Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Settles 'Permatemp' Case For $97 Million
pq writes: "The NYT is reporting that Microsoft has settled its 'Permatemp' case for $97 million. Another bullet, successfully dodged. 'Microsoft continues to be a great place to work,' said their VP." For those not following, the suit alleged that Microsoft was using not-very-temporary employees secured by temporary placement agencies to avoid giving them the benefits for which other Microsoft employees were eligible.
This is Libertarian talk, isn't it? It is a very fresh approach to Government, I will admit. I suppose the devil is in the details when we start talking about seriously implementing these policies. There is an awful lot of growing pain involved in weaning people off of reliance on the Government and onto themselves. But, to stay on topic, isn't the fact of Government regulations a sort of necessary evil? What would MS do without them, seeing as they already have tried to circumvent them. Let's see - here in California enterprising free-marketers hire Hispanics for poverty wages, flaunting the fact that the workers, although they live in deplorable conditions compared to the rest of America (ask Cesar Chavez), are still better off than they were back home, and as such are loathe to be revealed to La Migra, so accept whatever conditions are handed to them. I know of one guy who works about 50 hours a week for $75, though, since he is provided shelter (an old Airstream trailer), water and electricity, he Is 'earning a living wage'. This is of course, another illegal but accepted practice; just ask our Senator (a Democrat, by the way, who was found to have hired an illegal to watch her kid - was it Feinstein or Boxer?).
So what would MS do? I suspect they would undercut the job market just as much as they could, producing company towns full of Cannery Rows. Dude, we have been down this path more than once, and unless you can tell me how it is fundamentally different this time around - say, capitalists are no longer greedy at the expense of their humanity, or even "the internet disseminates information so rapidly that such injustices will be revealed before they can become endemic" - I maintain that only the government can protect the rights of workers in a capitalist society.
If you remove regulations from the marketplace, wages and quality of life for the underpriveleged will fall faster than teenage lady garment workers onto a hot New York sidewalk.
I agree that the combination of Government regulations and corporate tendencies can make life harder. But I contend and maintain that removing regulations without understanding what replacement force will guarantee worker protection is potentially much worse, and for more people.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Hello Mr. A. Troll,
startrekmail.com is just a free mail service. Go to www.startrekmail.com and get your own. Unlike a lot of other free mail services, this one forwards mail to other accounts. I use it in the internet to hide my true e-mail address from the spammers, but they found it anyway.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
May I humbly suggest that you read this--it speaks for itself. Yes, it's 45 web pages long, but well worth the read.
-- Shamus
This space for rent, reasonable rates
Who said Microsoft can't make software?
I live near MS, and I have a crapload of neighbors who work there, and my understanding is that regardless of what MS and the temps agreed to, the heart of the issue is federal and state law.
/. who will claim that this is awful, and that contracts should be honored no matter what. I think that they forget that human beings are not economic bacteria in a cycle of stimuli-response, but that we have social desires (e.g. preventing people from starving in the street) that are more important than adhering to an imperfect system of economics. (i.e. any of them)
Even if you're a temp with a contract, if you're given the duties of an employee, the demands upon you are the same as an employee, and this persists for a long enough time to convince a judge that it's not a temporary situation, you are in effect an employee. As such, even if the contract says otherwise, you are required to get all the employee benefits.
Basically, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, a piece of paper indicating that it's a goose isn't relevant.
MS tried to skirt around this by hiring de facto employees, calling them temps and dodging their legal responsibilities to give them benefits. The temps may not have gone in asking for it, but there's nothing wrong with forcing MS to comply with the law when they're the ones who weren't doing it.
There are plenty of boneheads on
I don't see a contradiction in this case. It is more important that employers not abuse their employees than it is to let the employees accept it because they have very little choice in the matter.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
They lost a lawsuit, so obviously some lawyer was able to convince some judge that MS was in the wrong. It seems that they were keeping 'temps' for more than a year. Look at it this way: you go to a Temp Agency and they line you up with a job. "Yay! A job! Now we can get off welfare and eat!" (Not: 'oooh, another offer from yet another computer firm vying for my unique perl-scripting skillz. I can add it to my stack of offers.') Now you're working there, bringing home a paycheck. But they keep you year after year without a raise, without benefits, without vacation. You lose.
Of course, since the lawsuit in 97, they now terminate you after that year, and you can't go back to work for them for over three months.
Guess what. You still lose. Sucks being on the bottom of the pile, doesn't it?
I am one of those proponents of a so-called 'living wage' for the poorest folks. I really would like to see a man be able to raise a family of two kids or so, with the mother at home for the first five years of the child's life, working 8-5 five days a week. I really believe that, no matter what we would have to sacrifice to achieve that (stock bonuses for the ten top execs? Seminars in Aruba? The Corporate jet?), all of us would agree it was worth it.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
This isn't GM itself... We're a division in the financial industry.
It's actually a great company. When I first started I'd end up in a room with 10 other people making critical decisions and we'd find out that not one of us was an employee.
It's different now, we don't have as many contrators, but management is willing to get things done.
I can imagine the automobile division is very different, and as I understand it their IT shop is run by EDS and can't get anything done without loads of paperwork.
So let me get this straight -- they hired all their "permatemps" in 97, after they were sued for denying the employees benefits for 11 years? Hmm, interesting "mistake".
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
- Agreement - if the temps agreed to continue working (as temps) for a
given period of time (and this can be implicit agreement, simply by going ahead
and working that period of time after hearing a unilateral offer), and someone
at Microsoft agreed that they would after this period offer the temps a
full-time position, this requirement is met.
- Consideration - both sides must have some value changing hands; this
need only be a change in legal position. An agreement to stay in one's
current job qualifies as consideration. So does an agreement to offer further
employment.
- Contractual capacity - Presuming that everyone involved is over 18, sane
and sober, there's no question here.
- Legality - The contract can't be formed to accomplish an illegal goal.
I'm going to call this one fine here too.
Thus, if someone at Microsoft told the temps "stay here [x] long and you can have a full-time job" and one of those temps said "sweet!", you've got a contract.It's your screw them if they can't do what I did mentality that forces the government to step in when it's the employers doing it.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
You're still being too idealistic - your idea of a minimalistic government will never occur as long as there are people who have many more resources than the bulk of the population.
The fundamental problem: the government has to have MORE resources than the people it is trying to constrain, otherwise they will use THEIR resources to overwhelm it whenever they want. And it will have to have the organization necessary to manage those resources (otherwise the resources will be ineffective).
Even if the government used its resources at 100% efficiency (which I highly doubt, given historical precedent), I don't think the result will fit your idea of a "minimalist" government.
With the exception of truly brilliant developers, Microsoft has always treated their employees as expendable resources. Currently, they're having a very hard time keeping people. They claim they pay competitive wages, but other companies in the area pay, on average, 15-20% more, offer better hours and comparable benefits. Contractors get their benefits through their agency and frequently make _double_ what Microsoft is paying to full-time employees for the same position. MS still believes their stock makes up for the shortfall in salary, but nobody's believing it any more. When I left there almost three years ago, I took a year off. After that, I started looking around in the market again, and could get 40-50% more than I was getting when I left. It's no wonder a significant percentage of the people being hired by MS right now are either straight out of college, or being imported into the US.
We should take a leaf out of Bill Gates book, and help the truly deprived, and not scratch our own backs here.
I'll go one step further, and say I like some of the things Gates has said lately. Particularly at a conference on using IT in developing countries: Gates pointed out that infrastructure and food supply were primary issues, not desktop PCs. The ITcrats in attendance were probably expecting something more rah-rah-ish.
This is a far cry from the drivel in his book "Business at the Speed of Light," which I forced myself to read a year or so ago but found too painfully obvious and ridiculous. Stuff that would be obvious to anyone who understood business and who wasn't hamstrung by trying to rely on Windows technology. I mean, even Apple is running an ERP system, c'mon, Bill.
As far as whether programmers and technical types can be exploited, yeah they can, just like anyone else, and in many ways. If you've never visited the Netslaves site, take a look and read some of the message traffic.
And as for the observation that employees can leave at any time, theoretically that's true. In practice, there are often costs associated with picking up and leaving a shop sooner than planned or under circumstances which might preclude one getting rehired quickly. Some employers know this and use it.
Dave
No. Money alone is not enough to permit anyone to arbitrarily modify political process, and money is not the sole (or even the primary) thing a government needs to govern.
Does the amount of money in the US treasury really affect the level of corruption? If Fort Knox were full of gold at this moment (rather than being all but empty, as it is), do you honestly believe that this could change the way that legislation can be bought? The government's wealth has little or nothing to do with the political process.
Do you, then, believe that the government which does the most -- which is the most active in the lives of the governed -- is the most resiliant to attack? It is this government, that which has no enforced (constitutional or otherwise) standards and rights keeping the government out of the people's affairs which is the MOST likely to violate its people's freedom on behalf of the wealthy (or some other fancy of the day).
A government's source of power is not the taxes it collects, but rather the full faith and trust of the governed. Certainly, some means of gaining revenue are required -- the failure of the Articles of Confederation demonstrates this sufficiently -- but by far the most powerful thing any government has is the trust of its people. Would you call the United States government a failure prior to the establishment of the national bank? Before the New Deal? Prior to the institution of the income tax? I would say that none of these are by any means true. In its initial state, the United States federal government had less control (financial and otherwise) over the governed and had a Congress far more tightly hamstrung by a Court which read the Constitution by a far more strict interpretation. Can you honestly and with a straight face tell me that -- at a federal level -- there was more corruption then than now?
The government that governs least, governs best. It was true two hundred years ago and is still true today.
If you tell me that you honestly believe that anyone -- William H. Gates included -- could buy a constitutional amendment, I'll give up and let you have the last say in this thread. The simple truth is that while legislation may be bought, the framework which makes that legislation possible -- the Constitution and, more recently, the courts' interpretation thereof -- cannot be changed without true and genuine widespread assert. Were this framework established more strictly, then -- without the elastic clause and other openings which permit the Federal government to grab power which rightfully belongs to the states -- we would have a genuine limited government, and one unbendable by those with anything less than a truly just and universally appealing cause.
How could you say that if I were in that position, I'm not being abused?
Well, lets suppose I'm an employer.. There is such a glut of unskilled homeless crackheads available to the market that I can't get but a few dollars a day for the services of my ditch-digging company. I can't price my services any higher (and provide better wages to my crackhead employees) because every other ditch digging company in town can get cheap crackhead employees, and there just aren't that many more people who need ditches dug. So if the employment arrangement is benefitial to me (someone to dig ditches at the market price) and benefitial to my crackheaded employee (food and shelter) and both parties enter the agreement then nobody is being abused. And obviously the homeless crackhead is deriving benefit from the arrangement because he's not starving anymore.
I suppose you missed the day in school when they taught basic economics; supply and demand. You get paid what you are worth. If you aren't getting paid what you are worth you go find someone who will pay you that. If you can't find anyone who'll do that then you are already being paid at your fair market value.
The only entity in society that can coerce, abuse, or otherwise impress their will on others is the government, as it is the only entity that can legally use force. Unfortunately people think that government is the solution to any situation they see as 'unfair', when they have their own ability to correct the problem by not dealing with the perpetrator of the 'unfair'ness. Handing more power to government just makes it more rife for manipulation by presure groups, at the detrement of the rest of the population.
I'm pretty sure Bill Gates spends ~50% of his money on taxes, which government mostly dole's out to special interest groups, which could be considered 'charity'; then again it could be considered extortion. If you are making 20K/Yr your taxes are substantially less (less than 20%?) Therefore, yes, Bill Gates does give more to 'charity' than you. Notably he also provides a living for ~40,000 people (employees), which surely provides vastly more than you are providing to anyone.
Go read Ayn Rand, you'll thank me later.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Sorry I don't have more time to respond to your thoughtfull comment in depth right not. I will try to get back to it this weekend in more depth.
...
There is a critical difference between a monopoly of supply [which can often lead to a very inelastic supply curve], and a glut or oversupply of unwanted labor. It amuses me somewhat that so many people decry capitalism as evil, when in a truly competitive market there will only ever be an oppurtunity for most to make a 'normal', or break even profit [a return on their investments as good as they could get from anywhere else available to them].
A perfect example of nearly pure competition is would be in the agricultural markets [yes, I know much of it is subsidized by the government] and in any industry that possesses a large amount of small players who sell identical nondiferentiated products. [Say, gravel, or hogs].
At this point, the central competitive question comes down to one of efficiency and meritocracy of the producers, but even then, this will tend to lower possible profit over time, as the skills and innovations developed by one are gradually adopted or improved upon by others.
At which point, goods become cheaper, and the overal wealth of society as a whole increases, as their is more productivity. [Which of course translates into lower costs for consumers as well, as it no longer requires as much of someone else's time or effort to produce something].
The problem is, in america [although less so then the rest of the world, frighteningly enough], the market really isn't all that free.
Damn. I'm beggining to ramble. I need to get back to work. [Software due on a deadline, fast approaching, I haven't slept in 40 hours!]
My break is over.
---
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Like this: you're not being abused. You don't have to accept that person's offer, and if you don't you are in exactly the same position you were before. If you do accept the offer, then you are better off as a result (otherwise, you wouldn't accept). In no case are you made worse off by being offered what you consider to be an unfair deal. What you are really asking for is enforced charity.
It's still wrong to hire someone on a temporary basis, keep them around for YEARS because they think they'll eventually get hired full-time
Well, that depends. If the employees were told that they would definitely be made full-time at some point, then there would be a breach of contract. If they weren't lied to or made any false promises, then they are responsible for their choices. I don't know the details of this particular case, so I'm not going to declare Microsoft either guilty or innocent. However, I will say that wishing you had negotiated a better deal should not be grounds for unilaterally altering an employment agreement after the fact.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I thought Bill Parrish's arguments made sense, but not having a particularly sophisticated knowledge of SEC rules, taxes or accounting, it's hard to make an informed judgement. I have heard that similar accounting practices are common among high-tech firms. I guess its human nature to cheat when you can..
