

"The protest, called No Ethics/No Work, involved about 300 employees walking out of their offices or stopping work at remote locations at noon local time and devoting the rest of the day to volunteering or civic engagement," Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg's source asked not to be named for fear of retaliation."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/report-300-oracle-employees-walk-out-over-ceos-trump-fundraiser/

"Oracle also competes with rivals for valuable government cloud-computing contracts. Earlier this month, a federal court granted Amazon's request to stop the Trump administration from moving forward with a massive $10 billion defense cloud-computing contract. Microsoft won the contract, but Amazon alleges that Trump personally and improperly lobbied for runner-up Amazon not to get it.

Trump and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have a testy relationship in part because Bezos owns The Washington Post, which frequently criticizes the president and breaks unflattering stories about him."

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Trashgate

In 2000, Oracle attracted attention from the computer industry and the press after hiring private investigators to dig through the trash of organizations involved in an antitrust trial involving Microsoft.

The Chairman of Oracle Corporation, Larry Ellison, staunchly defended his company's hiring of an East Coast detective agency to investigate groups that supported rival Microsoft Corporation during its antitrust trial, calling the snooping a "public service".

The investigation reportedly included a $1,200 offer to janitors at the Association for Competitive Technology to look through Microsoft's trash.

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In 2004, then-United States Attorney General John Ashcroft sued Oracle Corporation to prevent it from acquiring a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract. After Ashcroft's resignation from government, he founded a lobbying firm,

The Ashcroft Group, which Oracle hired in 2005. With the group's help, Oracle went on to acquire the contract

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"Oracle Corporation was awarded a contract by the State of Oregon's Oregon Health Authority (OHA) to develop Cover Oregon, the state's healthcare exchange website, as part of the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

. When the site tried to go live on October 1, 2013, it failed, and registrations had to be taken using paper applications until the site could be fixed.

In August 2014, Oracle Corporation sued Cover Oregon for breach of contract, and then later that month the state of Oregon sued Oracle Corporation, in a civil complaint for breach of contract, fraud, filing false claims and "racketeering".

 In September 2016, the two sides reached a settlement valued at over $100 million to the state, and a six-year agreement for Oracle to continue modernizing state software and IT"

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"On August 31, 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that Oracle was being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for paying bribes to government officials in order to win business in Africa, in contravention of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)."

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Trump Considering Changing Law That Makes Foreign Bribes Illegal


“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump is quoted as saying in the new book “A Very Stable Genius.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-illegal-bribe-law-changes_n_5e23ced3c5b673621f773637