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HP Contract Workers Sue For Recognition
manganese4 writes "The Idaho Statesman is carrying the story of 33 local Boise HP contract workers suing HP. They claim that they were expected to perform at the same level of expectations as HP workers and thus should be given the rights and privileges of HP workers. HP claims the suit is without merit." From the article: "The suit seeks to represent 3,000 workers in Boise and elsewhere in the company and could involve as much as $300 million, according to the complaint."
Contract! That should be enough information right there.
This is nothing new. It seems that at some point or another, all contractors suddenly feel that they are no longer contractors but rather employees. With entitlement no less.
The case is without merit but, not without precedence.
I'm pulling for these guys. Companies tend to have the nasty habit of using what they call contractors to get out of paying taxes and benifits that they really should be. If you go to the IRS website and look up the rules which are used to determine whether someone is an employee or contractor it's clear that rules are being broken.
I've had my share of contract and full-time work, and I guess I'm kinda weird, because I actually read my contract. If it doesn't say I get benefits, I don't expect benefits, If it says I will, I expect benefits. Am I going to be getting a 1099 or a W2 at the end of the year? Because one is typical of a contract employee and the other is a regular employee. Regular employees typically get benefits, and the company pays the taxes. Contract employees pay their own taxes and benefits.
Later Apple did hire me as an employee. At that point since I believed that I was an employee, pursuant to the previously signed statement I wrote a notice and tried to deliver it to Apple's legal department. They seemed completely flummoxed as to why I was notifying them that I was an employee.
Whats funny to me is that when Microsoft got sued for much the same reasons the response here was very much against the Redmond Giant. Now thats its another company the attitudes seem to have shifted against the contract workers. This is also a reason I will never again do temp work. I'd rather fish uneaten burgers out of the Burger King dumpster.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I'll certainly be watching this one!
I'm in the UK and I've been a contractor at a big IT company for over 3 years now. Still no sign of getting my contract converted to a permanent one to the company I work in. Not as many days holidays as badged employees. No pension plan. Lately I have been told that I have reached the top wage I can get in my current position and the temp agency policy is no bonuses. ("But you're doing a great job! Fantastic!").
When I signed the contract it seemed that you stayed as a temp for 1 to 2 years before getting a contract with the actual company.
So yeah I totally understand the frustration of those guys.
And the whole contractor thing is only getting more and more common.
While colloquially classified as "contractors," these individuals were not contract employees. They were full-time employees (W-2) of the contracting company, who in turn had a contract with the customer to provide a staffing service. The contract was with their employer -- not the employee directly.
The contractor vs. employee argument only comes into play when you're talking about true-blue contractors who work for a flat rate under a 1099, not W2 employees.
This was the situation in the famous Microsoft contractor vs. employee case. Contrary to common belief, the contractors were not the instigators in that case. It was the IRS who audited Microsoft and determined that they had incorrectly classified people as independant contractors as opposed to employees, and was therefore liable for back employment taxes (which, by the way, are paid if you're a W2 employee of a contracting company). The contractors then picked it up from there and demanded that, since the IRS classified them as employees, they were due the benefits give to full-time employees.
In my humble, and non-lawyerish opinion, this case is entirely without merit. They were employees of the contracting company, and were given a benefit package that they agreed upon by becoming employees.
I don't know about Boise, but in Colorado Springs, it was BAD. Employement opportunities got to be really scarce, no one was going to walk away from their jobs.
HP simply abused the situation. Looks like in Boise they are continuing to abuse a similar situation. This is more the contracting agencies and HP collaborating to screw people over en masse for profit, using dubious contracting methods. I've worked in the situation, and it is certainly NOT as cut and dried as this article makes it out to be.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
If the news story is accurate, these workers are not the same as if you or I worked as an independent contractor. According to the story, these workers were employees of staffing companies. The staffing companies were the contractors. They are no more entitled to be HP employees than the guy who drives around the lawnmower for a landscaping company deserves to be the direct employee of the landscaper's customer.
There are laws intended to protect individual workers from being treated like contractors instead of employees. A company can't simply hire people on a 1099 basis instead of a W-2 and duck all sorts of taxes and liabilities. The law provides for a set of tests to distinguish a true independent contractor from these situations. But the plaintiffs in this suit appear to be getting a W-2 from their employers, the staffing companies.
labour laws(and associated rules), and trying to get around them is the reason.
very few of us would be better off without them.
