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IBM Responds to Overtime Lawsuits With 15% Salary Cut
bcmbyte writes "IBM in recent months has been hit with lawsuits filed on behalf of thousands of U.S. employees who claim the company illegally classified them as exempt from federal and state overtime statutes in order to avoid paying them extra whenever they worked more than 40 hours per week.
The good news for those workers is that IBM now plans to grant them so-called "non-exempt" status so they can collect overtime pay. The bad news: IBM will cut their base salaries by 15% to make up the difference."
Maybe I am confused, now that they are classified non-excempt, does that mean the OT pay is retroactive? If so, grab money, cue job search...
This is the last straw....
Nobody forces anyone to work. No one is entitled to any particular salary.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This, folks, is a good example of why labor unions are still around. Not that it's going to help any in this case...
I wonder how many times this will work, before large companies adjust their payrolls. Radioshack settled a similar lawsuit with their store managers several years ago, and lowered their base salaries to offset the new overtime payouts. I'd think they'd want to act preemptively, to avoid a lawsuit--I'm somewhat surprised IBM had succumbed to this practice.
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if the free market responds correctly, i would expect ibm to lose quite a few employees over this. i know if i was working there i'd be shopping my resume around after a slap in the face like this.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
I used to work for a Accenture, a rival firm. While we officially got paid overtime, booking it could get you into a lot of trouble. Bosses would say, not in writing, to not book OT. Try confirming that by email and you get stern warnings to not be a smart-ass. One guy I knew booked OT anyway. Legally, they couldnt say no. Next thing he knew, he was staffed in St. Louis! Ouch. So the people *suing* IBM? Expect pain much worse than salary cuts. They will probably be executing 100,000 line test scripts soon.
When I started working, I heard from multiple sources that our company budgeted for exempt employees by treating them as hourly employees who worked 5 hours of overtime per week. Given that most overtime is paid at time and a half, that's the equivalent of being paid for 47.5 hours at at a straight hourly wage. 7.5/47.5 = .1579, or about 15.8% of salary. Now the real question is, how many of these folks will get 5 or more hours of overtime per week?
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Jokes about IBM aside (they rightly are about IBM management): Don't they have their salary regulated in contract? Or is it accept-or-be-fired (article doesn't tell)? I am not really familiar with US labour market. Is this legal? In many countries, you can only be fired for misconduct or lack of availible work. (The discussion about race-to-the-bottom and trying or not take part in it will probably take place somewhere else in the threads ...)
no wonder IBM was able to successfully make the low bid on getting the ability to do the massive Digital TV coupon program...
That remind me why I stopped being an employee, and became a contractor.
The bad thing about being a contractor is I only get paid for the time I work (no sick leave, public holidays, annual leave etc)
The good thing about being a contractor is I get paid for _every_ hour I work.
Strangely enough, once I was working on a strictly per-hour basis, the boss found far fewer 'emergencies' that required me to work all weekend.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
An IT Specialist making $80K a year should be classified as an exempt employee. An admin making $35K, that's another story.
You work 35 hours one week, you get paid for 40 hours; you work 50 hours one week, you get paid for 40 hours. That's life.
15%? That's cheap compared to the damage from the loss of morale and confidence in management.
Every job I've ever worked was salary based, and I've always understood that going a bit over 40 hours (and still being paid my regular salary) is in exchange for those slow weeks where I might only work 20 hours, and still collect 40 hours worth of salary. It's a pretty fair trade-off since some weeks (as an IT person) I'm twiddling my thumbs doing nothing and other weeks I'll be pulling 12 hour work days.
The fact that they were collecting commission on top of their salary, and still trying to demand OT pay is simply greedy IMO. Sales has always been a "You'll make as much as you want to" position.
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
That the 15% cut comes with 1.5x regular pay for each hour worked over 40.
Where did they think that money was going to come from? That IBM would suddenly have that much extra money to throw around?
Personally, if it were me, I'd be happy about the change. Less guaranteed money, but for quite a while I've wished I could work -less- than 40 hours a week, even if it meant a pay cut. SO much other stuff I want to experiment with and no time to do it. So to have that overtime on the books instead of just being expected...
I'd guess many of these people will find newhires in their departments and 40hr/wk jobs again, too.
There are some who only lose in this story, though... The 1/3 of the affected workers who were -not- working overtime and were not involved in this lawsuit. They get paycuts anyhow. I can imagine how nice the workplace will be for the next year... Assuming any of those 1/3 stay. I sure wouldn't in their shoes.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Here it is...
Seems they settled or something...
IBM's way of handling this just sucks for those employees...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I don't get it. If you are exempt and feel you are being worked too much, simply: don't. I'm exempt and I tell my management "I can't work on that right now" more often than I'd like to - I treat the exempt idea as if I'm simply "contracted" so to speak, for 40 hours a week. If I work more I work more, if I work less I work less.
Maybe the IBM folks (didn't rtfa much) aren't making par with their peers in other places. That would be an issue, I suspect.
But going to hourly is only going to get them "watched" more, and to boot, it got their pay cut. Why? Probably because management is the same at IBM as it is everywhere: Exempt people are paid more than nonexempt because they are "on call" 24/7, etc.
Which is the exact reason my management here tells us that when we *are* on call, we do not get differential pay, etc. It's "built into our salary."
nuff said.
Somebody please explain me why engaging in war with your own employees, specially on such delicate matters as payment, is going to affect the stocks of the company in a positive way.
Wouldn't they ensure employee happiness so they perform better so the company earns more and be more productive etc etc?
