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Takin' Care of Business and Working Paid Overtime
theodp writes "About 800 CA-based Siebel employees who held the job title 'software engineer' or 'senior software engineer' stand to pocket $27,000 each from the proceeds of Siebel's $27.5 settlement of an overtime dispute. And while IBM's 32,000 techies won't make out quite as well, they'll still divvy up $65M in OT pay that IBM's shelling out to settle a federal class action suit."
Wow! A $27.5 settlement that gives $27000 to 800 workers? How do I get that guy to be my accountant?
With that much getting handed out, looks like this guy was in a rush to get to the bank!
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It is true, after sticking it out working a 75 hour week for 12 months salary in the US, I nearly refuse to even entertain the idea of taking a salary position. I would rather make minimum wage and be paid hourly than ever do that again.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Does this mean IBM will start paying for overtime in the US now? How about Europe? It is a bit odd that it is the US branch that pay for overtime first. European laws seems to be a bit more on the Employees side in such cases. I am wondering how IBM got away with this in all those years.
If only we could get the *Mart(s) of the world to stop firing people for having 2 minutes overtime. Just saw it happen this week. Unsafe equipment, ignorant bosses, and corporate mandates aside, I think it's quite silly for someone to lose their job for trying to stay and make sure it's done right. Should get even more interesting, with corporate instituting a uniform and taking over scheduling soon(at least in my store, in Michigan. A few thousand miles from Home Office).
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
Every time I read a story like this it makes my alch^H^H^H^Hblood stream boil..... Here in Beautiful British Columbia, the provincial government in 2003 changed the labour laws so that "High Technology" companies DO NOT have to pay overtime (to an insane point). This was done so as to appease to the Asian investors (a lot out here !).....the ones whose work ethic is something like "you live with your wife but you marry the company" (an actual quote from someone I tried to get a job from a couple of years ago !!). I'd love to move to "greener" pastures, but there ain't none this time of year....they're all white (snow) !! Fsckin' asshole government.
What are the labor laws these companies broke?
I work for Verizon in the IT department and over the past 15 years or so we have gone from time and a half paid OT to none. My group routinely works 5 or 6 16 hour shifts per month with no compensation. It is expected to work extra hours. I was even told by a manager once to make sure that I work extra hours and report that on my time sheet or it would look bad to upper management.
I have always thought that what VZ is doing in regards to OT pay is wrong and illegal but I have never been able to find the exact laws that they are breaking. Where can I find the laws that Sibel and IBM broke that started their lawsuits and who were the lawyers?
In my last job I was paid overtime per hour for time over 40 hrs a week. I ended up having to work a huge amount of overtime and at least I profited from this.
If I had been paid a fixed salary and still been expected to work 70-90 hrs a week, I would have resigned after a few months.
On the other side, I think paying overtime and having flexible hours is better for the companies too - they then only pay out a lot of money when they have a lot of work, and do not have to hire more people immediately whenever the current staff cannot get through their workload in 40 hrs.
I was one of those creative types. Our team conceived, designed, and built large-scale programs. Working out of a manual? Dammit, we wrote the manuals. I would be shocked if that group was covered by this lawsuit.
In the months before a product shipped we typically worked 50-BIGNUM hours a week. During the rest it was closer to 40. I probably averaged in the mid/high 40s over my last several years there.
Personally, I think anyone who is making a salary should be paid the higher of:
* 2x what he would make for the same hours at minimum wage + applicable overtime
* his regular salary
Anyone salaried worker making 80 grand who works 80-hours every week should find a job more to his liking or start a union, not complain about unpaid overtime.
The employees will not get anywhere near $27K each. About half will be used for the lawyers.
I work with a company that recently went through the same mess about two years ago. I was working 60-90 hour weeks sometimes with no over time. There was a class action lawsuit filed, administered by Rosenthal & Company (supposedly the big name in corporate class actions). Sent in my paperwork four times now, and still haven't seen a dime. They conveniently "lost" my first two, causing me to late file my third, then a year later they denied it because I late filed with no excuse. I talked with others who had the same happen to them, and it seems par for the course.
these cowards only do this as long as no one speaks up. the SECOND anyone says NO they back down. i've had this happen to me before, managment push and push until you push back. the sooner you say no i'm not your slave, the less they will suck out of you.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
People who work unpaid overtime don't deserve anything, unless their contracts says so. If they don't think they're getting paid enough they should seek employment elsewhere.