*now we're supposed to let her renegotiate the contract BACKDATED TO THE START because she's changed her mind?* you don't have to, but then again the laws might state so that you're not allowed to screw them around on technicalities(to save on medical insurances or whatever).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
HP & Agilent terminated most of their IT departments and rehired them through an agency.
So HP deserves everything they get from this lawsuit. The previous posts about these guys
being asses and wrecking it for all other contractors, well, they don't know the real story. HP is as guilty as
Microsoft in this case.
I read a lot of comments from the field about how it's all about their contract and what's in it. And that's not really the issue here. Simply stating in a contract that a person is not an employee but a contractor doesn't make it so, even if both parties agree. What does matter however is the set of expectations the contracting party puts on the contracted one. Myself I'm a swimming coach and the club I worked for treated me very much like an employee while paying me like a contractor, I chose not to pursue legal action because it's a very small community we coaches travel in, and suing a non-profit childrens organization doesn't sit well with anyone. Instead I just jumped ship and got a better job elsewhere. Anyway, my research led me here: Employee vs. Independant Contractor Enjoy
I worked for a contracting company @ HP in Boise. Issue here is that the people who are suing(Adecco, VeriTest, Manpower) are not contractors. They are employees of their respective companies. The companies(Adecco, VeriTest, Manpower) pay the paychecks, the employees just happen to work at an HP building. The story would be different if these people were independent contractors, contracted directly to HP, but they're not. Not to mention, the people quoted in the article no longer work for any of those companies... I'm wondering why they left employment in the first place. -Phixxr
ungggghhhh
I've had two positions (two different employers) where I worked on-site with government agencies. I worked side by side with regular government employees and other sub-contractors in both cases. Does that entitle me to full government benefits? I'd love to have some of the health and training benefits offered by government agencies.
In my opinion, contract employees should only receive the benefits offered to them by their employer, not the company or agency they may actually work at. If you don't like the benefits you have, then switch jobs. Companies/agencies hire contract workers for various reasons:
handle extra work
partnering with minority businesses
internal hiring practices may be too strict - hire/fire easier with contractor
cheaper labor rates due to competition between contractors - let's face it, some companies/agencies are "bloated" (i.e. unions, legacy business units from mergers, or whatever other reasons people's benefits/pay increase beyond similar rates by other companies)
Actually, I think more companies bend those IRS definitions of "contractors" than you might realize.
A big offender? Most courier/delivery services. They often use only "contractors" to run all their deliveries - even though at first glance, this might seem impossible. (If the people are driving cars you own, and taking deliveries "on call" for you, then that would seem to immediately make them your "employees" rather than "contractors".)
To comply with the IRS rules of "contractors" though, they do such things as rent the cars out to the drivers (with compensation built into their pay to cover the rental costs), and instead of telling a specific driver to do a given delivery run, they simply get on the radio and "offer" the jobs to the drivers.
I worked there as a contractor. I did not like being treated the way I was treated as a non-employee. There were certain meeting you couldn't go to, etc. (usually ceremonies, etc. - not secret information of any kind).
Anyway, I left because I didn't like it. They were real pissed when I left too. They tried to guilt me into staying by saying "But you signed a contract saying you will work here!". Of course the first paragraph of the contract said that I could leave anytime and they could fire me anytime. These idiots always want to have it both ways. Fuck em - I can find work elsewhere.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Here in Ontario, Canada, computer techs aren't guaranteed overtime pay -- they're an exception to the rule.
Yay for me.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
If HP is found guilty then they are not the only ones who will go down for this. BellSouth is very guilty of this. At one point they fired most of their full time IT and development staff and hired Accenture to do most of their IT and development work. Here's the catch, Accenture went and hired all of the same people who were "fired". The same people who had been working the same job for five to fifteen years went right back to work at the same place sitting at the same desk. The only difference is they started getting their paychecks from a different company. Oh, and the other difference is, Accenture did not pay any overtime. Of course some people used the transition to their advantage and made use of their new employer but the whole thing seemed like a somewhat shady tax evasion thing. This happened during the tech bubble burst so people were happy just to have a job. It did seem insane to some people because now BellSouth was paying two to five times as much per resource. I figured it was a big shuffling of the corporate books. I did wonder how legal it was though. This case with HP could prove to be interesting......
No, nobody's being abused.
I was a contractor for ten years, and I've been a full-time employee for the last 12. As a contractor, I understood that I got an hour's pay for an hour's work. Period. I arranged my own vacation, insurance, and everything else that employees get as benefits. It was my job to ensure that my billing rate was high enough that I earned a good living after paying all those expenses, and I did. I earned a VERY good living, usually a lot better than my employee counterparts.