IIRC (I couldn't find the Slashdot story than ran in re: Mr. Parrish's site), one of the arguments that was made about his criticism of the MS accounting practices is that those techniques are really valuable for smaller companies with limited capital that need to attract high skilled (and hence high wage) talent. Rather than pay the employees "now" for their work, pay them "later" via shares. It not only allows them to offset wage costs, but provides employee incentives to grow the firm.
I'll admit that this is a compelling use for these kinds of practices, but the challenge is how you limit their use to "legitimate" growth situations. One problem is that Wall Street (to use a generic term for "those that invest") seems to have no problem with this tactic; it fits in comfortably with their high-growth, short-term speculative nature.
I have worked at Microsoft and it is an amazing place to be. Brilliant and passionate people, laid back environment (spontaneous watergun fights would occasionally break out in the middle of the work day), and very competitive compensation -- exactly the opposite of what /. dittoheads purport it to be.
Shame on you for your ill-informed rumor-mongering.
Strange land, this Slashdot place:
/. that I'M SO GREAT I CAN COMMAND ANY SALARY AND BENEFIT AND THE REST OF YOU ARE SLACKERS. Those two thoughts don't seem to go together. But then again, unlike you I may not up for the Fields medal or the Nobel fucking prize.
/. paradox: the "Didn't you know what you were doing, didn't you know that you had no benefits?" concept. This is actually an extension to the I'M GREAT YOU SUCK theory. It really applies to people who have never had to work at a company that hires from an approved vendor list and any contractor must be from a company on that list to get hired. Normally the way this works is the person is either an employee of that company or a contractor to it and the hiring company hires someone from the firm on the list. The rate is fixed and is typically something like 3x what the person is actually paid though it can be somewhat less where the hiring company has more leverage.
/. land. They generally fall into the category of "I'm a spoiled young jerk who's never had anything bad happen to me and even if it did I have no responsibilities to other people anyway. Times are great they always will be and anyone who can't be prince of their realm is obviously a loser".
Employers who want to exploit staff by setting up two tiers of employees - those with some security and benefits vs. those with none are somehow contributingto the greater good because being compelled to treat people well costs too much and would lead to no one being hired at all.
Well doesn't that fly in the face of the overweening mentality here @
Here's another interesting
There are so many paradoxes in
Well for all you people who have never seen a recession, you're about to. And when this employer who is held to no rules suddenly tells you that if you want to continue to be a contractor you have to cut your rate in half or, you have become an employee for a 2/3 reduction in your income, please don't hesistate to remind that employer that regulations cost money and how fucking grateful you are to have a job at all.
"Microsoft Toolbar Gives Out Your URLs!!!" CmdrTaco: I don't know about you guys, but this raises some major red flags with me. "Google Settles Temp Worker Lawsuit" (not posted)
- tokengeekgrrl
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions
A deal is a deal, no matter how much you hate MS. The temps agreed to a specific contract, MS honored that contract. Then temps decided after the fact that they wanted more, so the temps got some lawyers. I guess it is open season on MS, no need to worry about what was agreed on by all parties.
... the fact that most large companies refuse to deal with independents - many shun independents for precisely (at least the legal dept. proclamations) the M$ suit and other similar litigation in the past ... and for many others, a firm has to get on a "approved vendor" list before they will do business with that firm - sure, there are exceptions even in the most stringent do-goody firms, but for the average Joe Techsupport, or Joe Programmer even, they have to go to an "approved vendor" - even if they procure the position on their own merit and contacts, the hiring company directs them to the "pimp house" ...
AZspot
Working for a small tech company, I beleive that smaller companies tend to have better labour relations, perhaps because the executives have closer relationships with the employees. I'm sure Bill or Steve don't hang out with the receptionists...
Actually I believe those are the rules that allow you to work for a company under a 1099. However you could be W2'd through a contracting agency and working on site at another company.
Great, now the guy with the family of four and same set of skills is competing against your salary needs. This is already happening of course; people find themselves downsized in middle age, and end up getting none of their retirement benefits. It's another brilliant way for the corporation to save some money -- fire the expensive older workers and hire some hungry younger workers who will work hard for less pay.
See, no matter what happens, someone exploits someone else, someone gets screwed, someone starves. We need to stop sayin "that's life" about it.
What's needed is a rethinking of economics in which it's possible for everyone to win.
The first step for that would seem to be stabilizing world population, and then reducing it to levels that can enjoy a high standard of living without throwing the environment permanently out of whack.
Personally, I can't wait till they invent robots that can do all work better than any human, thereby putting everyone out of work and back on the same level. It'll be interesting to see: will they be our slaves, and we get to live in luxury? Or will we be their pets, and eventually made extinct? The average person living in society is already pretty domesticated...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
That is why there is a problem. Microsoft is activly trying to subvert the labour standards which have been built up over the past century or so. They want to greatly reduce the job security and the benifits that would normally have to give to their employees. That is a serious crime, and in my opinion at least they deserve punishment for it.
state thinks are appropriate for my interests, vs. my own conception and determination of my interests
Yeah, but everything that the over-oppressive government we have in America has been doing for so many years is taking away freedoms that people have for 'the good of the many'. Take social security. They take away an ungodly amount of money that you earn and lock it up from you. Why? Because they know what's best for you, not you. Take welfare. They take money from you and give it to those that they think would benefit more from the money. No, not you giving it to charities that you think deserve it, they just take and give as they please. That's the whole philosophy of the tax-n-spend Democrats.
they will better the state of the worker
That's right. The entire idea is that they know what's best for you, not you. They regard the average American as an incompetent fool, incapable of managing their own life. Now, that may or may not be the case, but in a democracy that's not the way the government is supposed to view the people. Actually, it sounds distinctly Marxist...
There are not enough H1B visas allowed in the U.S. to supply the current demand for Electrical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Computer Science Majors, and IT people
To supply what would be the demand at a wage that is low enough to suit the employers, you mean. While averting higher salaries is arguably be a good thing (e.g. it keeps the industry in the US rather than sending it offshore; increases the productivity of the employer's assets), it doesn't sound very nice that our government has a program designed to reduce worker salaries.
If companies were willing to hire older workers or to retain and retrain existing ones there would be many more people in the work force. Employers get too hung up on superficial criteria (e.g. N years of java rather than overall coding abilities). It's never taken me more than a week or so to start doing useful programs in a language and never more than a month before the language seems like second nature.
Second flaw: Most of those people comming over and working on H1B visas are making damn good money.
Damned good compared to what? If I have a position to fill, I can always fill it if I pay enough. It's because I'm not willing to pay a higher salary that I turn to a program like H1B.
Actually, I don't have anything against the H1B workers -- most of them I've met are really very bright and good workers. I think that bringing in offshore talent benefits the country -- but I'd like to see them tracked for permanent residency, and to be treated with complete equality with native workers. If there really were a shortage of engineers, that's what we'd want to do. However, if you want to depress industry salaries, you bring in "guest" workers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So before legal fees, this comes to just over 8 thousand dollars, each.
Now after the legal fees .... maybe two cents?
Never mind the ability to cash in on the stock options before MS stock price went into trip digits for a while.
There is a VERY interesting story here at the Register about how MS makes money off the microserfs via the stock options. To quote a small section:
Something to think about"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
MS offers certain benefits to their employees. What is actually happening of course is that the temps who qualified as employees (that is they meet the definition of an employee in all ways except in name) were denied access to the benefit programs. Now they're eligable. No one is forcing them to take advantage of the MS health plan (which like many in WA is probably rather good) but at least the decision rests with the temp.
It's certainly possible that they can then start negotiating away some of their benefits, but they've achieved access that they didn't have before.
Bonehead and proud of it. I have this wacky belief that agreements made between consenting adults should be honored, even if one person decides several years later that he's changed his mind. I especially oppose the concept that it is the government's job to tell me what agreements I can and cannot make because I am incapable of running my own life.
Yet there has long been the principle that not all contracts are legal. A contract to commit a crime is not binding. Nor are contracts that are simply reprehensible (e.g. giving up everything you have for something utterly worthless), or made by people who are not of sound mind when agreeing (e.g. drunk) or with minors. The contracts in question here were perfectly valid as long as the employees were contract workers. But the state law, which overrides the contract, establishes definitions of terms in the contract more authoritatively than the contract itself does, and offers a place of recourse should there be a breach.
It's a free country, and you can lobby to have the protections that exist in the law taken away from you if you want, to a certain extent, but I don't think that would be great. True, I don't think that the govt. should hold everyone's hands, but neither should it passively let people fall into pits that they have no hope of escaping from. Shall we revive debtors' prison next?
If anything, this ruling makes it more likely that people will starve in the streets, because it increases the cost that companies must pay to hire workers. As cost goes up, they will be less willing to hire. The law of supply and demand is not subject to repeal by the legislature.
Not really. There's nothing that prevents MS from hiring temps, they must however treat them as temps. If they want to treat them as employees, they'll have to be hired as employees. The new policy will cause there to be greater turnover among the temps, and will increase hiring for those workers who simply must be kept on longer. Seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other. The local economy is going to be impacted far more by MS's recent stock drops than a change in employment policy.
We clearly have radically different definitions of the word "abuse". Every single temp worker involved in this suit had at least two choices: continuing to work as a temp, or quitting. (And most of them probably had many more options.) By choosing to work as temps, they demonstrated that they were better off with Microsoft than without it. I fail to see how this mutually beneficial agreement can be termed "abuse".
Sure. But the thing is, MS treated the temps like employees in every way except in name, and in the benefits. These were refused them. It's all of the quid and none of the quo. The settlement establishes that the workers of whom special 'employee-esque' demands are regularly made need to really be employees and get the perks therof, and that those who are treated as actual temporary 'here today gone tommorow' workers are also treated as such.
Among the tech crowd there are a lot of contractors who like the flexibility and pay, but most temp workers do not get those benefits either; the largest employer in the country is a temp agency. Why? Because so many businesses hire temps instead of employees. Why? So as to dodge the benefits programs that employees had to fight to get in the first place. I'm sure that there are taxes and workplace requirements that can get skirted around too. For MS and other businesses (e.g. Amazon which has been harrassing labor organizers recently) it's about money. They couldn't care less about why you want to be a temp.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I know many large companies who hire multitudes of contractors for this very same reason. But, as far as I know...having a bunch of contractors is legal. Any ideas why temps are not legal but contractors are? I will admit not having read the article..i never have bothered signing up for "free NY times."
That's funny, cos I like to do incest fantasy role-playing with my g/f, so that might have stung me a bit more than I'd like to admit.
Still, no harm, no foul.
We may both retire with our honour intact, to quasi-flame another day...
In any case, these are computer programmers and technical types - it's not as though they are working making footballs in the third world for tuppence happeny a day, is it?
What makes you think they're techies? Do you believe that of the 42,000 people working for Microsoft, 41,999 are techies, with maybe 1 other person to answer the phones?
The article doesn't give any numbers, but I would bet that most of these permatemps are not techies, but secretaries and support staff, who do not have as many options when it comes to seeking employment.
Ask most any contractor who has been involved in 'temp' labor, and they will tell you that their pay scale is significantly higher then that of full time workers for the same job.
There have been several posts to that effect just in this discussion. I personally know someone who was offered full time employment on two occasions before he accepted it, because it involved a significant reduction in his pay.
You are failing to think about basic economics here. We don't live in some simplistic populist jingoism pipe-nightmare [vs. pipe-dream] of evil corperations opressing poor workers. Workers, myself included, voluntarily sell our labor to firms that desire it to our mutual benefit.
If anything, forced state regulation and forced benefit packages, by changing the underlieing economic situation and forcing coorperations to pay for many things that I don't necessarily want them to pay for, or even use or find advantage from are actually evil, not the corperations who want to purchase my labor. Any contractor, [indeed, ideally, any laborer] is a buisness, a minitaure firm in and of themselves, looking to negotiate the best profit that they can from what price the market will bear for their services.
State regulation and forced 'benefits' are of no benefit, they merely
A: reduce the salary the company can afford to pay me [thus locking a good part of the money I earn into the 'benefits' the state thinks are appropriate for my interests, vs. my own conception and determination of my interests]
B: Put me in a situation [r.e. the results of this lawsuit and similar ones, to the degree that it sets a precedent] where the company will fear being liable if it actually keeps me on as a worker, thus you hear about intel preventing anyone from -ever- working for them for more then 2 years total in their lives, and microsoft having to fire competant temps who enjoyed willingly working there [and getting paid more then the forced 'benefit'ed official full timers] after a fixed period, [6 months, if I recall, and they have to wait at least 100 days before they can reapply].
The only person who is having his freedom lessened is the temp worker, in the name of the nanny-state knowing what is really good for him.
The real irony is that the forced benefits laws are enacted in the sincere belief that they will better the state of the worker, but this is naive and flies in the face of any economic reality. The 'benefits' are a big piece of the total dollar figure that the firm considers you to be worth and thus are willing to pay.
---
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
I wonder if I might be so bold as to inquire who, initially, implied that the many aspects of your personality are of a contradictory nature. I know many people who possess similar traits, but do not feel the need to champion them in such a pretentious manner. As long as you insist on keeping such as tack, you might as well add 'Prick' to your litany of accolades.
Naturally, that's just my point of view, and your mileage will certainly vary.
Tristan.
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
When I was in San Diego, I was aghast at how expensive housing there was. Houses were approximately 200% more expensive than in Flordia where I live.
BTW, this lawsuit is a very scary thing for those of us who ARE contractors. Because of this lawsuit, many companies are making it tougher to higher contractors. Intel, for example, will now only hire any one person as a contractor for a total of 2 years for that person's entire life. So, if I work for intel on four seperate NON-continuous contracts that last 6 months each, I could never be hired by Intel again unless I was taking a full-time employee position.