Maybe I might be a little newbs to this way of thinking, being i usually am consulting, but
i always thought when the company doesnt want to pay for overtime, they just say "we wont pay overtime" and thats that, no? If they get more employees to cover the diff. of hours, they get what they want without breaking the employees back. Sucks for the employee, but I can make do with the pay I get, for the time I work, isnt that what I agreed upon to begin with.
Do you honestly think they (IBM) care? Seriously. The whole idea of (mostly big) companies caring about "engagement" and "morale" is a bunch of trash. Lip-service. Hypocrisy. Whatever you want to call it. Know this: they only care just enough to keep you around. You can argue that this is the way it should be or "free-market" or "just doing business" and you'd probably have a good argument, but please don't fool yourself or anyone else into thinking that companies preemptively care about the loss of morale. They don't. They always react, never plan ahead.
Wow. I really sound bitter! Can you tell what size company I work for?
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
That can't be legal.....
It seems very "contempt-ish" to me. I'd bring it straight to the same judge who awarded them the overtime pay.
I worked for Andersen Consulting, and the OT depended on the project. Sometimes they'd send you out of town (with weekend flybacks) for the express purpose of separating you from distractions at home. So you could bill the most hours, get the most overtime, and (most importantly) bill the client as much as possible.
If the contract supported it, paying your hourly wage (a 2 digit dollar amount) was no problem when your billing rate was $200 or more.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
It's just the nature of the free market. You can demand to have more as much as you want, but if the company doesn't want to pay more, they won't.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
However, knowing IBM, this is what they planned--with the current economic downturn, they probably want to decrease their payroll anyway and in so doing bolster their stock price. Still, it's critical (IMHO) that employees who quit know they can file for benefits so they don't get double-shafted by IBM.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I am an exempt employee and I do put in some overtime when required by a project schedule.
Even though the company doesn't have to pay us for our overtime they have "thanked" us
for our effort with some perks. Two years in a row they gave the software development team
a week's worth of "comp time" (extra vacation time) "under the table" as a reward for the extra time worked.
While this wasn't even close to a one-to-one payback for the overtime worked, it was the
thought that counted. Put it this way, if they HADN'T done SOMETHING, the next time a project
schedule was threatened fewer hours of overtime might have been available from the team.
so far, no one has mentioned the words "profit sharing." usually, a salaried employee who doesn't earn overtime gets a nice xmas bonus or something when the company's roi is over a certain amount. it's like saying, "we're glad you worked all those extra hours without getting paid, it helped the company have a good year, here's some extra bonus money for your efforts."
the company i used to work for routinely chastised me for not working one minute over 40 hours, saying nonsense like, "this other programmer regularly works 60-70 hours, why don't you?" to which i would always respond, "am i being paid to work 20-30 extra hours per week? no? well, that other employee must be terribly inefficient because i'm able to get all my work done in 40 hours."
what will they do? fire me? no, probably not, because then they'd have to pay me unemployment compensation, which probably costs them more because i'm not working at all, yet they're still giving me money.
the employees aren't the only ones with something to lose.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
Salaries, unlike hourlies, are a flat amount, regardless of how much you work. If the company wants to keep you around and has you working more than you were told when you were hired (you did ask how many hours a week you would be working, right?,) then the company will typically give you a bonus to represent the earnings you helped contribute to during your additional hours.
http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/whdfs23.pdf>U.S. Department of Labor Fact Sheet #23: Overtime Pay Requirements of the FLSA
29 CFR Part 541, Defining and delimiting the exemptions for executive, administrative, professional, outside sales and computer employees, final rule
IBM may very well have been legally justified to not reimburse these folks the overtime pay in the first place. However, since it was found otherwise, I think the 15% pay cut to compensate is just spitting in the face of their employees. How many good engineers and other employees will they lose as a result of this move? It seems to me that if you have good people working for you, willing to stay after hours to keep things moving, you should reward them for the extra effort. Too bad if it happens that computer employees rack up lots of overtime, but it's the nature of the business and should be considered cost of doing business.
Notwithstanding the fact that IBM is ultimately responsible for these pay-cuts, the net effect of this is that one group of employees (those currently doing loads of overtime and not getting paid for it) have won an argument with their employer, but gained nothing from it (they'll end up earning about the same as they were), but at the same time have adversely affected another bunch of employees (those who weren't doing any overtime, and will thus be earning substantially less than before). I'm playing devil's advocate to a certain extent here, but the fact remains that if you sue your employer, you shouldn't expect to come out with a good relationship with them. Even if you win the argument, you're likely to lose in the long run (or in this case, almost immediately).
Let me start by saying that I am a very strong Republican conservative, and I normally hate labor unions, especially since most of them don't do much but collect money from workers and use it to buy politicians. That said, in this instance I absolutely think those workers should immediately unionize and walk off the job. IT workers are already treated as slaves just about everywhere, and it's about time they got paid for their overtime AND STILL recieved a salary commensurate with the difficulty of their jobs and the level of their education.
Furthermore, this move by IBM is complete garbage. Google spends a heck of a lot more money on its employees than this, and it doesn't have any trouble with the "competitive pressures" cited by IBM. The reason it doesn't have any trouble is twofold:
Honestly, the only things they seem to produce anymore are a few supercomputers (and the market for those is clearly limited), some mainframes (again, limited and shrinking market), and some stupid "software development processes" like the Rational Unified Process (RUP). (News Flash for IBM: a process isn't a product. I can go out and make my own process that suits my work (which is what most people do), or use one of many free and well known process like Agile or UP). IBM also produces a lot of marketing speak and vague references to "services" that they can offer to companies (not sure what those actually are or why I would want them), they produce a lot of commercials about servers spiraling out of control, and they spend a lot of time on clearly stupid strategies like building a corporate office in Second Life and having a director of Internet and Virtual Worlds.
