07-30-2010, 01:13 AM
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Approved Member
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Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 1,207
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Lets just step back and look at exactly what sort of corporation Northrop Grumman is before getting to indignant about this as copyright extortion on WWII games is small fry compared to what else they get up to :
Quote:
http://www.crocodyl.org/wiki/northrop_grumman
The first major scandals in Northrop Grumman’s history came in the early 1970s, when the company, then known as Northrop Corp., was embroiled in controversies over illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign by company chairman Thomas Jones as well as some $30 million in bribes paid to foreign governments to win orders for fighter jets. A few years later, there were revelations that the company regularly entertained Pentagon officials and members of Congress at a hunting lodge on the eastern shore of Maryland. During the 1980s, Northrop was the subject of numerous investigations relating to alleged mismanagement during its work on the MX Missile and the B-2 Stealth bomber.
In 1989, Northrop was indicted on criminal charges of falsifying test results on cruise missiles for the Air Force and Harrier jets for the Marine Corps. Just as the trial in the case was about to begin in 1990, the company agreed to plead guilty to 34 fraud charges and pay a fine of $17 million. Under the plea agreement, federal prosecutors agreed to end the investigations relating to the MX and the B-2. However, the company agreed in 1992 to pay $4.2 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit—brought without the involvement of the Justice Department—alleging that the company padded its invoices on MX missile guidance system work.
Grumman Corp., acquired by Northrop in 1994, brought with it a history of controversies on issues such as cost overruns in the production of F-14 Tomcat fighters for the Navy, production of defective municipal buses by its Flxible division (sold in 1983) and a bribery scandal involving Iran and Japan.
In 2000 Northrop Grumman paid $1.4 million to settle a whistleblower case alleging that the company overcharged the Air Force for B-2 bomber instruction and repair manuals. In a case inherited through the acquisition of TRW, Northrop Grumman agreed in 2003 to pay $111 million to settle claims that TRW overcharged the Pentagon for work on several space electronics programs in the early 1990s. Also in 2003, Northrop Grumman agreed to pay a total of $80 million to settle two False Claims Act cases, one involving work by Newport News Shipbuilding before Northrop acquired it in 2001 and the other involving the delivery of allegedly defective aerial target drones.
In 2004, Northrop settled for $1.8 million the remaining individual whistleblower case from the late 1980s involving cruise missiles. The following year it paid $62 million to settle the remaining claims relating to overcharging on the B-2 bomber program.
The false claims allegations continue. In March 2008 a whistleblower brought a lawsuit charging that Northrop Grumman’s Melbourne division with hundreds of millions of dollars of overcharges relating to the Joint STARS radar aircraft program.
Not all of Northrop’s performance problems have been related to overcharging. Soon after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the company’s Vinnell Corp. subsidiary (acquired as part of the purchase of TRW in 2002) was awarded a $48 million contract “to train the nucleus of a new Iraqi army.” It botched the job so badly that the Jordanian Army had to be brought in to take over.
Labor:
Some 17 percent of Northrop Grumman’s 122,000 employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements. Some of the most contentious labor relations have been at the company’s shipbuilding operations. Northrop inherited these relationships when it acquired Litton Industries and Newport News Shipbuilding in 2001.
There had been a bitter dispute dating back to the early 1990s between Avondale Industries and the New Orleans Metal Trades Council, a group of eight unions which had won a representation election for 5,000 workers. Avondale fought the unions, which in turn launched a major corporate campaign against the company. The confrontation deescalated after Litton took over Avondale in 1999 and signed a neutrality agreement with the unions. In 2002, with Litton now part of Northrop Grumman, the dispute was finally settled.
In 2003, there was nearly a strike at the other Litton shipyard inherited by Northrop—the Ingalls operation in Pascagoula , Mississippi. After a 14-day “cooling-off” period a settlement was reached that was approved by a majority of the 7,000 workers covered. Things did not go so smoothly in 2007. The workers in Pascagoula struck the shipyard for 27 days before accepting a revised contract offer from the company.
Members of United Steelworkers Local 8888 at Northrop’s shipyard in Newport News, Virginia ratified a new 52-month contract in 2004.
In 2007 it was reported that guest workers from India employed by Signal International, a Northrop Grumman subcontractor in Pascagoula, were being held against their will.
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