As a contractor, I bring home approximately a 4x larger paycheck then I could by working as a full time employee. Granted, the security is not there, but with the contact base I have established over the years, I have never had trouble finding contracting work. (I'm self-employeed, I don't work through a contracting firm).
In any case, because of this Microsoft court case, my job opportunities have become fewer. It's not enough to hurt me yet, but I could see this being a problem in the future.
If people don't like the benefits they are getting from Microsoft (i.e., none in this case) then they should STOP working for Microsoft. It's ridiculous that this should have even been taken to courts. You ALWAYS have the option of looking for other employment if you don't like Microsoft's policies. What a bunch of whiners.
Why would an employer prefer to "hire" people as contractors rather than employees? I think it is the cost, and not just that they want to screw people over and not pay them. Here are some things that employers have to pay for (whether they, their employee or anyone wants them to pay for):
If they "hire" someone as a contractor here are their expenses:
That's it. I'm sure some companies take advantage of not having all those other costs by paying the employee less (i.e. actual wage minus bookkeeping costs) instead of paying them what they could without all the regulation costs. But then some people here were saying they (as contractors) are being paid anywhere from twice to four times what they get as normal employees. So some companies are not taking advantage of contracting to screw people over. Even if a company pays a contractor quite a bit more than a normal employee (i.e. what the normal employee sees as his wage), then the company is probably saving money: but getting the same work.
Rachael
"Go Forth Ye Lemmings and Propagate"
Because contractor expenses count as expenses to vendors, while they are an expense, they make it appear as if your company is getting all this work done with far fewer employees than it really is. This is pretty significant as I understand that high-tech companies often employee as many as 40% of their staff as contractors.
If I were a stockholder in any high-tech company (I got out well before the bubble burst) I'd be enraged at this.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
I've seen a bad trend here in Silicon Valley, companies hiring pernament employee's to do 1 or 2 major tasks then firing them.
Last job I worked at I was supposed to get a VPN solution running for the company, unfortunately the guy running the boxes down at GLBX could never make the time to give me some guidance. When I complained to management they excused his lack of co-operation.
So I tried my best, after a month they started giving me the look of death, and low and behold the company got restructured. I was told they would let me keep my job until I found another, fortunate for me I found a better job.
Over the course of the last two years i've seen companies like this several times, its been quite a roller coaster ride just to stay employed.
Another nameless company hired me to convert word documents to HTML back in '95. I showed them the word 95 to html converter and I was fired the next day.
Yet another nameless company hired me to automate their windows98 installs and integrate their software distribution with SMS. It took me 3 months to complete, and a week after it was tested and verified I got fired again.
Point i'm trying to make here is this. Companies know that contracters are expensive, temp agencies are a pain in the ass, not to mention there is a loss of control. It's easier for them to have a HR person fill out all that paperwork, hire who you need for a job, then fire them. I've been a victim to it enough times to have a tolerance. Here is my advice...
Make Freinds with a lawer.
Send e-mail to lawer stating "i think they are going to fire me lets sue"
make sure you disable screen savers and power saving for your monitor.
Bad sysadmins fix stuff all day, good sysadmins keep everything runnning so they can read your e-mails and make jokes umongst themselves. Chances are if your gonna get fired they're sniffing your packets, reading your e-mails, and a bunch of stuff you don't wanna know about. Just make sure to have 1 corrospondance a day with your lawer and they'll let you keep your job till you find a new one.
--Toq
It seems to me that most of the posters on Slashdot are Libertarian, or else the moderators are, because 99.99999% of the high-rated replies up until now have been: "Oh my god! Contractors are doomed! They chose to work for Microsoft for no benefits, it's their fault! They could choose to leave!" and varying explanations on the theme that offering employment with no benefits is *good* for employees by giving them that Libertarian buzzword, "freedom", to use their slightly inflated paycheck how they wish.
Perhaps, for the sake of balance, we could approach the "choice" argument from the side of Microsoft. Microsoft had a choice: they could employ "temps" that weren't really temporary, and in doing so avoid being forced to pay a living wage *and* provide the benefits all other employees of the company got, or they could get their butt sued. They got their butts sued. Rightfully.
I was employed at SAIC for two years as a temporary worker, and nearly everyone in the building with me was also a "temp". A lot of those guys had been a "temp" for two years before I even got there, and were still there long after I was gone. The guys who weren't "temps" were contractors (I make the distinction between office grunt temps making $10 an hour and contract programmers who were pulling in $40). I think there might have been about 10 honest salaried employees with benefits and vacations, and those just happened to be the managers and bosses.
I find the "choice" argument to be tiresome, repetitive, and boring. It fails to acknowledge that far too many permanent, salaried jobs with benefits are being replaced by "temps" who get an option to buy agency health insurance after a YEAR of employment with the agency, and with no end-of-employment date in sight. I really like this settlement, because it sends the message that companies should hire temporary workers because they want the flexibility for short jobs, and not because they want to bypass labor and wage laws.
Please make sure, in the future, that an argument about "choice" actually includes two fairly rational choices. Choosing employment vs. unemployment is no choice at all. This industry is dominated by rent-a-workers, and folks looking for positions with tenure and a chance for advancement need not apply.
At least that's been my experience seeking employment within the IT world.
Flamebait??? That is interesting. Suppose if anyone is proMS on any point they must be baiting people. For shame! Anyway, work for a company that uses contracters....When there is work they are busy and when there is none they sit at home. Risk vs. Reward...it is how the world works. -Angreal
No, I'm not a republican, though I'll gladly admit to being an asshole. :)
I worked on Win2K TCP/IP on security and performance related issues. I actually did quite a bit of programming for them. This was in 1997-1999 btw. I know several people who had been there for over a year without being hired on full time or receiving any benefits whatsoever. Myself included.
In addition to that, the working conditions weren't that great. In fact they were exceptionally stressful. I worked 90 hour weeks for months in a row. They would not allow for time off to visit my family on the other coast when I requested it.
The environment was VERY political. I was once chewed out by a more senior developer for proving him wrong on a technical point in a meeting.
Many people slept in their offices or outside of them. I woke up with keyboard prints on my face several times..
The situation was not like that in all groups, but I know that I won't work for them again.
Pity is, the obvious, Microsoft doesn't recognise that experience is a resource and would risk these people leaving rather than giving them fair treatment.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
But those conditions aren't horrendous. Frankly, I find it rather offensive that you think that the conditions I find (found) to be reasonably comfortable are so damn horrible. Horrendous is when you don't have a roof over your head and just plain can't eat, not when you're buying the cheapest sh*t you can and (resultingly) being well-fed. Horrendous is when your young kids are left uncared for while both parents work, not when you can't give them toys and their own room and take the family out to dinner on occasion. If you think that owning a car, buying food at the (overpriced) grocery down the street and having a dispensible income should be guaranteed to everyone with kids -- sorry, sir, I disagree with you.
If you remove regulations from the marketplace, wages and quality of life for the underpriveleged will fall faster than teenage lady garment workers onto a hot New York sidewalk.
This is a good one. I was looking for one having to do with burning women in a locked chicken processing plant, but couldn't make the words come right.
Well, you said it. Look, this is comparatively simple; it is a principle of contract law that you cannot enforce a contract whose provisions are illegal.
Wacky gedankenexperiment example: You and I enter into a written contract wherein I agree to sell you several kilos of methedrine at well under the market price. (No, I don't know what it is.) You give me the dough. I stiff you on the meth. You sue for injunctive relief to make me cough up the drugs. You get nothing, because the provisions of the contract were for illegal acts.
Real-world example: You are an hourly employee working for EvilCo. in their factory, making EvilWidgets. State law requires that hourly employees be paid time and a half if they work more than forty hours in a single week. Your employer asks you to sign a piece of paper saying that you will work forty-five hours a week at base pay. You work at the job for six months before you meet a disgusting, slimy lawyer at a party. He convinces you to sue for back overtime. You win. (The lawyer gets most of the settlement, and, unbeknownst to you, sleeps with your wife.)
Do you get it? It's illegal. The courts enforce laws.
The laws are mostly designed to do things like protect naive underage workers, migrant workers who might have poor command of English, and so forth. But they apply to everybody.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
I mean, aside from the fact that we all despise microsoft per se, is this necessarily a good thing? Temp agencies have done much to contribute to flexibility both for the companies who hire [they have the option of contracting for labor when needed], and for workers [whose skills are commodified, allowing them to move from assignment to assignment with a great deal of flexibility and variety].
Most importantly, though, is that temp work allows the circumvention of what some would say can be rather rigid state-mandated benefits packages, which significantly increase the cost of labor, and more importantly decrease the freedom of a worker required to recieve those benefits to concievably use those resources to some other better purpose or utility of their own choosing.
Face it, the marginal decision as to whether or not to hire a worker is based two primary factors, the benefit of the work recieved, and the cost of paying for it. In traditional regulated full time labor large companies are required to offer all sorts of benefits, [many of which are of no use to some workers, i.e. paid family leave is required, but some workers are single and never have any oppurtunity to take advantage of it, nonetheless, it is factored into the cost of their employment and the determination of their salary].
If rigid benefits packages weren't required, workers would have higher salaries as a result, and be able to utilize that money however they wanted, being it taking a vacation, purchasing quality health coverage [or passing over health coverage for the less risk-averse].
Temp agencies have come to allow a circumvention of these rigid requirements, to the benefit of both the workers and the employer. Now that this 'loophole' is being closed up, do you think there will be nearly as many temp jobs available at microsoft [or other companies]? Nope. They will have to make sure that the workers really are temporary; people will be let go when they would otherwise have been kept on [and been wholly willing to do so as well] because, although their positions are justifiable without benefits [and obviously desirable by the workers, or they wouldn't be working there in the first place], they won't be with them.
It is a true shame that some people some an oppurtunity to exploit the system and argue that they had a right to the traditional entitlements, even though that hadn't been part of the deal, and thus ruin it for future temp workers who liked the idea of contractual integrity.
---
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
I don't think the corporation "used" her or any other temp. They hired outside people through the contracting agency. That's what the agency's business is: to market their product, in this case people. Just because they are called 'temps' doesn't mean that the job is a temporary one. It could be for a few weeks or several years. The point is, the company is using a tool at their disposal. If a 'temp' decides they want to work at the company then they should apply. It's their choice. They aren't getting deprived because they are a temp. It was their choice and they are getting paid by their company - the contracting firm. That's their job. If they have a problem with it, leave like anybody else would leave a 'standard' employee position and seek your fortunes elsewhere.
You mention the conditions us poor, educated, in demand, IT people work in. In some cases it's true and a lot of time the extra hours are unnecessarily forced on us by management to make deadlines some clueless marketing person agreed to. But again, that's the job. Software development and IT is full of unexpected pitfalls (what software does 100% it is documented to do...hell for that matter 90%). But it's not just IT people whose job demand unpaid overtime or that little bit extra. Practically every other job demands this at some point or another. I don't necessarily feel sad for IT people and the 'horrendous' stress they are put under. Try switching places with a cop or fisherman sometime!
It's the career we've chosen and it's up to us to decide when we've had enough either with our current employer or our career. We're all adults and are responsible for our own lives.
I have been a contractor for some time now. I usually have contracts with terms around 6 months. However, I prefer to stay as long as possible if the employer wants. This way I can get some stability in my line of work, and I get pretty decent money too. I think MS's new temp worker policy is a loss for temp workers/contractors.
The SFGate says: But that's peanuts compared with Seattle, where the average annual income of $129,330 gave tech workers far more money to spend than their counterparts in San Jose, who made $85,100, according to the study by the American Electronics Association.
Explanations?
So, I'm a temp. Have been for 9.5years (plus summers before then). I've never had any other kind of work except freelance contracting.
On one hand, I think this decision is a dreadful precident which will have a chilling effect on my career. Though I don't agree that the "most important" aspect of temping is in anyway a "circumvention" of employment regulations, temping is a path actively and freely chosen by some of us, because of benefits of that mode of work. And it worth mentioning: some temp agencies have benes. I am offered health insurance, 401(k), etc. by mine.
On the other hand, I remember 1993. Do you remember 1993? March/April, in particular. It was the bottom of the Recession. Remember the recession? I was doing reception jobs and being grateful to get them. One of those reception jobs was at, of all things, an employment agency. The Sunday before I started they had run an ad in the Boston Globe advertising five basic draftsmen positions. I started manning the phones on Monday morning, and the switchboard had lit up like the proverbial christmas tree. But not with draftsmen. With *architects* -- guys with 10 years of schooling -- with CAD/CAM experts with advance degrees -- all desperate for a job, even an entry level draftsman job.
It was around then that I got one of the worst temp jobs I've ever gotten. A certain University had screwed up some safety records big time. When I got there I found out how and why that had happened:
The U. had a two-tiered employee structure. Some employees with "normal" or "regular" employees. Others were "temporary", though in this case, it referred not to people hired through a temp agency but through people hired directly by the U. as "temporary employees". As such, they got no benes, less pay than the regular employees, and could be fired at any moment for no cause and with no warning. As it happened, the person neglecting the safety records was (A) a regular employee and (B) a bosom buddy and co-religionist of both the president and vice-president of that division. Every "temporary" employee in the division knew the safety records were being screwed up, but didn't dare report the responsible employee to anyone because they would lose a job they considered themselves lucky to have.
Someone below asks "who put the gun to their heads", to which, I confess, the obvious-seeming to me answer of "why, Ron Reagan and his pet recession" leaps to my lips. Regardless of whom you blame for the recession, corporations were quite ready to use the power a buyers market in labor gave them.
The idea that the market for labor is in any way a free market is patently ludicrous. As a temp, I actually interact with the labor market in a way which is a thousand times more market-like than someone who is a permanent/direct employee -- I sell my time by the hour on the open market -- and I am constantly astonished at how unfree the market is.
The demand of laborer for money (that is, the reciprocal of demand for labor) is brutally inelastic. While critics of consumerism are quick to point out that if people had less consumptive lifestyles they would need less money (e.g. the frugality movement), they always neglect to notice that the single greatest financial obligation of most debters is mortgages/rent.