With all that sort of vaporware and garbage products, it's no wonder that they are facing big competitive price pressures. They deserve the problems they are having. But the regular employees shouldn't be the ones penalized. The problems (and pay cuts) should be directly placed in the laps of their management, especially their top executives. IBM has repeatedly had the chance to conquer the world, and they blow it on stupid ideas every time.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I vaguely recall that something similar happened in a Dilbert strip. The punch line was somewhere along the lines of "So basically, you managed to negotiate to get only half the money for the same working hours" :-) But I would prefer such things staying on the paper. :|
Ezekiel 23:20
Most office work should be exempt from overtime. On the factory floor, it's real obvious when one worker is 2-3x more productive than another. Productivity in the office can vary by a factor of 10 or even 50 from one employee to the next, but such differences are difficult to quantify because each person is assigned a unique set of tasks. Effectiveness (selection and prioritization of tasks) is actually more important than efficiency (rate of progress on a specific task), and there are vast differences in the quality of work as well. Relatively unproductive workers shouldn't get paid 50-75 percent more because it takes them 60 hours to get done, and often poorly, what should be achieved in 40.
Time-and-a-half OT pay, in particular, should be reserved for blue collar work, or clerical work paying $20/hr or less. If you don't earn overtime, congratulations - that means you have a job in the knowledge economy.
Won't they make it up in the overtime they can now get? Surely the only reason they complained was because they were already working what they considered to be overtime.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Considering how much the dollar has dropped. Employees have already received a %15 pay cut through inflation alone. Another %15 percent cut is adding insult to injury.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I used to work at IBM and we were REQUIRED to work 10% overtime and every minute of our time had to be billable whether we had any work to do or not. Our raises and bonuses were determined by job performance numbers. If you got a 1 you recieved a nice bonus and a decent raise. If you got a 2 a smaller bonus and raise. And if you got a 3 you were considered average and barely got a cost of living increase. We were told by our managers that only 1 person in each group could get a 1, only 10% were allowed a 2, and the rest would get 3's. So no matter how hard you worked most likely you would get a 3. So why bother putting forth any effort? Why bother working any overtime? And whenever they needed to lay off a bunch of people they called it a Resource Action. IBM employees are just resources to be used up and tossed in the garbage. I have friends who still work there who pray every day to be laid off. At least when that happens they give out nice severence packages. Getting laid off was the best thing that happened to me. Where I work now employees are appreciated and hard work is rewarded.
*your* company may be generous enough to pay for hours worked over 45, but its not legally required to do so ... and IBM does not (in general; certain sites or certain projects for the duration of that project sometimes do).
My guess is that many folks who try that won't be greeted with a manager who says: "Can't say I didn't try. Well played, employee".
I am not a crackpot.
And if you do work over 40 hours a week, you do it because you want to. Overtime in competitive industries just leads to ... well look at today's french banking scandal. When I worked at Bank of America, and was about to be hired full-time, a fellow employee took my laptop workstation away, claiming they needed it because of mission-critical overtime work or something. I didn't have a computer at the time so I had to go into gaming labs and clean their entire network of spyware for them to get any work done. (and have been addicted to FPS games since, thanks alot)
The problem I've always had is that few employers seem to really grasp the concept of a salaried position. In a salaried position, I'm hired to get a job done, irrespective of how many hours it takes. If it takes me 40 hours a week, great. 50 hours a week, oh well. 30 hours a week? PARTY! But most employers don't get this. So they look on salaried as a minimum of 40 hours week. In my particular specialty (troubleshooting really big systems), that's just silly, because often there's nothing to do... so when I was really doing my specialty, I would often end up doing nothing, sitting at my computer just to keep the IM icon lit up, when I could have been resting up for the next 48 hour marathon problem. It's just annoying ... I mean, if I'm salaried, why do a timesheet? Yet they all want a timesheet. If they want me to work free overtime, then they need to g
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
...does not a quality employee make. Please don't strengthen employers' belief otherwise; it's that very sort of thing that created the travesty at IBM where it was *expected* that people would work overtime and not get paid* said overtime in the first place.
* yes, I know, supposedly this was offset in their base pay. But for how many hours of overtime? 10/month? 20/month? what if you worked 40/month overtime? You were underpaid. What if you didn't work overtime at all? You got overpaid. At least, let's assume you got overpaid.. what if the base pay with this expected (assumed, really) overtime included is what would be base pay sans assumed overtime, in general, in the rest of the field? Then presumably you got the pay you deserved, and anybody working overtime was underpaid. Which would mean the base pay correction simply means that those who work overtime now get the pay they'd deserve -without- overtime to begin with, while everybody who doesn't work overtime will be underpaid.
Let's see some figures to determine which situation applies.
I wish I could get this deal. I would gladly take the money for all the overtime I put in over the years. I will compensate for the 15% salary cut by doing 15.5% less work.
If IBM did not make the cuts, the exempt employees who aren't getting reclassified would be the ones up in arms since their effective wage would go down in comparison. They had two ways of going: tick off the non-exempt or tick off the exempt. Since the non-exempt are the smaller group, it's easy enough to go that direction.
Excellent bullshit detector technology you have there. In fact, you beat me to it. :)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
No troll, seriously, where are they making their money at this point? I know their revenue is in the billions but, from what I can see, it's all legacy shit. They don't seem to be making new sales, they're just supporting the existing market which is slowly but surely drying up.
Are they in a place like the Detroit Big 3, revenues of billions but sinking into irrelevancy? Honest question here, I don't know. I just know I used to see IBM equipment in high school and when I started working but now the only thing I've seen IBM produce is commercials.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Here's the deal. I've been an IBM employee for the last five years. I loved my job. I was rated a Top Performer EVERY YEAR. I didn't complain about the hours, and I loved the freedom. I didn't participate in the lawsuit.
