Brazil’s aircraft maker Embraer has filed a lawsuit against American-based Gulfstream, a manufacturer of executive jets, charging the Yankee firm of trying to hire its employees in order to steal the Brazilian company’s know how and also its clients.
According to the daily O Estado de S. Paulo, Embraer is also accusing Gulfstream of disrespecting the Brazilian labor legislation.
As O Estado tells it, the dispute started in April, when Gulfstream published an ad in English in newspapers of São José dos Campos’s, the city in the interior of São Paulo where Embraer has its headquarters.
The ads offered a job to aeronautical engineers, who were willing to move to Savannah, in the state of Georgia to work at Gulfstream’s main plant. Interviews were to be conducted between June 1st and June 3 in São José dos Campos.
Embraer, however, just before the interviews were supposed to start, was able to get a preliminary injunction from the Labor Public Ministry, which put a stop to the selection process and added the sting of about US$ 1 million in fines in case the judicial order was not heeded.
Embraer says that it respects the free will of its employees, but stresses that it has invested substantially in the training of its professionals and that recruiting by a foreign company that does not operate in Brazil is not only illegal but also a threat to its business.
Guilherme Vieira Machado, the commercial representative of Gulfstream in Brazil, is not making any comments according to O Estado. He informed that the subject is being dealt with directly by the head office in the United States. The law office of Felsberg Associates has been hired by Gulfstream to make its case.