Before the industrial revolution, "employment" as we think of it was a option, not a requirement. One could stay on the farm and work land that one or one's family owned. Indeed, the ideal of the farmer-citizen was part and parcel of the ideal of freedom to which the country aspired. Even if one did not own a farm, to own one's own house was considered basic. Today, to own a house is merely an aspiration for many people; attempting to do so chains them to jobs which in no way can then be considered gotten by free and uncoerced contract.
We are quick to condem a supplier who illegally drives all competition from the market so as to be able to fleece the buyers; we call that monopoly and have made it mostly illegal. But what about when a company manages to become the only source of demand -- for labor? If are a draftsman and you live in an area which once had 10 architects offices, but now has 1 architect's office, what will you do if the one remaining employer offers you exploitative terms of employment? You either take it or you change lines of work or you move. Choices two and three have non-trivial expenses associated with them, especially seeing that their costs are set by markets which in turn are often tied to the labor market.
So it is that when a market for labor collapses, the housing market does likewise (making it even more financially punative for homeowners to try to sell one's house and move) and other markets for labor also suffer (when architects stop hiring, often so too must general contractors, e.g.)
In light of this, I understand perfectly how badly these permatemps could have been screwed. The only employer of technical people in town won't hire them directly, but offers exploitative terms. Other issues make moving or changing fields prohibitively expensive.
I'm certain I don't know the solution to this problem. But its obviously nowhere as simple as most people are trying to make it out. It's not simply that temping exploits the temp (I am a temp and I am usually less exploited than direct employees.) It's not simply that the labor market is (or could be made to be) a free market (because it isn't and it can't).
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Anybody can give away 1 or 2% of their net worth. It seems like a lot but let's be honest is he "giving till it hurts" of course not. Bill Gates can give away 99% of his income and still live better then 99% of the population of the planet. Bill gates giving away a billion dollars is like me giving a bum a dollar.
War is necrophilia.
So let me get this straight. A bunch of low paid unskilled temps should lose their right sue corporations and force them to comply with labor laws so that a few highly skilled people making 6 figures can continue to make more money? Is that your argument here?
Hey these people exercized their legal rights, microsoft settled the suit everyone is happy. If MS thought they would win they would have pursued the matter further instead they settled for a few bucks. No biggie.
War is necrophilia.
> ... I'd gladly go to prision. I'd wear it like a badge.
Why? Why would you be glad to suffer under laws you find morally reprehensible? Would you not rather break the law and evade punishment?
Ryan
Well, really, you're better off than you were before. Would you rather that a middle-aged homeless man have a shack and one square meal and work like a dog for it, or that he have nothing?
Right now, it's the latter option; homeless bums get nothing. Giving them jobs costs the full minimum wage -- same as a more responsible high school dropout -- but they're (percieved as) more likely to be dishonest/piss of the customers/cost a lot to give (govt-mandated) healthcare, whatever. So by raising the minimum level which a homeless bum can get paid, you prevent those homeless bums who aren't worth that minimum amount from having anything at all. If your goal is to raise the base standard of living, these measures don't do much.
So what do you do? Make even those homeless bums who aren't worth minimum wage (in the eyes of a potential employer) recieve this 'base standard of living'? Now you've got this same base guaranteed both to homeless bums and people who work their butts off at minimum wage. Even if you make the homeless-bum-subsidy less than minimum wage, you're still reducing the number of people who are out in the workforce.
So frankly, I'd rather let people be 'abused'. It's just like folks working in Nike factories. Maybe they make $.50 a day, but if there were better jobs available in their area, they'd have them. Having even an abusive, coersive employment situation is still better for the employed than having nothing, and that's something a lot of liberals seem to forget. If these shoe factory workers were making $5.75 an hour, then they'd be making more than skilled labor in their areas, and you bleeding-hearts would be crying foul because we've gone from exploiting a weak economy to totally overturning it (reducing the number of practitioners of skilled trades, raising the cost of goods now that a large number of people are capable of paying inflated prices, etc).
The same thing applies to tech workers. If you agree to work on a temporary basis without benefits, and you let the company 'abuse' you, so be it. I say this as one of the "abused" population; I presently make something like 1/4 of what most of the people with my exact job description in my department at my company do, and with no benefits. However, this happens with my consent. YOU shouldn't stop in and tell my company that they need to either hire me on proper or fire me outright; if you do that, and I get fired, I'll be pissed. For that matter, if you do that, they hire me outright and they force me to move to the bay area and work full-time (telecommuting and working my choice of hours are part of my little agreement), I'll be pissed then too even if I'm making 4x the pay. In short, my agreement with my company is my own damn business, not yours. Keep out of it.
Btw, while I don't donate money to charity, I donate time -- lots of it. I volunteer for libraries (doing tech work for free), schools (teaching kids to program), and other good causes. Just because I'm a Cold Hearted Bastard in my political views doesn't mean I still can't be a nice guy IRL. I really do think people should be nice to each other. I don't think the government should force niceness on them, though, which is effectively what redistribution policies do, and I fear that most of the good-intentioned programs in effect today really act to the detriment of those they're intended to help.
I am not overly versed in the details of this case, but have seen similar things in other businesses. IT's not as clear cut as it may seem, and MS is not necessarily 'evil' for doing it.
Lets' say you go to work for a temp agency. That temp agency hires you out to MS, for a LOOONG period of time. What's the problem? MS is paying the agency, you work for the agency. MS typically also pays the agency a lot more than what you yourself make.
What's the problem? I mean, I'm not debating what the court decided... but really. Is it that clear?
A similar incident here (calgary, alberta). A company hired some 'contract' workers. This was by mutual agreement; the workers and the employer both wanted it this way. I forget how it started, but in the end, the courts decided that these were, in fact, permanent employees, and not 'outside contractors'. THey sat in company desks, used company equipment, and came to and from the company every day to do their work. They ruled the company had to treat them as regular employees.
The bottom line in any employer-employee contract is that the employee is free to leave at any time. If he does not, then he is not being 'abused' by the company for which he works. All whining about abuse of employees etc is besides the point entirely, IMO. The simple fact is that these employees have a choice, and they have chosen to work for Microsoft.
And Microsoft has chosen to do business in the US. In so doing, they have also chosen to do business under US employment law.
You can call somebody whatever you want, but the federal employment rules recognize job descriptions over job titles. In other words, if I hire someone as an employee, then tomorrow, even though they're doing the same thing under the same conditions, say "You're a contractor, you get no benefits, suck it up and deal," that ain't gonna fly with the IRS or the Dept. of Labor.
The IRS has a list of guidelines for whether you're likely to be an employee or an independent contractor. None of them is conclusive, nor is any combination, but the more items you answer "yes" to, the greater the likelihood that you're an employee. The IRS will also be happy to make a conclusive determination for an employer if they file a form SS-8.
The basic problem here is employers creating an invalid and unfair artificial distinction between employees and "contractors" to keep their costs down. I won't claim full impartiality here, since I worked as a "contractor" in a job where I too was really an employee, but the law is very clear and it's routinely flouted. Misclassification of employees is probably the most lucrative tax violation bar none that tech companies engage in.
In any case, these are computer programmers and technical types - it's not as though they are working making footballs in the third world for tuppence happeny a day, is it? Doesn't the geek community have better things to worry about than this?
Irrelevant, and silly to boot. A buck is a buck. If I earn $50K, that doesn't make it less wrong for a mugger (or my employer) to steal $20 from me than from a shipyard joe making $20K and supporting 3 kids.
We should take a leaf out of Bill Gates book, and help the truly deprived, and not scratch our own backs here.
Let's also not get all wet and sloppy about that just yet. Note that a) he's giving away blocks of MS stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, stock which they liquidate, and b) he gets a big fat tax deduction on it (I guarantee you he's in the 39.6% bracket, so this is not trivial here). So Bill G. gets to look good in the press, get rid of MS stock in huge chunks without alarming Wall Street (and mask his real sells at the same time), and take a huge tax break to boot.
All of which is irrelevant to the main issue here, I just note it for the record.
More importantly, this could suddenly reverse the dominant industry trend of classifying employees-in-fact as contractors to save a couple of bucks. I made your choice, and I don't regret doing so (for other reasons as well), but it's ridiculous that Microsoft and others get away with this. It's a "loophole" that never really existed, and it looks like some big companies might finally pay the price.
You can argue that some employment law is bogus, and I'll be happy to debate that, but let's not make a screwy argument about choice to let businesses weasel out of legal duties they've accepted.
-- Old Man Kensey
I've occassionally tried to post comments where I suggest that the market system is not absolutely perfect. All these sources were found from a lexis search, you probably can't get the stories from the original provider anymore. Here we go again....
The whole independent contractor system has tremendous potential for abuse. In 1996 the Toronto Star reported on low-tech companies that fire all their employees and re-hire them as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits. We're not talking high-tech firms with mobile, highly skilled work forces here. It's not nearly as easy for them to tell the company to go to hell as some assume.
The NYT reported on 7/20/97 that Pacific Bell laid off all its managers and offered them new jobs as independent contractors but took away all their benefits. All of the Atlanta Olympics technical workers were independent contractors who were required to sign away their right to sue for anything, including discrimination, etc. A quicke quote:
We're heading into a two-tiered economy," said Ms. Horowitz of Working Today, the advocacy group. "The first tier has a New Deal safety net, protected by all the different labor laws. Then there is a second tier that's short term, flexible, many of them independent contractors. That tier doesn't receive benefits or labor law protections.
"The labor law and social protections are completely out of sync with this work force. If the rules of the game are changing and people are going to become independent contractors, then we have to have a new safety net that serves these people, too."
OK, now we pre-refute the "free market is sacred" posts. Free markets work most of the time. They also fail to effectively provide critical goods and services sometimes. Utilities are a good example - people in rural America wouldn't get electricity without government assistance. Market entities don't factor in effects of their actions that don't relate to their profits. Pollution makes sense in a narrow economic sense, but only in that sense. Discrimination doesn't make economic sense, but the harms to an individual company from discrimantory policies are insignificant.
History shows the need for some government intervention in economics. Look at late-19/early-20th century labor conditions. Large monopolies were able to force employees to work absurd hours for minimal pay. Then we get anti-trust laws, labor regulations, etc. and along came the idea of the weekend. You scream at the top of your lungs about the perfection of market distribution, but the evidence indicates otherwise. It takes a truly stubborn person to look away from the evidence in their face.
Finally, many assume that employers and employees bargain from equal positions. Normally employers bargain from a much stronger position. If one company in industry x switches to independent contractors to avoid paying benefits, it puts tremendous competitive pressure on other companies to do likewise. The average person really doesn't have any option chance to reject these practices if they become widespread. Citing one's recent personal experience in the IT industry is worthless as a refutation. IT is experiencing a labor shortage of epic proportions which advantages employees in a way never seen before. It doesn't affect most people, and it probably can't last for ever.
I'm making literally 1/4 of what I made there. My quality of life is better. Not just a little better -- way better. I live in a bigger house (heck, I live in a house; I spent half my time there living in my cube or with friends), have a shorter commute, pay far less to eat out...
The people who voluntarily live in the bay area are insane.
The fact that this situation complies with the law is not sufficient to justify it. For example, going after DeCSS is complying with the DMCA, but that doesn't justify it. Numerous other examples can be made. If you think that these workers should get benefits or whatever, fine, but don't act like bringing a company into compliance with the law is sufficient reason to act. It's not.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Of course you could write that 2000$ dollars off on your taxes, assuming you donated to a non profit organization and kept a recipt :)
IMHO, this is entirely the temp worker's fault. They already work for a company...their contracting firm. They get paid and have benefits thorugh them. Why should they expect any benefits from their client? If they wanted MS to give them benefits, then they should have joing MS instead of their contracting co. Seems to me they want to double dip. Is that any different then a company hiring a large outsourcing company like IBM to do long term work for them? Imagine the IBMers working at this other company demanding that their client give them the same benefits as its employees.
Unfortunately, this decision is bad for the contractors. My sister was a temp for GE and was hired a few months before this case went to court. As a result of this case GE changed their temp policy and after one year, they just let her go out of fear she would sue them for benefits. It's ridiculous.
The temp's that brought this case against MS were just greedy opportunists. I have no sympathy whatsoever for them.
But what can we make of the feudal system of open-source? Sure, it's a better way to make software. But a lot of great ideas go uncompensated.
Some get rich while others work their tails off for an ideal and make just enough to live- or nothing at all.
www.ridiculopathy.com
I don't know about the specifics in the MS case, but I was hired as a temp by a small startup company 3 years ago. Then a larger company became interested in buying the startup and I was told that if that happened that I would be hired as a perm. employee. Well they got bought and I waited, and I waited. Finally they told me that they didn't want to hire "support" people [I am a facility tech. A job, BTW, that they need someone to do no matter what] so that they could show a higher percentage of "scientific" workers. Earlier this year the bigger company that bought the startup merged with an even bigger company. Still they said that they didn't want to hire "support people" [yet they hired a secretary for the head guy just 6 months ago]. Now we all have learned that, due to the merger, our small division is going to be shut down. All those perm. employees, including that secretary who has only been here 6 months, are getting from 6 to 11 months pay for severance. And me? I can't even get a letter of recommendation [it's against corporate policy]. Sure, I guess I had the choice to leave, but it was still better than not working. After all, I find that being employed is better than not [I've had a hard time finding work since I broke my neck a few years ago, but I'm not bitching about that; it's something that I know I have to deal with so I do]. It's just that, somehow, I just don't find this fair. But, hey, I already knew that life ain't fair. That doesn't keep me from being just a tad bit bitter and pissed off about it, though.
Metaphysicist
"If at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking until you do succeed"
- Cu
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
"I doubt Bill Gates regularily spends 10% of his income on charities" No, his Bill Gates Foundation is currently worth $22 billion...roughly 40% of his net worth. Top that.
