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?
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.
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.
No kidding. That's less than $20/hour. You wouldn't need to go to college to make that. Both of my high school education brothers-in-law make way more than that and are home in time for supper.
...but there are still some dyed-in-the-wool attitudes where people don't think you have done a good day's work unless you are staying late...
This is how employers pit employees against each other to milk them for free labor. If employee A wants to get ahead, he's going to put in an extra half-hour. Employee B also wants to get ahead so he decides to outdo employee A by working an extra hour. And so on and so on. And then, in the end, the boss' lazy nephew or some other politically-connected individual--who rarely puts in more than 35 hours per week--gets the promotion.
And what are employees A & B left with? Heart disease and diabetes from eating crappy convenience food, getting no sunlight and no exercise. Some bargain.
I worked in a union workplace for many years and thought it sucked, but I have to admit that it's probably a good thing that the unions are there.
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?
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.
.You have obviously not worked in a place where you felt compelled to work overtime for some reason or other (in my case it was to save the jobs of other people there). Once you've been pulling a fair bit of it, you start losing perspective and things get a bit crazy. It starts out with you trying to help out a bit by putting in some extra hours for free, and ends up in exploitation. And management should be held accountable when it crosses that line, because then they haven't been minding their jobs, and instead have just been floating along on their laurels because of someone else being generous/kind.
In the end, you make a decision not to put in any more unpaid hours ever again, hopefully before you burn out. Everyone loses out.
Holding someone accountable for their actions is usually the only way to make them do what they should be doing. In this case, management should have been putting an end to their excessive reliance on unpaid overtime a long time ago, which they didn't, so they are being held accountable. Fair enough.
Either way, reliance on unpaid overtime is a bad business decision. If you budget with their overtime, then when these workers put their heads together and decide to pull the plug on said overtime (which they're well within their rights to do), you lose big.
Of course, long term use of overtime doesn't work unless we're talking pure grunt work here; the loss in productivity per hour just isn't made up for in terms of net productivity. Especially since the productivity per hour doesn't recover immediately upon cutting the overtime.
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.
...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.