Life ain't nothing but bitches and money.
This is a very small IT community. There aren't a lot of IT-related jobs that don't have something to do with my company. At some point even if I did leave this job for another in the area I will likely work for or with one of the people that I believe is causing these problems at my company. I don't particularly want to move to a new market. I'm hopeful that the people causing the problems at this company will leave. However, having been in a similar situation before I know that the chances of that are slim to none. In the mean time my medical and financial health suffer.
Since we're talking about OT, maybe someone here can explain to me what our position is (by "our" I mean all of us in IT) thanks to Bush's changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 2003. My understanding of his pro-employer changes to the FLSA mean that I can now be classified in such a way to prevent me from being eligible for OT. If that's so then how are these 2 lawsuits proceeding? The Sieblel article says 2000 to 2005 but my understanding is that 2004 and 2005 and the last 5 months of 2003 are times when OT wouldn't have applied. I'm assuming that's why my company decided to re-evaluate their position on job classifications. Comments?
from last year, that made hourly office workers 'managers' so companies wouldn't have to pay overtime?
My company offered paid OT last summer for a project, we've yet to see any money from that. So guess what, we are not working any OT now. Oh and at completion we had $18mil in new sales.
They Live, We Sleep
Henry Ford said:
We've completely forgotten that last bit over the last 50 years.
If you want to take these "radical" ideas of ultra-capitalists further, and get even wilder with a true "Free Market" -- compared to the joke we have today -- you also might like to note that shareholders are entitled to exactly one thing: a share of the residual profits. They are NOT entitled to tell buinesses how to run, nor to demand that residual profits be maximized. This whole idea of "shareholder value" is completely broken, and is anti-competitive and anti-innovation (and I mean real innovation, not the Microsoft kind). Look it up.
.I expect there are some I.T. workers here that have such incredibly valuable skills they can switch jobs easily.
That's not the case for everyone. We're not "patsys" we just don't have as many options. Not everyone lives in a good I.T. job market.
So when employers oblige you to work overtime for free, you do it. There is always another guy willing to take your job and do what the boss wants, but there is not always another job available for you where you will not have to do that.
So you make the best of it and try to find alternatives. But it's not as easy as "oh you don't like it? just get another one, patsy!"
>...between Jan. 2000 and Oct. 2005 with the job title "software engineer" or "senior software engineer." The employees worked an average of 139 weeks during the time period
That should have been phrased to explain that it took turnover into account. Otherwise anyone capable of arithmetic will read the rest of the article looking for clues about how half-time employees were filing overtime claims.
I'm posting as the veritable anonymous coward because I am anonymous, and don't have enough cash to not be a coward. I just quit from NDMA which is a subsidiary of I3archive. What basically happened was that two months ago, the one central server (of course, with no backups, no failover, and no budget) went tits up after two months of warnings from the sysadmins. For the next three weeks, we all worked about 60+ hours in the office and countless more VPNed in from home to save this thing. When my boss came by and told me (specifically) that we were going to have to VPN in over Thanksgiving, I asked him if I was going to be compensated. He said, "We'll take care of you". I asked for it in writing. He said no. I said, "No pay, no work". He told me if that was my attitude, I had better take a walk. I walked out, along with two phone support people, three other developers and I think two sysadmins who were also fed up with it. I think the ratio of management to geek has approached 1:2.
The sad part is that the company had potential, but they decided to abuse the hell out of the employees. After talking to a lawyer on Wednesday, he said that it wouldn't really be worth persuing unless it was some kind of class action suit. HR did get a clue, however, the money I got for severance is about what I expected to get for time-and-a-half overtime. I wish they had gotten a clue before I walked out, but whatever it takes, I suppose.
Every time employers in the US get in legal trouble due to having employees, the pressure to outsource or offshore increases. We have an absolute infestation of laws, lawyers and lawsuits in the US, convincing everyone that he's been wronged.
The risk of hiring employees in the US is already high, and cases like this are driving it higher. When the risk and overhead per employee goes up there is less hiring, and more conservatism in hiring, which means the applicant with anything odd on his resume gets summarily rejected.
I often see slashdotters complaining that companies won't take a chance on them; the company demands skill X and the applicant thinks he could learn X in no time. Well suppose they hire you and you don't learn X? How hard is it to fire you? In the US, a fired employee has many ways to sue.