I quit contracting because I got tired of doing the lowest-level scut work that nobody else wanted, and now I earn a good living as an employee, but I have no illusions about loyalty or job security.
If I was abused by anybody, it was by the contract houses, who skimmed (or tried to, at least) an excessive amount of my raw billing rate as pure profit for them. Needless to say, when I found a contract house that treated me like I might actually know how the business works, I stuck with them.
You can look here for some information on how Idaho figures out if someone is an employee or a contractor.
Do you know if a difference exist between "contractor" and "independent contractor"? From what I've read, the people suing HP worked for a company that was contractor to HP so I am not sure "independent contractor" necessarily fits in this case.
In one of the clients I worked for, they gave contractors literally 2'X4' desks to work while every other employee at any level in that company had 5 times bigger desk space. This company never invited contractors for company christmas parties and even didn't bothered to set them up with their private voice mail. They wouldn't be invited to participate in meetings that are critical to the project and would be notified later of only outcomes of the meetings. The contractors won't be even invited in to project success parties while the fact was that it was just those contractors and only them who actually wrote any code to build the project. If project is running behind the contractors would be asked to drop their plans and work in weekends at Friday 4 PM and often asked to work late to meet deadlines. They will be even forced regularly to cancel their planned vacations without sufficient notice. When project would end the company will inform them in the morning that it was their last day! The employees, mostly managers, would have completely different life styles of frequent parting at company's cost, vacationing and useless meetings. The contractors were just worker robots without any feelings or need for social interaction with their collegues, they weren't humans. They had a view that contractors can be treated as worst as they want to because they had higher pay rates and legally only few rights. This is inspite of the fact they were the ONLY contributor in actually building the product.
The Microsoft permatemp lawsuit was won by the permatemps but lost by all future contractors in the entire state.
There are now laws setup so that after one year of working at the same company you must refrain from working there through any agency for three months. This covers everything from IT through every other contracting field.
The result is that instead of being a permatemp you are in fact a temp that has a 1 year life max and you are now interchangable with the contractor that comes to take your place.
Legal technicalities aside, I kind of side with HP on this. They entered into a good-faith agreement with the contractors, and both sides signed the contract. I think they should be told to obey the law from now on, but not be penalized for an honest mistake.
There are a lot of these lawsuits going around. Someone works salaried for 10 years, without complaining, with both the employee and the employer content with the situation and of the assumption that it is appropriate under the law. Then there is an unrelated dispute, and some lawyer shows up to demand tens of thousands in back overtime since the employee shouldn't have been exempt. It's a misapplication of the law, and it hurts everyone. Unless there is a record that someone didn't think they should be exempt, they shouldn't be able to sue for back wages.
Sure, the law defines what a contractor is, and companies should not be allowed to violate that. However, when someone willingly enters into a contract for specific compensation, they shouldn't be able to change the terms of the contract midway through and demand retroactive pay. It seems that our whole society is turning into vindictive, money-grubbing pricks who screw each other for a buck. Companies hate employees. Employees hate their companies. Customers hate the companies they buy from. Vendors hate their customers. All because some people have no integrity, and would rather make a little money they didn't earn than to be forthright, honest, and civil.
Then again, I might just be bitter.
So, why NOT contract? You make sure and bill out enough to cover your own insurance...
:P
I think you may be ignoring a large number of the 'contractors' out there who are not the type of employee you seem to think they are.
I myself am a 'contract/temp' employee, and getting paid abysmally low compared to my peers(When you include benefits, company product discounts, and retirement funding; without counting all of that it's only a couple dollars/hour difference.)
I am fullfilling a specific role, but I am not getting the kind of benefits I 'should' be getting.
That said, I'm in an area with a completely horrid IT job market, and this is my first post-college job, so I'm glad to HAVE a job, and the people I work with are pretty cool, so I'll live with it to build my resume.
"Miller said she was employed by HP in Boise from 1989 to 1995, when she took a severance package and left the company. She returned later in 1995 as a contract worker and worked at HP until March 9. Part of the time she was a contract employee through Veritest and Manpower Professional. Her jobs included testing software for HP printers.""
Something about this sounds wierd. Every employer I know of has had a strict time limit on length of contract: ChipZilla's is one year, with a minumum of 6 months off the payroll before you can be recontracted. A series of contracts doesn't equal a permanent employment.