I had a lovely conversation with my manager where she informed me "Your pay is getting reduced by 15%, you'll be hourly. Btw, you're a 1 again this year."
Here's how it works:
OT must be PREapproved by management and must meet business needs. This has been stressed repeatedly in every call and conversation I've had about this. This means that while it's fresh on everyone's minds, I'll get my 5 hours a week and won't have a paycut. Of course, 60 days from now, the overtime will be cut and it will just be a 15% paycut. Trust me on this one, I've seen IBM do similar things before.
Also, if I take a week's vacation, do I work overtime that week so that my paycheck isn't 15% less? Nope. It's just 15% less. That's right, I'll now be financially penalized for taking vacation, and sick days, and holidays.
My life insurance and short term disability and other insurances are also affected. They are done as a % of my base pay, which is now 15% less.
I'm shopping around for a new job. This is crazy.
The thing about being hourly when working a job where you don't set your own time is that you actually know what you are being compensated for your work.
I'm not kidding when I say I've asked about work-week length in an interview... the reason being that my non-hourly salary requirement is based on how long my work week actually is.
At least hourly wages make it easier to compare apples-to-apples when it comes to compensation. I would say that it also works in the favor of the company, who will now have little trouble getting its employees to work extra hours... it moves from a drudgery with no compensation to a chance to make time-and-a-half.
Interestingly, IBM did a very large move to hourly work about two years ago, reclassifying thousands of previously exempt workers. At that point it did not, at least for me, also include a pay-cut; but because I was on-call and working weekends, there was a month or two where my income doubled, and then after that I worked quite a few less hours than before.
As to the "5 hours" comment, in IBM's case, 10% overtime was considered manditory in most groups I worked with for salaried employees.
Personally I'm glad. The "exempt professional" category has been abused far too long.
I've had this conversation with loads of people, and I'm slowly making headway. More and more of my associates are starting to work this way, and it's buying us all far better quality of life.
:)
Would your employer give you any of their high-value goods or services for free? The answer to that is normally no.
So why should you give them any of YOUR high-value services for free?
When I take a job, I'm offering to exchange a certain amount of my time and skills for a certain amount of money. If I give them loads more, then I'm actually getting less money per unit of work than I agreed.
I'm flexible to a certain extent... I normally get in half an hour early because I like to avoid traffic any way, and I work through my lunch hour. On balance, I do about 7 hours a week free overtime. But that's where I draw the line, and every hour after that either costs, or contributes to time off in lieu. Since my base holiday allowance at my new gig is 30 days per year, it mostly has to be paid overtime rather than TOIL these days.
I'll never forget the look on the MDs face at the ad agency I worked at 5 years ago when I asked him for £20,000 in free advertising - he went spare, and that was for charity! That's when I realised that this is a two way street and cut my average work week from 60 hours to 40. Things got messy a bit quickly but then another overhaul of management and we got sensible staffing levels and proper project planning
GP is either trolling or very confused indeed.
Is someone making them work there? They're salaried workers, working in a reasonably high-paying field. Yea, there is stress, yea there are long hours...What's your point?
If they don't like the pay, they should do something else for a living.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The only thing a union is likely to do in this situation is force the work overseas.
If IBM can't find workers for what they're offering, they'll have to raise their salaries. If they can, then the work isn't worth as much as people thought it was.
The only thing I've ever see a union do well is force out people who don't belong to that union.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Section 13(a)(17) of the FLSA provides that certain computer professionals paid at least $27.63 per hour are exempt from the overtime provisions of the FLSA.
80K a year works out to somewhere around 40 bucks an hour.
They said they were wrongly classified as exempt, but TFA mentions IT positions. This explains a portion of who is exempt and who isn't. It looks to me like most IT jobs fit into exempt.
I guess I should be thankful I'm on salary, but still get hourly OT pay if I claim it. *grin*
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
We are entering a hard recession. By next year the employees morale will be high because they have a job.
Was talking with my dad last night, who is a financial planner. He got the monthly prospectus from his parent company yesterday and shared an interesting bit of information with me:
They looked at the ten worst January's on record, where the market showed recession. All ten of those years, the market turned a respectable profit by December.
You have to remember to think in the long term. So what if the market is down for a few months? The remaining months can turn it up higher than it was before. And election years, historically, have a tendency to stabilize the market.
(If anything, a recession is a time to invest. The stocks are sold at bargain basement prices!)
Yes, never once. I have out and out refused to work it. I put in my 40, leave at 5 on the nose, and fuck anyone saying I have to do otherwise. The only exceptions are that I did do 'on-call' duty once a month when I worked at CPS as well as one volunteer weekend of extra time during Y2K at the same place, and once about 5 years ago at my current place to supervise a complete gut and replace of all of the IT/IS infrastructure at the company that had just hired me. Never one second for SF, never for IBM, never at any other company.
The best part is, I have only been 'forced out' from one company (contract to IBM) and they were forced to pay me the remainder of said contract (10's of thousands). No one else has batted an eye honestly, and when asked by line supervisors or higher ups I told them point blank that I have a life, work is simply to pay the bills and while I am here I will give you 110% but don't expect me to be here one second beyond my standard 40 hour work week.
Now as a senior IS/IT manager and director, I don't require anyone to work it at all and defend anyone who has that same attitude. If someone does without prompting I compensate them and note it, but I am not looking for kiss asses and one of my actionables is to check man to hour levels and see if we need to bring another regular or contract person to meet our requirements - it is cheaper in most cases to bring in temp help (or even another perm employee) rather than pay out on OT anyway.