If we continue down this road, we'll end up like France, where it's almost impossible to fire someone. Students there recently protested against a proposed law that would let employers fire them within the first N months. Needless to say, they have high unemployment.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Stronger employee protections mean higher unemployment.
As for crazy overtime, everyone should do it for a few months at least, to find out what it's like and find his own limits. After that, you learn to probe for this when interviewing for a job. My last several jobs have all been about 40-45 hours per week, plus rare crunches.
800 CA-based Siebel employees who held the job title 'software engineer' or 'senior software engineer' stand to pocket $27,000 each from the proceeds of Siebel's $27.5 settlement of an overtime dispute
Wow, 800 people getting $27k each from $27.50. It's obvious that Jesus is working at Siebel.
with that many techies with that much money, I bet CA will go crazy with LAN parties with free Bawls and everyone with fancy new computers :P *starts packing*
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Hello this is the new world calling all you stone age fools. If you are not billing by the hour and don't have fines (AKA OT pay rate) for crap managment trying to fix the problems they made with your a$$ and think all your "extras" they promise will add up to a hill of beans at the end of the year, here is your notice. Here in the USA the law of the land, thanks to Pres. Regan, is work at will. That means you need to always have some feelers out for the better paying job as it is this force of all workers that will keep you from not getting what you are worth. Unless you all are pushing together you will not be near to the max the market will bear and all that extra money you should be making will be going to people who have more money than time. Unless there is a boilerplate contract that applies to all employment that can only be change by the agreement of both parties (fat chance), and you don't have a contract that spells out what you are to be paid no matter what, then thses are the new rules.
Working as hourly and never looking back.
Who changed what rule? I'm hourly, and I'm not a manager.
Why doesn't someone set a website up where people can write references for their employers that prospective job candidates can lookup ? Imagine going to a job interview knowing how much unpaid overtime is "expected" of you or that your lunch breaks are stopwatched .
...who finds that I work LESS as a salaried employee than I did as a contractor? It used to be that they paid me for the work I did; now they pay me $X dollars a month plus $Y dollars a year not to leave them - and all because I'm really the only person who knows enough about the project to explain what needs to be done and how to do it to the contractors, and because I'm the only person who is willing to show up when something goes wrong at 3am... but nothing ever goes wrong at 3am simply because every decision I make includes the fact that if I fuck up I'm going to have to show up at 3am while the contractors dream about collecting their next paycheck.
Have fun working hard; I'm enjoying my 35 hour workweek and 2 hour lunches.
Beauty is just a light switch away.
I'd do it if I had points left. Posting AC for useless post
>
If you are trading your medical health for a salary in a job that makes you unhappy, you need to move. To another company, to another city, somewhere. If you have, like a friend of mine, a spouse that wants to live close to their family and you cannot find work that supports you and does not make you unhealthy in that community, then you need a divorce and then you need to move.
We trap ourselves in all kinds of unhealthy situations for all kinds of reasons. In this land of the free, the traps are all self-imposed.
Most states are "employment at will" states -- you can be terminated for pretty much any reason. All this means is you are no longer employed there.
It almost never means you were "terminated for cause" -- this is almost always an enitrely different standard requiring significant documentation showing that the employee had problems with absenteeism, repeatedly broke written rules, committed a crime, etc. Didn't suck up to the boss doesn't count. Employees not fired for cause are generally due unemployment compensation, and the employer generally has the burden to prove termination for cause or the state will pay the unemployment (which the employer almost always has to pay back...)
Further, terminations without cause are generally looked at suspiciously by juries in employment suits. It's one thing for the boss to be a tyrant in the office where few will challenge them. It's quite another when the boss is on the stand forced to explain TO A JURY that he terminated the employee because the employee didn't go along with some unrealistic unwritten policies and not for some legal cause. Juries are usually employees in their regular lives and often side with employees against bosses in borderline cases. This is why businesses often settle -- humiliating management AND losing a lot of money is always more expensive than a years benefit and salary.
800 x 27000 = $21,600,000
27.5m - 21.6m = 5.9m
Chances are that's about six million that's going towards paying lawyers and other related fees.
Have a little dignity.
That's the way they used to do it. Rather than lay there endlessly consuming costly resources for no good reason, just die. Everyone has to eventually, might as well leave something positive behind rather than be a net loss for the world.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO