Broadcom Inc. is a $100B company formed by the merger of a number of semiconductor and software companies with roughly 20k employees worldwide, primarily in California. Most of its US employees moved to work-from-home status on March 17 and per management, US operations have been running at 100% efficiency with a small essential skeleton staff on-site.
But that wasn’t good enough for Broadcom CEO Hock Tan. As Broadcom Colorado engineer Andrei Taraschuk notes, employees were informed late last week that all workers would be required to return in shifts starting April 27, with 25% coming into the office each week. Unlike in other countries that have re-opened workplaces, no virus testing will be conducted, though employees will be screened for fever and provided surgical masks and gloves. Employees with medical risk factors or childcare responsibilities were told to take a leave of absence regardless of whether they were productive working at home.
The rationale for sending employees back to work was not explained, but Tan has in past both expressed discomfort with employees working from home and attempted to curry favor with Donald Trump. Tan long ignored politics in favor of getting large institutional investors on board with with his M&A strategy. But in October 2017, Tan donated $70k to various Republican candidates and PACS, including maxing out to then-house majority leader Kevin McCarthy. Two weeks later, he appeared on TV alongside Trump and McCarthy to announce a plan to re-domicile Broadcom from Singapore to the US. Of course, this didn’t prevent Trump from personally quashing Broadcom’s bid to acquire competitor Qualcomm Corp. just four months later on the grounds that it was still a foreign entity.
Tan was just named to Trump’s “Great American Economic Revival Industry Group” along with a number of other tech CEOs. The other tech companies represented in the industry group, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm, have not announced plans for non-essential employees to return to work, giving Tan a chance to come out in front of Trump’s favored policy.
Whatever the reason, Hock Tan has decided to put thousands of Broadcom employees, their families and their broader communities at risk of serious illness or death.