I didnt make the pass but I saw it on a previous post. L/P slashdot200/slashdot2000 Just used it to gain access ;)
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
I have contracted with MS before. There is no dishonesty in their new rule... 365 days work, 100 days somewhere else. If you don't like it don't temp there. There isn't much to it. It is a great place to work, in fact the only place I heard that was better was Apple with their lounge rooms and hot tubs.
MS bases knowledge and skill before schooling. A guy I kno works there got a blue badge job and he hasn't seen a day of college. He is just a media guru.
I don't know why people bash the way a company runs itself on the inside when most people, (even those from Holland) haven't even seen the Main campus itself. It is work at its best! No cubicles, free drinks, free video gams on all the skywalks, especially foozball and shuffle puck. Great bosses and a real laid back atmosphere.
Why do Open-Source and scrap when you can do Open-Source and hav luxury to go with it. I hate pikers with their monosyllabic "MS Bad" attitude on everything branded MS. You mean to tell me nothing ever came out of Redmond that was reasonably good? Well the day of reckonning is at hand my friends.
The Linux community went up-in-arms over the fact that Whistler tested stable in early-early BETA.
"Oh it is a BS review"
"Oh it is still unstable"
"Oh... blah blah blah"
Fuck all of you with this holier-than-thou bullshit. Take your communistic OS and shove it up your ass. (Yes I said communistic, if you stop and think about it, Linux from any vendor, has Stalin and Castro written all over it. I mean, my God Redhat sports the colors of China! Communism was about everyone being equal, hmm... Linux is about everyone being equal... some kind of correlation here. After all Linus the wanna-be-demi-god is foreign... hmmm) The day Linux takes over 10% of the client market is the day Windows 95 becomes a standard again. IT WILL NEVER FUCKING HAPPEN!!!
Alright I'm done... now flame me as all of you pussy's usually do. I really like the ones that break my whole comment down into a series of sentences and comment to each portion, making it look like I said somthing one way and not the way it was meant. THAT IS WHAT PARAGRAPHS ARE FOR YOU FUCKING MORONS!!! they are there to get the whole point. You guys act like you are paparrazzi or somthing...
~AdmrlNxn
~Admrlnxn
"I got your mom in my trunk"
Sure, all I'm saying is that the contract in this instance should not be illegal.
You give me the dough. I stiff you on the meth. You sue for injunctive relief to make me cough up the drugs. You get nothing, because the provisions of the contract were for illegal acts.
Well, I'm not too fond of drug laws either, and that's a major reason why. With no legal framework, we may end up settling our disputes with firearms rather than in a court.
State law requires that hourly employees be paid time and a half if they work more than forty hours in a single week. Your employer asks you to sign a piece of paper saying that you will work forty-five hours a week at base pay.
If that's the case, I would have had a good reason to do so. Maybe I'm buying a house and need the extra money, but EvilCo isn't willing to pay overtime rates so I agree to standard rates. No foul, unless they had a gun to my head.
You work at the job for six months before you meet a disgusting, slimy lawyer at a party. He convinces you to sue for back overtime.
No he doesn't. I honor my contracts. (Plus I saw him looking at my wife.)
Do you get it? It's illegal. The courts enforce laws.
illegal!=wrong. Fugitive Slave Act, segregation, DMCA, etc, etc.
The laws are mostly designed to do things like protect naive underage workers, migrant workers who might have poor command of English, and so forth. But they apply to everybody.
Precisely, they are overly broad and restrictive. I'm not debating the existence or meaning of the laws which apply to this case. I'm saying they are bad laws that should be removed, as they unnecessarily limit freedom of both employers and employees.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
What more is there to say ? They have an anoying login and the Uname/Pword that I use is
slashdolt/slashdolt
The infamus Cypherpunks acount dosn't work.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I realize this might be hurting current contractors. I sympathize. But here is the issue:
It's actually cheaper for an employer to simply say 'all my staff are 'on contract'' and not pay benefits, deduct taxes, or anything else, and simply pay higher salaries. All other things being equal, the bookkeeping is simple. The real problem is... how is this any different than a 'permanent employee' as defined by law?
The problem isn't those who are benefitting from the situation, ie: contractors who are getting their way.. the problem is with companies saying 'well, we'll hire you as a contractor' and then just keep renewing the contract, becuase it's easier for them. In many places, it's illegal now.
Now, if I do programming on contract, and I work from home, on mostly my own equipment, pay all my own bills, etc, and simply collect a cheque for my services.. that is contract work.
If I go into their office, use their chairs, desks, computers, equipment, and office space, and work with their people all day, discussing with them, programming on the team with them, how can you say I don't fit the definition of an employee?
"Minimum/Living wages do one of two things, either they increase the cost of goods (increasing inflation, and therefore pricing things outside the wageearner's income) or increase unemployment (therefore increasing poverty and the percentage of unskilled labor in a population)."
Well now this is an interesting statement. In the past few years the minimum wage has been increased several times. According to your theory each time it was raised the inflation rate should have gone up as well as the unemployment rate. In fact is as you say increases in minimum wage actually CAUSES these effects then we should have a rich pool of data. Let's plot inflation and unemployment figures for the previous 30 or 40 years and mark on that plot each year that the miminum wage was raised (AFAIK it has never been actually lowered). If you are right there ought to a definite relation between the two if however you are full of shit and know nothing about this subject then there should be no corrolation at all between inflation and unemployment figures and the minimum wage. Really there is no need to guess, we can know this for a fact one way or another we have the data, we can prove it.
War is necrophilia.
I am a stockholder in companies that do this. Why get enraged? The cost to vendors and other sources of services is simply part of the cost of doing business. Whether they are developing product in-house, or farming it out, or paying contractors, it's still a cost of doing business.
Why on earth would I look at simply the # of employees, versus how much product they move? I also want to see how much those employees (the company) are spending to do it! It's not illegal, and it's not even shady.
so find another job! good golly why are people so damn lazy when it comes to finding something better to do! Especially if yer being fucked?
There was one poor guy on alt.computer.consultants that was making $30 an hour from his agency, but they were billing him to the client at $90 per hour!
This is one of the instances of unethical agency practices that led me to write Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Lets say I'm the owner of one of these two auto shops; and lets assume two mechanics are needed for each of these shops to operate. Lets also assume that because only four mechanics are needed in this small town there are only four people qualified as mechanics that live here; the one's trained by the owners of the auto shops to be mechanics.
Well if one of my mechanics suddenly decides to go join a commune, as a owner I've suddenly lost 50% of my workforce and am gonna be really screwed trying to either entice someone from another town to move here, or alternatively be short qualified help for a year while I pay to have some local kid trained to be a mechanic.
The employer has the ability to be just as easily screwed as the employee.
Abuse of owners is just as common throughout history as the abuse of laborers. Owners often lose their lives work and savings when countries outlaw or nationalize industries. Owners are also 'abused' (by your loose definition) when consumers no longer want or need their product. If you are for a 'minimum working standards' which employers must meet for employees, are you also for a 'minimum sales' in which consumers must purchase a given amount of product? They both derive from the same concept of entitlement!
So the government legislates that we work 40 hour weeks. Thats all great and dandy if thats what I want to work; but suppose I want to work (and be paid for) 60 hour weeks for 9 months then take three months off every year? Oops, thanks to the laws I can't do that. California has a law which roughly mandates a work week of 5 days, 8 hours each. But sysadmining sometimes requires 12 hour days when things are crashing, and 4 hour days when there's nothing going on. Thanks to california lawmakers I'm technically in violation of the law.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Please read why I feel you shouldn't either:
- Important Notes to Recruiters and Contract Agencies
- Market Yourself - Tips for High-Tech Consultants
At the very least, recruiters and contract agencies take 30% of your pay - recruiters take 30% of your first years pay, agencies take it the whole time you're a contractor. But if they can get away with it, they will take far more.And they're pushy and ignorant besides. How many of you have gotten a phone call from an agency who wanted to place you who clearly hadn't even read your resume, let alone understood it? The above two pages contain many horrifying anecdotes of recruiter and contract agency abuses, unethical practices and just plain stupidity.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
You can also see the story at zdnet at the following url http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2663 873,00.html
I believe NYT requires registration. ZD doesn't.. So its here if you want it.
Wah wah microsoft this, microsoft that. Christ. It's like a penis-envy game.
-
They are angry because it affects *them*, when, if they were truely altruistic, they would be worrying about the truely deprived.
There is a group of people, and it's a pretty big group, known as the working poor. I know, I've been a member of that group for many years. These are people who work just to get by. These are people who have no health benefits, no pension, no vacation, no security. Their wages barely cover necessities, and there is little or nothing left for savings.
These are the sorts of people who frequently work for temp agencies. And these are the sort of people who are abused by a situation like the one Gates, and many others, has been running. Sure, you have a choice not to work for him. But then you'll have a hell of a time finding another assignment and the rent's coming due. Or you'll be given the impression that this "starvation wage" job doing data entry or answering phones will turn permanent and you'll have the sort of paycheque that you've dreamed of. And then you get the rug pulled out from under you.
Don't let yourself be fooled. Sure, they're working. But it doesn't mean they're not needy. And it certainly doesn't mean they can't be abused.
but I really don't understand what business the courts have interfering in voluntary contractual relationships.
Lets see.
Contractors work under contracts. A contract is a divorce agreement between 2 parties. And, when 2 parties disagree, this gets settled by a judge.
Looks like Microsoft and said CONTRACTors had a difference of opinion, and a court, interperting the law, decided Microsoft was in violation of the law.
What would you rather have? No law? Congress pass a law/edict? Some form of government allowing this guy to become in charge?
This will accomplish little except to raise prices and take jobs away from people.
Errr, how can Microsoft raise prices on Windows when there are 'free' alternatives? Microsoft is VERY aware of price pressures. Look at the laughter of the $13000 price for NT 3.1. Then, look at how quickly NT 3.1 sales increased when the price wnet to $250.
And, if you listen to Brett Glass, the GPL is ment to take away jobs.
This court action will have no marked effect on prices or jobs.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
"The case only covered temps from 1986-1997." If I recall, that was THE most profitable time to be a Microsoft employee, in terms of stock options. A full-time employee who got a basic stock package in 1986 would have had a portfolio worth several hundred thousand dollars today, if not over a million dollars.
You state that "With full health, pentions[sic], and stock options, Microsoft employees are some of the best treated workers I know." But the people that we are talking about are not Microsoft employees, but temps. People who don't have the health, pension and stock options...that's where this case came from to begin with.
And for the kicker, MS ended up settling for a measly $97 million. Sounds like a lot of money, but there are estimated to be between 8000 and 12000 members in the suit who the money will be divided up between. Even in the best case scenario that's only around $12000 per person, BEFORE the lawyers take their cut. But you can assume that the lawyers will probably take a third of that...
The whole thing is a shame:
1) Contractors at Microsoft (orange badges) almost always made a higher salary compared to employees of similar job functions. Contractors, if and when they would become FT employees (blue badges), would take a significant pay cut to get all the other benefits.
2) MS consistently tries to hire the best people. MS uses contractors to "beta test" these new hires until they are sure that they will perform with a very high level. The only reason this is done is because of the communist labor & discrimination laws in this country, it makes firing MUCH easier. For tax reasons it is much better to have all "employees" - pay them less and give them deductable options.
3) Any "contractor" that was really good would become an employee with no trouble. Why would the company want a good worker not to be tied down with options?
4) The suit happened because a bunch of subpar whiners missed out on the great MS stock rush of the mid nineties. Now, that MS stock is limping a little I wouldn't be surprised to hear the same people, "I'm doing contract work but I'm being forced to be an employee"
5) If you do not like the conditions on which you were hired, you have the CHOICE not to work there.
6) These stupids laws and lawsuits will only give companies incentivies not to hire more contractors - meaning less choice for you, the WORKER!
-=t
Tell me, please, how temp workers--who you have already described as having "commodified" skills--have much of an option as a group? (And why would you imply that commodification is a positive thing? Do you feel better as a human to know that you are a uniformly-swappable cog in the machine of enterprise? I prefer to focus on the things that make me special, personally.)
Individuals may or may not have the ability to leave their uncushy temp jobs and find something comparable with a riskier company. But as a group, you can hardly expect them to walk out and find work. So, because Microsoft has the "weight" to throw around, and the ability to easily slot in a new temp, they aren't going to suffer, but temps in general must face pissing off their contracting company, and making a name for themselves as "difficult" and possibly losing their income.
Perhaps for the high-priced contractors of the world this is "just the way things are", but some people just want to survive. Not all companies are as mercenary as Microsoft, but size breeds arrogance, and they are one of the worst offenders. I find that most companies treat their customers like they treat their employees. The reverse is also true.
Face it: Microsoft's general attitude for over a decade to both customers and its temps has been "take or leave it". Only, you HAVE to take it, because the only option is being shut out. So quit implying that temp workers have a rosy career path just waiting for them to "choose" not to work for companies that take advantage of their replacability.
Freedom to starve isn't any kind of freedom at all.
The fun project to explore the i386 was not clouded by visions of piles of money and strippers in a bar.
2.0 was smp-aware, Windows 98 _still_ isn't and never will be. 2.2 and 2.4 improved on it alot.
I realize SQL Server is great, fortunately there is more than one SQL server out there, and some of them are free.
Linus was joking about world domination when Linux users were in the 6 digits, now there are stories about it on every web page, newspaper, magazine and news television.
Linux 2.4.0
"It'll be out any day now..."
You may think 2.4 is "late" but do you realize how late Microsoft's latest and greatest NT5 was?
2.4.0 will be out when it is done, and not before, perfection, not delivery dates drives this project.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
This sort of thing happens so often that I wasn't sure it was illegal. Here in California it is a common practice to hire people as temps and have them work exactly 32 hours so they remain ineligible for benefits, which are mandated by law for full-time employees.
There is the flip side to being such a large corporation: whereas small corps only shaft five or six employees at a time, MS generates 8-12000 disgruntled disenfranchised ex-serf-wanna-bes. Those kinds of numbers seem to generate sufficient land-shark interest.