What IBM has done here, though not surprising given who they are and their history, is simply disgusting. They are a terrible company to work for, always have been and at this pace always will be. They purposefully, and most gleefully from what I have read on various boards, did this to spite the workers who had the temerity to fight IBM on the issue, and there are plenty of reprisals beyond this being handed out to boot. Just disgusting, and the worse part is the courts and lawmakers don't give a shit.
A union is not the answer here either... they will just take what ever extra they get you and do little beyond preserving their own existance as an organization. And if there is unionization it will all just go overseas for a few dimes on the dollar.
From the article:
"IBM believes aspects of the wage and hour laws have not kept pace with the realities
of the modern workforce."
I agree completely. Because the typical job involves a daily commute of over 20 miles
within massive urban congestion and stalled traffic, an extra 2 hours (at least) needs
to be allotted to the time already spent at work. Coupled with all the other demands
of modern civilized existence, which ironically have only increased and not decreased
the amount of labor and effort required, the average working man is forced to consume
more of his free time than even his agrarian ancestors.
The reality is clear. The time has come for a mandatory DECREASE in the workweek
from forty hours to thirty. Another major realignment of our cultural mores, as
once before had happened in the early twentieth century with the abandonment of
the twelve hour day, is now absolutely necessary.
We cannot forget that, in addition to work, modern people need to devote attention
to their families and to be involved in local and national politics. Such critical
tasks need time and, thanks to the excessive work week, time is becoming a rare
commodity. Only a reduction in working hours could begin to redress the imbalance.
Being allowed to. The re-classification does not guarantee the workers that 5 hours of overtime. In fact, going forward, you can bet they will push back on allowing overtime that HAD been done before as "exempt" work. Even worse, there are plenty of people affected by this that will not qualify for overtime to begin with (they work a standard 9-5 position). Those are the ones that are really screwed in this.
I meant to say, "Maybe you could spend 2 days per month with your family, instead of an hour per *day*.".
testing out my trending skills
I know you've got a low ID,
old man (or woman),
but there's no need to man-
ually enter carriage returns
while you type, like some
kind of old timey typewrit-
er. The input box is wider
than the comment will be
displayed, so it forces awk-
ward line wrapping with
hang-
ing words every other line.
You can't possibly anticipate how wide everyone's display is when you type the comment, not the least because nesting means that every comment will have a different width on the same computer. It is much better to let the computer handle the wrapping, especially since it can re-flow text to fit the width available dynamically. Say no to hard returns.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
When I worked for IBM, they classified me as Salary Non-Exempt. In IBM's world, Salary Non-Exempt is the absolute best of both worlds. You are, indeed, salaried, which means you get your standard paycheck for any hours up to and including 40. If you are sick a day, you still get your 40 hrs. If you just slack off, you still get your 40 (until you get fired ;) ). However, if you work more than 40, you get paied 1.5x for every hour over that. It was great.
The new FOSSie hero IBM can do no wrong!!! Since they are dumping money into having programmers make software which will never be purchased, OF COURSE they are going to have to cut the pay of those programmers: fiscally speaking, they aren't pulling their weight.
IBM primarily makes money from two sources: hardware and support. Programming FOSS lies in neither of those categories. So if Teh IBM FOSSies want to make money, move into the hardware or support departments, and make room for some other poor sucker. But on the bright side, the new FOSSie schlub won't know the base pay was cut, and actually getting paid for doing something will be a new experience! He could then possibly afford to move out of his mom's basement into a basement studio apartment!
There are thousands of soon to be former IBM workers who are on the job market. Any company wishing to hire in those regions should be happy.
When the company you work for treat you badly you must seriously consider if it is worth it and react with finding a job where they appreciate you. Or start your own company...
The people that quit are those that don't want to work a minute over 40 hours and just took a 15% pay cut. If they are non-exempt, they are now getting time-and-a-half for over 40 hours. So they need to work 10% more hours, or 4 hours/week. Everyone that puts more than 44 hours a week comes out ahead, those at 44 hours are a wash, those between 40 and 44 a slight cut, and those at 40 or below took a 15% haircut.
Guess what, IBM is going to keep their hard working billing people. The guys willing to put in 50 - 60 hour weeks will love this. The guys that put in extra time when needed but not every week will grumble about the pay cut, put in some overtime every pay period to not get a pay cut, and start to love it when big projects mean real money.
The people that will pack up and leave are the guys that show up at 9:05, leave at 4:55, take an hour for lunch, and do whatever they can to dare someone to fire them so that they can fire a wrongful dismissal suit. IBM will get rid of some dead wood and make their hardest working employees happy. They'll turn this into a net win.
Personal Experience: I briefly worked for IBM when one of my employers "sold" my whole department to them (we went from being full time employees to being IBM contractors doing the same job). IBM looked like a pretty good deal at first -- same pay, same job, but better benefits and more time off. The catch is, they require a minimum of 2000 "billable hours" per year. 52 wks x 40hr/wk is 2080 hours, so that may sound reasonable at first, but the 12 holidays and 2 weeks of vacation you get and any sick days you need are not "billable". Nor is time spent at IBM company meetings. So in effect you get 2 weeks off and anything beyond that you are expected to make up for with unpaid overtime.
I left IBM after about a year. Many companies expect or pressure their employees to work unpaid overtime and have been getting away with it for years, but IBM actually made it an official policy - I suspect that's why they are getting in trouble. I'm a big free market proponent, and normally would say, "if a company's compensation plan is bad, then don't work there!". Well, I did leave, but you could say I didn't exactly choose to work for IBM in the first place.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Wrong. Harm done. Sure, you keep working overtime and your take-home remains about the same. Except when you take a vacation or go on maternity or other medical leave, and suddenly your income drops 15% for the duration. Also, the company's annual pension payout to you drops 15% because that amount is based on your base salary, not overtime.
Doesn't everyone think the tag: letthemhavetheirtartar would be appropriate?
They wanted to be treated like blue collar, hourly employees - now they can be paid like them. If you want a salaried, career position and the pay that comes with, get used to working more than 40 hours.
Or you can go out on your own, work 80 hours a week, and possibly not get paid at all.
Quit whining and get back to your oars (ok - this line is a joke, but I'm serious about the rest).
When I was at a major software company in the 1990s, the execs were really pushing us to get a big project out on deadline.
The project slipped for several reasons some good some bad.
The employees grumbled to the highest-ranking non-management people and THOSE people went to upper management and whispered the word "union."
All of the sudden the push for super-long work-weeks ended.
As far as I know the shop is still non-union.
When I left the senior tech people were still there but some of the upper managers weren't.
I'm one of those exempt employees who's expected to bill 15% unpaid OT per year. If course all my billings go right to customer accounts so I am in theory a straight profit center.
The "ideal" workweek is a balance of the job requirements, the person's individual stamina, and the amount of time the individual needs or wants for sleep, commuting, family, volunteer work, leisure, etc.
For some people in some jobs, "every waking moment" is ideal.
For other jobs, "ever daylight hour except necessary breaks" is ideal.
For other people or other jobs, less than 20 is ideal.
For most people in most jobs in America, 30-50 hours/week seems to be about right.
However there is nothing magic about 40 hours. If I'm comfortable working 50 in a salaried job, fine. Hourly productivity being equal, I'll be 20% more productive and 20% more valuable than my coworker who insists on going home after 40. Over time, our paychecks and opportunities for advancement will diverge to reflect this difference. On the other hand, if he gets as much done in 40 hours as I do in 50, then our career paths should remain parallel.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That way, you get a good paycheck, you are in charge of your OWN money/retirment, and you NEVER work for free. You get paid for every hour you work.
I swear, if possible, I'd NEVER go back to working as a W2 employee again...
The only thing needed for a mass transition to this, is to make it easier for single person corps to be able to buy into a group insurance scheme, or make it easier for individuals to get insurance for themselves (it isn't THAT expensive, but, hard to get if you aren't in 100% top health).
Anyway, doing this would cut companies' HR expenses, cut all the overhead of benefits, and then they could easily pay the bill rates required.
I mean, in todays world of "at will" employment, and the lack of loyalty from either employer or employee, why not just get the formalities of W2 employment out of the way, and call the workforce of today, what it is, and pay for it that way.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There are cases where the application of overtime law is crystal clear but there are many cases where it is not.
In particular, if a knowledge worker with no subordinates who uses company tools is told "here is what needs to be done, see that it gets done, I don't care how you do it" and he is paid more than a certain annual salary, things can get pretty gray pretty fast.
Absent a settlement, a judge will determine what laws apply and a jury will determine what the facts of the case really are, and in the meantime the lawyers will get rich.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When people start talking about a 'pending recession', it means that the recession started about three months earlier.
The formal definition of recession is "two or more successive quarters of GDP decline". You can't assign the first quarter to a recession until the second one arrives meaning that we're not technically in a recession, as of this writing. Wait for March 31st (end of 2nd US FY08), then we can comfortably claim that Jan 24th was part of it.
By the way:
since so many people look to the federal funds rate, it's easier to illustrate the overall attitude by looking at the changes to it and when they occurred. We see a minimal regular increase (+.25) in rate until September 18 when suddenly the rate drops by twice that interval (-.50).
September 18 also happens to be about one quarter ago.
Even though that is just one marker to a complex market, it is one that all participants use.Politicians will say anything, so disregard those comments. In this case, it's not just politicians talking about recession.
This is not my sig
Actually it is completely standard for non-exempt employees to be paid less by about 10-15% than exempt employees. In the various institutions I've worked, it was recognized and standardized that exempt employees get paid more, but then do not get overtime. Such employees are typically officiers of the company, etc, i.e. exempt employee are generally of a HIGHER class. Now these folks *wanted* to be non-exempt, i.e. a LOWER class...
I'm sure this action seems mean, particularly on an individual basis, but since the lawsuits were dealing with the issue as a "class", that is generalized to the job classification of a whole group, then it is in fact standard for that whole group to either: 1) have a higher base salary but not get overtime (exempt), or 2) a lower base salary, but then get overtime. So the group asked to be non-exempt, a lower class that gets overtime... so they got it, along with the reduction in base salary commensurate with the reduction in status...
I thought Congress passed a law a year or two back to prevent that.
It was to protect restaurant managers who were taking home $30K/year for 60-80 hour workweeks.
Now, if by "low paid" you mean $50K for a position that pays $80K in the corporate world, well, that's not low paid in absolute terms.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
1) employees are happy.
2) employees fear retaliation.
In a healthy job market, good employees who are unhappy can simply vote with their feet. The mediocre ones don't have as much flexibility and they probably know it. They would be financially wise to keep whatever job they have unless it's making them completely miserable.
No large company in America is going to retaliate in a way that will get them into legal trouble. However, they will react in a lawful manner.
If a large US software company's IT staff unionized, nobody would be fired and nobody would lose a job opportunity just because they helped organize the union.
However, if the union was antagonistic to management, the union could expect future job growth to occur in right-to-work states or outside the US, rather than in areas that would increase union membership. Likewise, projects would be shifted around so future layoffs would occur in union plants rather than non-union ones. All of this would happen over several years or decades.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well, announcing a 15% salary cut is essentially announcing a layoff. Hopefully, losing some percentage of their workforce was what IBM had in mind.
