http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/02/07/ibm-employees-anti-trump-petition-growing/97609426/
SAN FRANCISCO — Some IBM workers aren't thrilled with CEO Ginni Rometty's advisory role with the Trump Administration, and they want it to stop.
A petition circulating among staff and former workers at the usually button down blue-chip IT company beseeches Rometty to reconsider her close alignment with the new president.
Rometty, who wrote a letter advocating "new-collar" jobs to Trump in November, is a member of the president's business council. More than 1,600 have signed the online petition, according to organizers.
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IBM declined comment.
"IBM should know better, and rethink its role in the world," says Elizabeth Wood, 31, who resigned in November as a senior content strategist in marketing at Big Blue after Rometty's letter. "Everyone is signing that (anti-travel ban) brief but them and Oracle."
More than 120 tech companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have signed onto a legal brief opposing Trump's order that barred immigrants from largely Muslim nations and Syrian refugees from entering the country. Oracle, based in Redwood City, Calif., and IBM, based in Armonk, NY, did not sign it.
Petition organizer Daniel Hanley, a security-software engineer at IBM in Atlanta, plans to
present the swelling petition to IBM management soon.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick dropped out of the business advisory council last week after Uber drivers and customers protested Uber's involvement in the council.
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Elon Musk remains on the business council, but two of his companies, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, signed the amicus brief.
Wood, who's now freelancing in New York, is among the first in a growing wave of tech workers who are organizing and taking to the streets against Trump. The political awakening now taking place in Silicon Valley was alive and well several months ago, across the country, when Wood took a stand and resigned in protest.
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She left, she says, because she considered Rometty's association with Trump an affront to IBM's stance on inclusion, which included opposition to a Muslim registry and an anti-LGBT law in North Carolina.
She's received dozens of messages and calls of support from IBMers. "Sometimes you have to fight for what's right," says Wood.