I bet Jenny Craig is laughing in her size 5 grave right now.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
I'm not sure how personalized and fading menus help. When I use windows, those are the first things I turn off, with tweak ui I turn off all animations and set the menu scroll speed to maximum, after all, I want to start my program right now, not watch animated words magically appear on my screen.
Speaking as a contractor/temp work, I can tell you something that may or may not be relevant. In every contract for every assignment that I've ever been offered, the duration was a specified period of time (however long the project is expected to take to complete), after which the company was supposed to either a) cut me loose or b) make me a permanent offer, unless the project went a little long at which point they could extend the contract for a fee untill the original project was completed.
Now, it's not too much of a stretch to see MS stringing along contractors/temps with the notion that they may get a position as an employee if they stick it out just a few more months as a temp.
Maybe not, but there's going to be some line somewhere. If not drugs, let's say a contract between consenting adults for murder for hire. I decide not to rub the guy out, you sue for injunctive relief. I'm trying to picture the court ordering me to kill Anthony "Little Knuckles" Capistrano.
Even if you remove these laws today, the permatemps still win their case. Ex post facto...
Am I correct in assuming you favor no labor laws whatsoever? I, personally, like having my market value artificially set a bit too high. It hasn't caused any disastrous depressions that I've noticed -- and the absence of labor laws didn't ever prevent depressions, panics, plagues of boils, whatnot.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
They should take their disgruntlement out on the source... and steal it and release it to the Open Source community so that we can all laugh at it!
Now I've seen it all!
---
Appended to the end of comments I post? 120 chars?!
I know I'm in a serious minority here, but I really don't understand what business the courts have interfering in voluntary contractual relationships.
This will accomplish little except to raise prices and take jobs away from people.
--
He sure is - that's why he recently gave a Billion buckaroos away - making your point irrelevant.
Motivation is irrelevant, also. Everybody is selfish, that is natural. It is the pressures of society that make people behave in an altruistic manner. Altruism is just a form of selfishness, almost always.
But it doesn't matter, the fact is that he gives *lots* of his own hard earned cash away.
That's why it makes me laugh to see everyone here moan about MS's employment practices. They are angry because it affects *them*, when, if they were truely altruistic, they would be worrying about the truely deprived.
It's not so much that it surprises me, it just annoys and disappoints me, that's all. But it's human nature.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
You're absolutely correct. I work for a divison of GM now, but I entered here as a contractor 3 years ago.
The Microsoft case changed the way this company treated contractors. Used to be you were part of the team, invited to celebrations, company parties, etc.
That's not bad as I was used to it, but it is somewhat disappointing.
Now they make it quite clear who is an employee, who is temp.
It's also resulted in less of a reliance upon contractors.
But there have been other factors which have hit the contracting/consulting world. It's becoming increasingly difficult for these companies to maintain business.
to anyone's head? The temps' knew when they were going in what their pay and benefits were, and they could have rejected the offer if they found it unacceptable. Instead they took the jobs then turned around and sued Microsoft.
I interviewed at hotmail shortly after they were aquired by MS. They wanted me to sign the 'standard microsoft paperwork' which had terms I could not agree to so I chose not to sign and went somewhere else. These people had the same option but instead entered legal contracts with Microsoft for their employment then turned around, breached their contracts, and sued Microsoft for damages. This is rediculous. Although this affects microsoft directly, all employers are now going to be wary about taking on non-employees, making contractor's lives more difficult.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
It doesn't seem that there was anything even close to a promise, let alone an exchange of consideration, in which Microsoft promised people benefits, or that they would only be employed for a certain duration of time (they could quit whenever they wanted)
Where were the temp workers wronged? They weren't expecting benefits, they didn't receive them. They received employment at the amount that they work for..
Any objection to this system would be an objection to the temp agencies as a whole- not what Microsoft did. Temp workers certainly weren't wronged; given that they don't receive benefits they generally carry home more dollars per week than their full-time equivilent (of equal experience, etc)
-bugg
its not insane nor is it dishonest. please explain how it is dishonest.
nothing prevents these workers from getting full time employment at MS or part time employment elsewhere. there's a reason they are called "temps".
many other companies have similar rules. Apple Computer for one has had a nearly identical temp policy for at least 10 years. the policy is there to protect both temps and full time employees, it does not benefit the company in any way except to protect them from law suits.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/pressroom/default.a sp
Check out how much Bill gives away this year.
I remembers hearing that on his death, all of his money is going to the trust, aside from under a 100 million going to his family - No idea if this is true, can't find confirmation on the web.
Well okay, many temps felt screwed, because they realized that they could have earned much more.
But, wait a moment, aren't you forgetting two things here?
Firstly, most temps are people that don't WANT a full time job with the same company for a variety of reasons [family commitments, university / college, etc.].
Second, why did they take the job if they weren't happy with it - more - why did many of them stick around for years [even now], only to turn around and ask for more afterwards?
I'd have to say that this pure greed on behalf of the temps. "Hey their is a class action suit and if we join and complain, we might get some free cash".
This has NOTHING to do with *fairness* or with treating Temps and Perms equal.
In a time were software and dotcom hacks are sought after world-wide, they can pretty much write their own ticket. It appears to me that seeing this, the temps mainly envied the guys who are better off and tried to get some extra bucks.
So, now M$ shares lost over 50%. That means the Perms' benefits are worth much less - will the Temps turn around and share some of the free cash
with the Perms?
In theory a temp position is a position that is temporary, not just the person filling it. If the position is permanent. MS is using temps as a way of cutting cost, never a populer thing with the guys and gals working hard for peanuts in these positions. But these positions are one not tricky, and benefits are simply other forms of payment. An employer is going to try and pay their employees as little as possible, can't blame them really. I'm just glad the pay with one hand, take with the other practises of the turn of the century are gone. A fair wage is what you were promised, up front, with no tricks to lessen it.
i don't know about the rest of you chumps, but i've worked lots of temp jobs at places like rental companies, gas stations, and shitty shitty "alphabetize these" jobs. personally, benefits or not, i'd go temp at microsoft! shit, who could complain about not getting benefits when you're not having to say "have a good one" after every fill-up?
context! context!
love
grizzo
www.grizzo.com
it's 100% grizzo
grizzo: totally insecure, but very convenient.
I realise that last comment is controversial - it mentions Bill Gates! - but I said it to shock everyone into thinking for once, and stop being emotional and selfish
/. to get everyone thinking instead of being emotional.
Let me get this straight.
You mentioned Bill Gates in a sentence on
Great idea!
"And like that
There isn't a firm rule to define when someone is an employee or not, but the general test (from IRS ruling 87-41) is that you're not if you satisfy most of The Twenty Factors. Here is a summary of them.
This basically means:
- The contractor keeps his own hours
- The contractor provides his own equipment and office space
- The contractor takes on the financial risk
- Whether the contractor is working, or could be working for more than one firm at a time.
Really, the 20 factors are not a bad way to do business if you really are an independent business as I am, but in no way do most contractor/client relationships satisfy them.Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
It's even worse here in Rochester. A certain major company HQed here that shall remain nameless has been known to lay off its workers and THEN hire them back as temps.
:P
I'm currently working in a department that has two full-time and one part-time permanent staff members -- and ELEVEN temps, at least one of whom has been there for two years. At that point, the company needs to suck it up and admit that it needs to hire more staff.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
One of the reasons there are so many "permatemps" at Microsoft is because many contractors feel they don't want to take a pay cut for the privilege of being a full-time MS employee. Not to mention losing the time-and-a-half pay for overtime, which the salaried employees don't get despite the fact that they usually work far more hours a week than a contractor.
You won't read that in any of the articles about this case, though. You'd get the impression that BillG puts us all to work sweeping chimneys.
Microsoft took advantage of a loophole in the system, and the lawyers took advantage of Microsoft.
Microsoft was singled out because it is a really big and high profile target.
US West has been doing the same thing with their directory assistance people for years.
The real question is, will more high tech employees suddenly become pro-union when the third-world code mills ramp up production?
I'm currently a permatemp at Microsoft doing product support for FrontPage 2000. I've seen a lot of very competent people leave after 100 days.
:)
M$ has to spend money brining in new temps and sending them through training and such.
As far as I'm concerned, this is very bad for business. If you have a permatemp that is kicking ass at what they do, hire them! At least you can bring people in on a probationary basis and have them proove themselves.
Hopefully, we'll have the negative income tax soon for temps.
That amount includes exercised stock options from long-term employees. When I left MS three years ago, my annual salary was in the low $50K range after more than eight years on the job. However, my annual income was well into six figures due to exercised stock options.
The only reason they held off the feds so long on this was all the money they spend on lawyers. Treating employees differently by giving them different labels and benefits, when they really are regular employees is a clear violation of ERISA. And any company that does it needs to be whacked big time.
1. You must be a Congress-critter of the Republican ilk (or an immagration lawyer) to spread that kind of BS...Senior-level engineers of all kinds are among the most unemployed group currently in the US (DoL and DoVA statistics). Besides 'software engineering' is as much a joke as 'military intelligence.' The fact is that the work we do is more of an art than a science (when we _are_ competent, which we can't be on consistent 90-hour work weeks). Therfore, the correct term should be 'architect,' (or the classic 'developer') not 'engineer.' Keep in mind that a CS major/software engineer is nothing but an EE or Applied Math major who dropped out or failed Calc3/Math Analysis and/or Statistical Methods.
2. Even if you sincerely believe that there _is_ such a thing as a 'software engineer,' Microsoft employs a very few of them as realized by the final product. No self-respecting 'engineer' would tolerate releasing a product with 500K lines of code and and 69K reported bugs (W2K). No, Microsoft is, in the main, market droids and wannabes more worried about their options than the product of their labor.
3. As for the poster's recognition that MS is a political environment and your observation about not making senior people look stupid in meetings: he was making a correct observation about the culture, you missed the point entirely. MS _is_ a political and abusive environment. It's why they _have_ to offer stock options to the idiots who work there. Not to mention that making a 16-year-old (still a _minor_ in every state of the Union, Canada, the Commonwealth and the entirety of the EU) work 90-hour weeks, verbally abusing them because of their immaturity, and not giving them time to visit their family, is not just abuse of an employee, but probably a violation of the Child Labor and Welfare Act, as well as coming close to the UN definition of slavery. However, because the poster was an 'permatemp,' Microsoft was not liable, their sub-contractor whose employee the poster was, was.
4. It is _just_ because of these reasons that the fight goes forward in Redmond and the Valley. This is just the litigation phase. The _real_ fight is to unionize and enter into collective bargaining. The litigants against Microsoft are also the organizers of this effort. They have received death threats, been followed and harassed, and had their offices broken into. That was the litigation phase. Now, the giant is _really_ gonna take the gloves off!
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
The problem is that unions are for the immediate benefit of people in their roles as Laborers -- not in their roles as Consumers, and we cannot think of them as a solution to inequality.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
I hate to side with Microsoft in ANYTHING, but I personally know (as does just about everyone else in the Seattle area) current and former MSFT temps who make considerably more per hour than their 'permanent' colleagues, and can change groups pretty easily. In fact, most of them wouldnt go permanent if they were asked, because they don't want to take a pay cut. The fact is, these people are all adults who knew what they were signing up for. Did their contract paperwork say "contract-to-hire"? Not bloody likely.
These folks need to realize that you don't get something for nothing. Take some responsibility and that extra hourly wage, and sign up for personal health insurance. There's a great organization here in Seattle called Group Health Cooperative (www.ghc.org), which provides relatively cheap and easily accessible health care, at convenient locations.
As a former temp at Cisco (back in '95), who had no health insurance and also made less than the regular employees, I can tell you that MSFT's not the only place who gets away with this.
I know I am responding to flamebait, but I just can't help myself. :)
... well, he'd have less savings. It's not like he'd just drop that much money on a purchase.
The bottom line in any employer-employee contract is that the employee is free to leave at any time.
You must live in a different world than mine. In my world, people are only "free" in that they are allowed to make choices. That doesn't mean they can't be forced into doing something. It doesn't mean they can't be coerced. It doesn't mean that they can't be forced to do something really shitty because there's no other way.
If he does not, then he is not being 'abused' by the company for which he works.
Let's take a real-world example.
I'm a middle aged man, and have recently become homeless. I havn't eaten in two days, and it's been months since I've had anything other than garbage scraps. Someone offers me a job, saying, "I'll give you a shack to live in, and one square meal a day. It will keep you alive. In return, you must work for me twenty hours a day, digging trenches. You must remove an entire shovel full of dirt from the trench each second. You get one break for your meal."
How could you say that if I were in that position, I'm not being abused?
A person doesn't need to have a gun to their head in order to be forced - there are many other ways of doing it.
I know this is a different situation, and I agree with what you said about them being techies and programmers. But that doesn't make it RIGHT, damnit. It's still wrong to hire someone on a temporary basis, keep them around for YEARS because they think they'll eventually get hired full-time, and then dump them.
Just my two cents.
Dave
P.S.: I donated $2,000 to charity last year. I made $20,000 dollars last year(working full-time), so that's ten percent. I doubt Bill Gates regularily spends 10% of his income on charities. Not to mention the fact that the 10% I spent meant I couldn't have a car, whereas the 10% he would have spent would mean
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
"the employee is free to leave at any time. If he does not, then he is not being 'abused'"
this is clearly a false statement and i find this type of 'logic' very disturbing. you would do well to devote more thought to your point of view.
I'm sure you are proud of your experience there and the work you did, but do the products coming out of Microsoft reflect "and the development environment always encouraged "off the beaten path" thinking" ?
My opinion is no. Reinventing symlinks, reinventing network protocols (with proprietary extensions that gain no functionality at all except to break cross platform compatibility), and integrating the browser into the Windows kernel are not my idea of advancements in personal computing.