The company I work for has a very interesting policy for exempt work... even as an exempt employee, we can still work "overtime". It goes like this:
The first 5 hours that you work late during the "standard week" is free; any time after that, or any time not during the "standard week" is paid as additional straight time. The best part is that our "standard week" in engineering is four 10-hour days, and until you get up into a management-type position you rarely (maybe 2-3x/month) work later than that. Friday is extra pay; most of us generally come in and work till lunch that day. However, you generally are expected to be there for the normal 40 hours; and though personal time is technically "unlimited", using more than the standard allotment without good cause is generally frowned upon. You're also guaranteed at least 4 hours if you get called in (say, on the weekend), even if you're only there 30 minutes.
What's even better is that, for the first six months, someone coming in as Engineer I is classified as hourly, so you get all the benefits of time-and-a-half and all that. The catch is that, once you go salary, you keep the same base pay till the annual adjustments/raises come around... so you effectively lose a little money if you've been working overtime.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Homw much do you charge for /. time? Not trying to flame, but I like my exempt status because it makes the job not about hours, but about production. I've never been a fan of time and materials pay structure because it compensates the slow worker as much as the efficient ones.
878659 - yep its prime.
An employer is a customer, who buys your labor. Suing your customers is usually a bad idea, as the RIAA is slowly discovering. Suing your one big customer is an even worse idea.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Why can't they do like the rest of us and make up the 15% cut by stealing the equivalent value of office supplies?
Being an independent contractor simply isn't suited for everyone, and I would not be surprised to hear that many people would prefer to keep their current salary than take a 100% raise as a contractor. Nothing in employment is certain, but in general an employee is going to keep a stable steady paycheck longer than a contractor. Yes, reasonable contractors take in more income overall, but they still go from contract to contract, with down time between. To some, that's a positive aspect (more money, lots of vacation time), but to others the downtimes can be scary.
Form your own corp....got corp to corp, figure your bill rate to cover your paying your own insurance, vacation time, etc....and be done with it.
Well, because there is an uncertainty in the level of work (especially since I'm in a small market - Alaska) and the bill rate to get me my current level of compensation would be uncompetitive. I worked for a consulting company that provided the same services I'd provide as a contractor. They charged less for my time than it would take to match my current salary, and I'd be competing against them (of course, they paid me much less at the time as well). So I'd have to charge 50% more than a direct competitor for service as a single individual when the competitor has a company of 10+ people they can throw at the same issue.
I swear, if possible, I'd NEVER go back to working as a W2 employee again...
Well, I get $10,000 per year retirement put into my account, not matching, even if I put in $0, they give me $10,000 per year. They paid for my masters degree. I have medical and dental and vision and all that, for a cost of $0. They pay about $15,000 per year for it. I can take off 4 weeks and 4 days per year at full pay. Starting in April, it goes to 6 weeks and 4 days per year. I'd have to charge an additional 15% above everything else just to cover the vacation. I get mileage, travel per diem that is above market rate, free training and time away from working for the training. I love being a W2 employee. My paycheck is the same every time. I've never been fired or laid off (well, except one time when I wanted it and got just under $30,000 severance after a merger). I have more job security than a contractor and greater income. Only if I thought I could be billed out at $250 an hour for 20+ hours a week would it make any sense for me to even consider contracting. The bill rate is much lower than that here, and I have no idea what my billed hours would be. For me (and the majority of people) being a W2 employee is vastly superior to contracting.
Learn to love Alaska
It's far more likely you got modded by someone who is tired of watching people like you spew the same karma whoring garbage over and over.
Get some talking points douche, your old ones have been debunked, and it's sad watching your loser ass whine about your moderation.
Fuck off now.
There have also been a number of legal cases where it has been determined that if a single "client" (company) accounts for more than a certain percentage of a single "contractor's" pay, then that "contractor" is an employee and subject to all benefits and requirements of an employee.
Working as a contractor only works if you multiple clients, at least over a period of time.
This is also the main reason that many companies haven't converted employees to contractors.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/12/AQXZ.html
$21.30 mil (#56)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I've been exempt before and it got abused like crazy by the employer. I'm talking here about an employer that expected massive overtime averaging 60 hours per week, plus on-call constantly, and absolutely insane about making it in the office by 8:00 even if the previous day had been a 16-hour troubleshooting fest.
There was no, zero, balance to the relationship and no "life" outside the place, and my health was beginning to suffer due to exhaustion.
After the second week in a row with a full 24-hour Friday implementing a migration job, plus being unpaid for a few days after taking time off to get married, I finally had enough. That was "it" and I got out of there. Just quit. Bye-bye.
Occasional overtime is one thing and near-slavery is another.
Lets just say I am in a position to know whats going on. The IT workers are working for large accounts that they bid in and usually the lowest bidder takes it. The IBM contracts with the accounts tend to create a lot of politics and finger pointing that just getting a faulty hard drive can be an exercise in wading through red tape.
Now the issue is you have a large group in say...an Intel group or Unix group. Within that group everyone is salaried, or on a contract. Also a lot of IBM employees on these accounts have been "absorbed" by accounts former IT departments, which usually results in far more overtime worked, way more paperwork, and since you have the tribal knowledge, a lot more responsibility. Since management is usually states away and a lot of the time unreachable, it creates a lot of hostile feelings. Add in the contractors who come in getting paid overtime and usually making significantly more, and you get the lawsuit.
Now I believe the lawsuit, and the resultant overtime payment will be good but it can be bad as well. IF IBM takes the opportunity to track hours better, and see the overstressed members and accounts, and then is able to go back to those accounts and get more money and resources, then they will have taken advantage of the situation. However if they get into the lazy way (IE See Computer Science Corporation) they will make people not report or work overtime, and will remove or punish those that do.