So, the question is when are we going to start seeing the fruits of this multi-billion dollar R&D that Microsoft is funding by increasing the cost of thier operating systems and office suites
by 100% per year?
When win95 was out
"Windows 98 is going to be super duper!"
When win98 was out
"Win98SE is going to have increased fun and super happy ok gaming!"
When Win98SE was out
"Win2k is going to have the best of NT and 98 - plug and play, directx and stability (admitting unstable windows 98)"
Now that Win2k is out
"Whistler is going to be really really good"
See the flip side of all this is that they are admitting that thier previous releases are unacceptable sub-par pre-beta crap.
Customers consult with me about Windows ME, know what I say? Don't even bother, its Windows 98SE with some fluff. $129 for a new name.
Yeah right.
Although this practice is common in many, many, other U.S. corporations (and is by no means a good practice), this gets posted in Slashdot only because it is more fuel for the "MS=Evil Empire" fire. And in typical fashion, the Slashdot fanboys run to jump on the bandwagon. Lame.
You can also turn off the 'automagic' menu resorting... see www.regedit.com for more usability goodness.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Perhaps I don't fully understand the case, but it seems to me that a temp worker knows he's not getting benefits. Hence the reason that they are usually paid more per hour.
I worked for a company that used permatemps. It might be different from the way MS did it, but I interviewed with the company and filled out my half of a W-4. Only after I was "employed by" them did I find out that I was actually a contractor through a staffing company. No benefits, no paid time off... zip. At that point I realized they had very carefully avoided referring to me as an "employee of" their company during the whole process.
Contractors were second-class citizens in every way, including the attitude of some of the employees and management toward contractors as a class.
Turns out that since the company was owned by a parent, and ParentCo had declared "thou shalt not have more than X number of employees", they were hiring contractors in this manner to meet their staffing needs.
As near as I've ever been able to figure, this is the whole raison d'etre of this and various "staffing companies" or "contract agencies" like them. They never have any contact with the employees they've "hired", they just cut paychecks and issue a W-2 at the end of the tax year. Every other decision about the "independent contractor" is made by the employer who contracted with the staffer. If they let the contract employee go, the staffer just terminates them instead of reassigning them.
I even had it relatively easy. A bunch of people who were employees faced a choice of leave, find another job in another department, or get shafted when their departments were converted from employee-staffed to contractor-staffed. At that point all of customer support and all of QA were contractor-staffed.
I'm not saying all staffers and contract agencies work this way, or even most of them, but a disturbingly high number certainly seem to.
-- Old Man Kensey
Dear Anne Marie,
Not that I always agree with your Marxist analysis of everything, but I do value your voice here. I'd just like you to know that somebody here doesn't think you should suffer the indignities suggested by my brothers, merely for stating your opinion. Feel free to spout Leftist rhetoric... at least it will help balance out the monotonous chant of "leave us with our profits... we owe the world nothing" from the Libertarians.
I swear, they're as bad as jocks sometimes!
</troll>
Your post defines ignorant.
Gates has, quite opposite to the point you attempted to conjure up in your completely useless post, put forth over $15B this year into donations.
Seeing as he has a net worth of about $60B or so, I don't think that's "a very, very tiny percentage of his income."
You don't have to like M$, but don't speak about something you know absolutely nothing about. BTW, how large was the last donation you made?
Before you start to discredit others for their philanthropic endeavors, you should really look at what they're doing (and what the money is being used for) instead of being such an ass.
This has nothing to do with *nix or Windows.
No it wouldn't. How much do you want to bet their contract with the temp agency and the agencies' contract with MS didn't include any full-time hire clauses?
You can look at this as poor, fearful and powerless temps being taken for a ride by half-promises and innuendo by the greedy and sadistical MS, or greedy, self-interested temps playing both sides to get a better deal by screwing them both. As long as they work their agency gets a cut, MS has cheap(er) employees and the temps have nice machines to touch up their resumes on.
MS may not have played nice with the temps by dangling them a carrot, but rest assured the temps are no angels either. It's definitely not a breach of contract.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
I know this may come off a little randian, please pardon, but why can't this stuff be left to work itself out on its own? I am not so much a libertarian as I am concerned with this 'tort culture' that seems to be taking over here in the US. I think lawsuits like this are a major waste of time and money. I think these people new the deal they were gettiung into, and if they were actually valuable mindshare, they might have been hired full time from the get-go. Life is tough. But everything would have worked out OK if lawsuits like this were discouraged. consider:
If the situation were left to develop it's natural course, say by not allowing the lawsuit, there would eventually form a market around
providing temp jobs to an always hungry MS. Soon, a scarcity in temp workers might prompt a temp agency to offer benefits so as to attract the most qualified applicants, thus allowing them to charge a premium, etc. seems simple to me, and at the scale we're talking about, insurance premiums become pretty inexpensive.
As I look artound me, I see a lot of anger about corporate greed, but it is my feeling that much of bad corporate behavior is just as likely attributable to laziness. Both individual laziness and a type of interdepartmental reluctance to share credit. Any big company suffers this problem (excepts maybe those orcs over at Honeywell). But once the lawsuit started, MS was stuck: who would want to hire people that had just sued you? and so they played a stalling tactic and settled cheap. Which prevents any precedent entering the lawbooks, afaik ianal hand.
I would also like to point out that MS stopped handing out incentive shares to programmers and similar level positions many many years ago. This lawsuit was probably mostly almost definately about health insurance. I dunno though, I forgot and the nytimes is down or something right now. thanks,
mm
From what I have seen in Silicon valley, they treat their employees there better. Contracters do not get benefits, yes, but they do get good money. Full-time employees get competitive salaries for silicon valley work.
Of course, working for Microsoft in silicon valley tarnishes ones reputation, so Microsoft can be cheap with there employees in silicon valley the way they can with employees up in Redmond.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Isn't this the basis of this genius/crackpot (you make the call) who has a web site (and a Slashdot story about him) claiming that MS was actually *losing* money and not making money?
Ie, that they bury their true labor costs by printing shares instead of paying cash, if they had been paying true market salaries in cash they would be losing money. And due to an SEC/IRS loophole the shares they pay employees with don't have to be reported as expenses.
Anyway, reading the above gave me a deja vu..
This is exactly what the suit was asking for - To make the situation worse. When you deal with microsoft, this is what you get. When you choose to work for (or with; Talk to Sega) Microsoft, this is what you get. What is "this", exactly? Fucked.
In any case, this is what they asked for. They'd have been better off leaving well enough alone. Nothing was stopping temps from carrying out job searches (from home, where microsoft's proxies wouldn't flag them as looking for new work) and finding something new; Now, they'll have a deadline. How many people do you think can be placed in other jobs in redmond, anyway? Or even in Seattle?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Microsoft has thousands of headhunters staealing people away from Apple and Sun, and they don't even pay their secretaries?
The bottom line in any employer-employee contract is that the employee is free to leave at any time. If he does not, then he is not being 'abused' by the company for which he works.
... and usually the headhunter companies are run by real assholes... YMMV.
Coming from someone who clearly has no experience dealing with a headhunter temp company.
Here's how it works (experience comes from a family member in the tech area).
Generally the people who go to work for these temp companies are out of work, and unable to find a job on their own. When the headhunter finds you a job, they may pay you $14 per hour while the hiring company pays the temp company $25 an hour. In addition, the hiring company usually cannot hire the temp worker directly without paying a huge fee to the headhunter.
So most of you are thinking, wouldn't it be cheaper to just pay the large fee, and then hire the temp worker directly for, say, $20 an hour? You're saving $5 an hour! But the hiring company wasn't paying you any benefits before -- that was handled by the headhunter (if you're lucky).
So the point is, for most people in these situations, you are stuck. Your job is decent, and you need the work, but you are totally shafted compared to the other people you work with that were hired directly instead of through a headhunter. In addition, it's much more difficult to get a raise or "move up" in the hiring company as a temp worker, due to the red tape involved with the headhunter contract.
So why not just quit the headhunter, and get hired directly by the company you worked for, for more money? No way, the headhunter will have something in your contract that stipulates you can't go to work for the company for a set length of time (usually one year).
The simple fact is that these employees have a choice, and they have chosen to work for Microsoft.
No... these people work for the headhunter. The headhunter has a contract with Microsoft. It is not the same thing as CHOOSING to go work for Microsoft. The headhunter doesn't say, "Hey, do you want to go work for Microsoft?" They tell you about the job, you sign the contract, then you start working at company X, which turns out to be Microsoft or whoever.
My father has gotten screwed over twice so far in these situations
"And like that
We all know that microsoft can be a little sneaky sometimes right? So why should we be surprised. Now I know this is wrong, even for Microsoft, but this is very common so let's ease up a bit eh?
Now that the loophole is closed up? That's a bad thing??? So exploitation is OK?? Go see Kathy Lee Gifford - I bet she can get you a nice TEMP job at one of her overseas clothing warehouses.
Anyway - I am sick and tired of seing IT labor being shafted by corporate america. It'd be NICE if either we (a) unionized IT workers, or (b) the government started to crack down on the exploitation of the working people.
(This is speaking about US information technology jobs... what you do in your country is your own business - j/k )
------
Signature:
------
[Connection closed by foreign host]
I have been both a temp and a full time employee at Micro$oft, so I've seen both sides. The employee benefits were MUCH better, let me tell you!
I worked at their tech support center in Las Colinas, TX. One day, after support calls had fallen off for a month, they fired all of the temps. All of them. Without warning. We called it "the Great Purge." I'd already been hired on as a perm by that time, so I wasn't affected, but my roommate was still a temp. It wasn't very pleasant.
I can see why Micro$oft temps could build up a little angst, in other words...
Ah, I detect the scent of a sense of humour. All the references to sex, with children, vinyl objects (three, no less), and transvestism, PLUS the zinger at the end about "right-thinking God-fearing Christians".
You either have a sense of humour and are really bored, or you don't and you are easily enraged through text. Either way, you should get out more.
And my girl is 24. And I'm her boy. She blew me this morning before I went to work, where I'm getting paid to write this. Life is good.
So *you* go to Hell. I hope it warms your Christian heart a few degrees Kelvin...
(At least you took the time to read my posts. I was getting worried nobody appreciated my writing. Thank you for your continued interest and support!)
I'm not sure I'd trust SFGate to report anything accurately about Seattle, but that 'average' salary figure they quote of $129,330 is based on PAPER wealth from dotcom stock options. That meant next to nothing when they took that poll, and even less now, given market conditions. Yeah, it's certainly true that in parts of Bellevue and Redmond you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some Microsoft Millionaire looking for a way to spend money, usually in the most tacky and earth-polluting way possible (hello, fully-loaded SUV!), but they're definitely in the minority. (and I'd bet that their net worth's been brought low of late, too.)
Nobody here is getting the point(not to pick on you specifically, keep that in mind).
Everyone is talking about charity and you'd be better off, etc., etc..
Digging a ditch takes a certain amount of work, a certain amount of effort. Whether the digger be a Doctor, a student, a small business owner or whatever, that work is worth a certain amount of money.
I'm not forgetting anything either; I know you also have to take into account things like reliability, personality, personal intelligence, etc., etc..
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Thank you for seeing what I meant :)
That two grand I gave away really hurt, and I'm not kidding. If I had known exactly how badly I would have needed it, I probably wouldn't have given so much so often. That's just the way it is.
At least I know the various people who got it personally; I know they used the money well.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, would need to give up almost all of his wealth before it affected his life in any way.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
No, I was replying to a comment :)
The poster I replied to basically said, "No matter what happens, if you do something, it's your fault and nobody else is wrong."
What I'm saying is that there are many ways to take advantage of someone.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
"Or do you think that temp positions should come with job security? I mean, for god's sake, they're temps. They're supposed to be short timers."
Fine, but were those temps offered a choice between full-time and temp work, or were the positions themselves only available to temps?
If many more computer companies started offering only positions labelled as "temp" positions just to get away with providing fewer benefits, and it became increasingly harder and harder to find *any* computer jobs that weren't simply labelled as "temp" jobs, I'm sure you'd probably also agree that this doesn't sound like fair practice. Many computer companies just follow Microsoft's practices, so I'd be quite surprised if no other companies had also started trying to do this after MS did it.
So the problem with the ruling is it doesn't prevent 'abuse' of temps - the 'abuse' remains, but it merely really is temporary. Why would Microsoft pay all the benefits for a full-time worker when those positions can be more cheaply filled by hiring temps? As long as employees still have the choice it's probably OK, but many don't.
Sorry, I don't get this bit of moderation. The worst I could think up was maaaaaybe 'off-topic', but not really even. I can't quite tell why the above post was 'flamebait', either.
I agree with the general point - that companies hire temp workers to cut costs. But that's about as far as it goes. Microsoft can't simply turn all of their programming jobs into temp positions, because they'd have no continuity of staff - essentially, they'd have an army of short timers and would need to spend a signifigant portion of their time brininging the new hires up to speed.
Before the new policy decision, Microsoft could keep "temp" workers on the payroll for as long as they wanted, with no need to retrain them, and no need to hire them as full employees with benefits. That sucks.
I agree with you that MS will probably still continue to staff a bunch of temps, but at some level, that's their prerogative. The point is that this policy now makes it less adventageous for MS to hire as many temps, because they can't keep them indefinitely.
full time workers are much more expensive to a company. if MS can hire temps and contractors and keep them on projects for 5 years, 10 years or more, then they have no incentive to hire full time workers.
why hire a full time worker and pay out all the benefits (medical, dental, bonuses, profit sharing, stock purchase plan etc.) when they can get a temp to do the same work and just pay a straight wage with no benefits?
Apple computer has similar policies for contractors and temps for exactly the same reason. Apple lost a law suit in the 80's that was basically the same as this one.
because Microsoft's employees are addicted into playing GORILLA.BAS. They also try to port GORILLA.BAS to Win2k with Visual Basic .NET without any success. That's why Bill Gates cuts their benefits.
I though that this was normal. Many shops in my area us "Contract" staff that stay around for ever, even the ones you want fired. This could have interesting effects...
Dammit, the post above is NOT a troll. I'm a contractor at IBM and have been for a year and a half.
I agree with him. When my contract with them is done, I owe them nothing and they owe me nothing. We are both free to go at any time. This suits me more than permanent employment with them.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
because Microsoft's employees are addicted into playing GORILLA.BAS. They also try to port GORILLA.BAS to Win2k.NET with Visual Basic .NET without success. That's why Bill Gates cuts their benefits.
I worked at Microsoft for over a year and a half as a temp before going full time. Going full time was NOT an easy decision. Temps are paid dramatically more than full time employees and are not subject to a lot of the rules that full timers are exposed to. I actually turned down two full time positions before I went full time. When I finally went full time, I took a 40% pay cut (yup, almost half my pay went away-this was TOUGH), hoping that it would be balanced by the other benefits, especially stock options. While a temp, I WORKED FOR A TEMP AGENCY, not microsoft. So, if I didn't like my benefits or wages, I could talk to my agency and work with them. I happened to be providing services to MS, but my employer was Volt. My point in all of this is just that I had two options. Work for MS directly, or work for a LOT bigger paycheck for an agency. I chose the second option. It is very common for all the temps I manage to be making WAY more money than I do, even after many years in the system. The options also haven't been what I'd hoped-all things considered I'd be better off if I'd remained a temp, especially considering that I never use my healthcare, use virtually no sick days, and don't have children or a family.
Exactly what is your problem with this policy?
The lawsuit alleged (reasonably, IMO) that Microsoft kept "temporary" employees, including developers, in their stable for years at a time. This, the plaintiffs argued, is unfair, because after you've been working at a job for a year, it doesn't feel very damn temporary. They said they wanted Microsoft to treat temps like temps - by keeping them in temporary positions - and hiring the rest of their employees full time.
Microsoft could have (and still might yet) tried to dodge this bullet by shuffling temp employees around to different positions, claiming that the employee hadn't been in the same department long enough to qualify as a full-timer. Or, Microsoft could have terminated a temp's employment for a day and re-hired him the next day, then turn around and say "Oh, sure, he's been here since '97 - but he's been fired and re-hired three times since then.
So, considering that this policy is pretty much exactly what the lawsuit was trying to achieve - keeping temps temporary, and hiring them full time if they prove too valuable to let go - I'm a little at a loss trying to figure out what your problem with it is. Or do you think that temp positions should come with job security? I mean, for god's sake, they're temps. They're supposed to be short timers.
A friend of mine has a term for the massive shift to temporary employees: Disposable Labor.
It is no suprise that in a society where everything else has disposable that labor has become disposable as well.
This social ill has been brought to you by the WTO. WTO: Globalizing Poverty!
--
--
Intelligence is definitely a recessive trait.
And as you'll notice, the mention of cubicles was not directly attributed to the environment at Microsoft but in the industry in general, referring to CEO's, VP's and others also in general.
---
seumas.com
The case only covers Dec 1986 thru 1997 temps
Yeah, I mean, that's not a very long time, especially for a software company.
This clause is a way to *protect* temps from being abused as permanent-employees-without-benefits.
Suppose MS (or any other company) really does want a permanent employee, to work on a long-term project, say. Then the fact that they'll have to give up any empolyees classified as "temp" after a year, and not be allowed to hire them back for three months means they'll be less likely to try to do an end run around granting benefits by hiring temps permanently.
A "temp" position is temporary: that's why it's called a "temp" position, and why temps get hosed when it comes to benefits.
On this point, at least, MS is doing the right thing.
Cheers, quokka
Just read about this on my cellphone, actually :-)
Anyway, what MS was doing would be horrible in any company, but it is especially horrible in a company is rich as Microsoft.
Warning: Sensibility filter off. The following is a [crazy] theory [guess]. Do not take it seriouslly.
However, this "permatemp" thing does explain how MS can release a browser for free - and how it can be so buggy. They hire temp workers and set them to work at low pay (by MS standards) on the next Internet Explorer. The workers are unhappy without their benifits, and so they write poor code.
Sensibility filter re-activated
It's good that MS decided to settle, and I wish that they would do so with the DOJ. 14 years is a long time to be a "temp" worker.
This comment makes no sene, just like my other comments
The ``permatemp'' settlement praised Microsoft for recent policy changes, saying that since 1997 it had hired some 3,000 former permatemps as workers with full benefits, and had adopted new practices to limit the length of temporary assignments.
For those who are wondering, Microsoft's new temp rules (effective as of this past July) are that each temp is not allowed to return to work for 100 days following a one-year stretch of employment. Yes, that's insane. No, temps are out of luck for that stretch of time. Some can hopefully find work at other agencies or companies, but it's still a dishonest (though now "legal") practice.
-- Anne Marie
Do linux zealots have any room to talk?
My opinion is no.
Re-implementing UNIX because you're too fsckin' cheap to spring for a legal copy of minix, rebuilding the entire desktop interface because of a license flamewar, and sub-par hardware support are hardly advancing personal computing to a new level either.
Linux kernel 0.1
"This is sort of a joke, just a fun side project"
Linux kernel 1.0
"This is cool, the next version will have plun-n-play and better hardware support"
Linux 2.0.0
"The next version will have USB, plug-n-play, run on any system with a 32-bit processor and more hardware support"
Linux 2.0.2
"We fixed all the glaringly obvious bugs in 2.0!"
(kernel 2.0.0 was the infamous paper-bag release)
Linux 2.2.0
"It's new and improved, and sorta has USB, and a little bit of plug-n-play, but 2.4 will have full USB, all the plug-n-play toys, and it we'll port it to anything with a microchip in it."
Linux 2.4.0
"It'll be out any day now..."
World domination? Linux on every desktop?
Yeah right...
0 1 - just my two bits
in general, contractors are billed out at at LEAST three to four times what they are actually being paid.
case in point: my friend was making about $20 an hour contracting for some company. they were billing him out at well over $80.
the discrepancies are not really in the financial dept. most employees are signifigantly cheaper in the long run than contractors. The problem is that once you hire an employee, it's hard as hell to get rid of them. You have to worry about the EEOC getting on your ass, as well as a slew of organizations dedicated to making companies look like assholes. Hell, the employee could just turn around and sue you for wrongful termination anyway.
With contractors, it's as easy as calling up their employer and saying "tell john not to report back on monday" - 'nuff said.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
In any case, these are computer programmers and technical types - it's not as though they are working making footballs in the third world for tuppence happeny a day, is it? Doesn't the geek community have better things to worry about than this?
We should take a leaf out of Bill Gates book, and help the truly deprived, and not scratch our own backs here.
[I realise that last comment is controversial - it mentions Bill Gates! - but I said it to shock everyone into thinking for once, and stop being emotional and selfish]
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
There is a group of people, and it's a pretty big group, known as the working poor. I know, I've been a member of that group for many years. These are people who work just to get by. These are people who have no health benefits, no pension, no vacation, no security. Their wages barely cover necessities, and there is little or nothing left for savings.
And its a group that, demographically, isn't very bright. Most poor people are poor because they aren't as smart as other people. Example, I grew up in a single mother household, lower middle class at best. At times, worse than that. I made over $110,000 last year at the tender age of 25, all legally. If you are working poor in this market, you're either dumb or lazy. And if you are poor because you have five kids to feed, you're still dumb. Very few adults are poor simply as result of being a victim of circumstance. Sure, there are those whose parents died and left them with several siblings to raise and provide for. But don't talk to me about this growing poor deprived underclass thats mercilessly exploited by the industrial robber barons because its a figment of your fucking imagination. If you are being exploited by your workplace, it is your own fault for taking it.
Microsoft is doing some great things in Redmond in terms of technology, but Bill never wanted to have all his employees full time. He wanted to ensure that if MS hit hardtimes, that they could quickly cut staff (Temp workers). I don't really know what the temp worker were complaining about, they get paid more and have to flexibility to work at little as they want. I for one think MS is in the right. Go Bill. -Angreal
When I was a temp at Microsoft, my benefits came through my employer (Volt). I was not paid significantly less than direct employees. Let us take a look at the finances here.
The direct employee is offered some benefits (like stock options) that a temporary worker is not offered, but all the benefits of the temporary worker are paid by the agency. THe agency, in order to cover their cost (administrative and for benefits) and make a profit must mark up the labor by a larger percentage than would be required by the company to pay more than they would have to pay simply to hire the employee directly.
That being said, outsourcing the workforce allows a company to get to know potential employees and it allows them to focus to a larger degree on core objectives. It does not save money, though.
Microsoft has probably abused this policy, and hopefully the new policy will force them to hire more workers, but I worry about the general economic impact to the Seattle area. The new policies may create a new problem for temps-- the inability to find a job because of increased competition for jobs and increased unemployment in the Seattle area....
Enough ranting for now.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
yah
Daniel
the original statement: "...the employee is free to leave at any time. If he does not, then he is not being 'abused'..."
:)]
my boss comes in and clubs me over the head with a 2 by 4. 1 minute later i quit my job for being abused. but according to the assertion, i could not have been abused until after i quit. for the 1 minute that i sat there stunned, i was not abused because i had not yet quit. if i was not abused then why did i quit my job?
the assertion does not hold. it is faulty logic.
also known as the chicken and the egg problem or in multi-threading as deadlock. the transition cannot occur unless the state is true but the state cannot be true unless the transition has already occured.
[i liked your PB reference.
<SARCASM>
Just because Windows is the most tested, perfectly stable windowing shell available is no reason to believe the rest of the company operates like that.
</SARCASM>
--Mike--
[sigh]. This guy was trying to ridicule the abuse-of-employees position by showing what it looks like turned around backwards, and then you take him seriously?!
C'mon, folks... sheesh!
A lot of people here forget that the time this happened was during the end of the heavy recession of the early to mid 1990's. There weren't really any jobs available and so they kind of did have a gun pointed at their heads.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
It has been confirmed that Moicr$haft has been guilty of selling $oftware to customers without giving them the full benefits of running real software.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
There certainly is an uneven playing field in most companies which discourages a lot of valuable employees from putting in the effort. They bust their butts as much as anyone else and put in the 100 hour work weeks routinely, but at the end of the year, their 5% pay increase is nothing compared to the extra $20 million the CEO takes above and beyond his previous year.
This is why a lot of people snicker when management indulges in company-wide propaganda pushing us to help the company succeed and grow. I could not possibly care less about the revenue of the company I work for because I don't care about helping management buy another house in a foreign retreat.
Big pay increases don't come from helping your current company succeed -- they come from jumping ship and joining another company who sees your value and wants to employ you at a salary more accurately reflecting your contributions.
---
seumas.com
Most likely, they were given the distinct impression that, like most temporary workers, they would be evaluated and potentially considered for full-time hire 6-12 months after starting. This is pretty standard for temporary workers...you bring someone in on a temp basis due to cash restraints or other limitations, then after a while you either give them a full-time job or you get rid of them. Microsoft was just keeping the people as temps indefinitely.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Sorry, but read the article, Microsoft did not hire ALL, they hired some 3000 out of around 8000ish, and they now have around 5000-6000 workers.
...and I quote,
"The ``permatemp'' settlement praised Microsoft for recent policy changes, saying that since 1997 it had hired some 3,000 former permatemps as workers with full benefits, and had adopted new practices to limit the length of temporary assignments."
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
If he were stuck as a permatemp employee with a so-so wage, few or no benefits, working in a cubical on insane deadlines, battling the average office-woes -- all the time knowing the guy down the hall doing the same thing you're doing is making double your salary and earning full benefits because he is technically a 'full time employee' (despite the fact that you may very well have worked for the company longer as a temp employee than the other guy has at all) -- and he might be compelled to revise his statement.
CEO's, VP's and other upper-management types always think things are rosey -- easy to do when you spend your day on the golf course bragging about your new yacht. Quite another when you actually WORK for a living.
---
seumas.com
What company dosen't do that. State agencys here in Virginia have temps that have been working for them for years straight.
I have seen Microsoft from the inside many times and know quite a few of their employees very personally. If there is any truth that Microsoft had at one time denied employees benefits, I am sure it was some sort of mistake. In fact, according to the NY Times article, starting in 1997 they hired all of their Permatemp employees into full time positions with full benefits. (Of course that isn't mentioned on the slashdot front page.) The case only covers Dec 1986 thru 1997 temps and by making a settlement Microsoft is acknowledging that those employees deserve benefits. With full health, pentions, and stock options, Microsoft employees are some of the best treated workers I know. Microsoft IS a great place to work (and very challenging too!) and one of the most respected employers in the field.
The american people. You are forgeting that these companies are publicly held. I, like most of the middle class, have had a lot of money in the stock market. [I took most of it out about a year ago, due to realization of the bubble, and am glad I did; I do, however, intend to put most of my a good percentage of assets back in it again at some point]
When companies profit, and the stock market goes up, the american public profits enormously. Ever heard of the wealth effect?
P.S. Huge layoffs are good. They generally indicate that the company was losing money or performing less efficiently then other firms in the marketplace. The labor that would otherwise have remained at the firm would have been producing less real wealth per unit of effort then they will once they find another job in a better managed or more modern firm that is more equiped to the ever changing demands of the marketplace.
What do you think the huge problem has been in japan and germany, of late? The notion of entitlement to a job for life. The idea that one should somehow own the job one is employed at and have an expecation, nay, a right to it, regardless that it is not a worthwhile utilization of your labor compared to other oppurtunities. This leads to stagnation and inefficency, and less real wealth generation [and therefore greater poverty] for society as a whole.
--- man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
i'm down in texas. a friend of mine has been temping with them for like 3 years, and he always seem to have some 'interview to work for microsoft lined up. and it never comes through and yet he's still 'working for microsoft'. of course he's just doing tech support and he's bi-lingual so they bs him about interviewing for the i18n jobs, but - blu - i dunno, seems like he's kind of getting fucked.