As for unionize. I dunno. Im not a huge fan, however IT is an extremely necessary component of a company. These days the employees are treated like the reheaded step children in terms of job stability, workload, and in general respect. Most companies do not realise that the job market is drying up at least in the areas I am in. CS majors and people that want to get into IT is very low because they see and know how they will be treated. I think IT Is every bit as necessary, and even more company specific knowledge than other groups like say accountants, or sales teams. You dont see them getting outsourced or undervalued much if you want good ones. The IBM 15% decrease is a shortsighted, and disrespectful decision towards there IT workers.
At some point this behavior will come to bite a lot of companies in the ass. I look forward to the day when companies need tech workers, and they are all doing something else because they needed stability.
In theory, the only reason why a W2 is superior to a 1099 is the legal backdrop and reduced responsibilities that go with it.
I'll leave the pros and cons to both out of the discussion here as I'm sure most folks have a clue what they are.
This. What I wanted to contribute is this may be one tipping point where contracting may come ahead of being an employee in the years to come. With "right to work" laws being what they are in most states, the notion of "job security" and "employer loyalty" is obviously being more spurious, with "layoffs" being the happy norm over outright firings. It would seem that "sue the pants off the bastards" is not as much of a deterrent to loosing one's job as we'd all like to believe, so you're left with about the same security as an independent contractor would have.
For that matter, putting your fiscal and professional future in the hands of an entity that things of nothing but the bottom line seems like rather spurious judgment. This is especially so when put in the cold light of the rash of IT layoffs ten years ago.
You got that right. I get quite a few calls from companies that want to hire me on a W2/full-time basis. The only thing they can really offer me is paycheck security--twice a month I'd get a reliable paycheck. But that word "reliable" should definitely be in quotes because there is no loyalty from companies to employees which is why there is no loyalty from employees to companies. So why would I take a pay cut and give up my freedom (being able to work at 2am if I want, deciding when I'll take vacations, etc.) for a "reliable" paycheck that isn't really reliable? It just doesn't make sense.
It'd have to be an awfully juicy offer to get me to go back to W-2. I don't think anyone could afford what I'd have to ask for to accept a W-2 position.
I used to work for a Accenture, a rival firm. While we officially got paid overtime, booking it could get you into a lot of trouble. Bosses would say, not in writing, to not book OT.
In court, two people saying "the boss said that" and one boss saying "no I didn't" will almost always find for the two people that agree. Also, there are recorders that are the size of pens and look like them too. Hit record, toss it in a pocket, and have the "I have to work O/T this week, how would you like me to enter my time code?" question ready. If he answers "work it but don't book it" then you have a nice case against them and can sue them so you never have to work again.
Learn to love Alaska
Who would want to work for IBM now anyway? They've outsourced all their work and have only shell US employees to do the talking to customers while the real shit software development is done in India. And having worked on too many outsourcing projects, they always come in with crap software. When I get a call from a recruiter and they mention working for IBM--delete. IBM is a dinosaur and they are running on fumes. If they are so stupid as to penalize their employees for standing up for their rights--good luck hiring anybody whose first name is not Jagdish.
If you're working on an hourly consulting basis, sure, if you can get the job done in 20 hours when a slow person gets it done in 40 hours, the slow guy is actually going to get paid more for you to get the same job done slower. But once a company realizes you are reliable and efficient, you're going to get the jobs in the future--not the slow guy.
I used to think like you. Even as a consultant I'd try to spec a project and come up with a fixed-price bid. That way both the client and I could focus on getting the work done rather than stressing about counting hours. But last year I got burned by two projects that, through no fault of my own, ended up being significantly more complex than could be known in the quoting process--but since the complexity wasn't known, it wasn't specifically limited in the contract. So it wasn't specification creep (which would definitely be billable), it was just more complex to get the things done than either the client or I recognized. So I had a tough year.
Having learned from that, I have to protect my own rear end. I've come to the conclusion that billing on a strict hourly basis is in everyone's interest because:
So now I give clients a good-faith estimate of how long certain things will take, but the actual billing amount is based on the actual amount of time I spend on them. The estimate is just that: An estimate so they can have a reasonably accurate idea of what they're getting into. If it takes less time, they pay less. If it takes more time, they pay more. And they know that up front. And if, as I proceed, it's becoming clear that my estimate was low, I immediately let the client know why and how much more I think it will end up costing. Then they make the decision. Of course, I virtually always come in at or below the estimate so the client is actually pleased to pay less.
The only reason a per-hour arrangement might not be ideal is if 1)You are not honest about the hours you work--in which case you shouldn't be billing by the hour or, 2) The client is suspicio
I still marvel on how HR got us into this salaried mindset. More so now that I've been contracting for years now. If I work 41 hours I expect to be paid 41 hours and not comp time. Overtime pay can be milked so HR comes up w/ salaried pay which means you work more and don't get anything for it. Not extra pay nor overtime. How they hell did they do that?
....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
OT: Do you have any sites that helped you get started for Group Benefits etc? That seems to be the only stopping issue for me at the moment.
Sig it.
Why is anyone suprised? Anytime a company is sued, the public picks up the tab and the lawyers get a payday. If we truly wanted to punish these companies we'd stop buying their products and services. They'd still lay people off to make their numbers, but at least the legal 'profession' wouldn't continue to profit as well.
You won't ever have to work again... outside the prison walls, that is.
Remember that recording someone without their prior knowledge in the US, is wire fraud. If you are not part of an ongoing criminal investigation AND have a warrant that specifically allows said recording, you are violation of the two-party recording laws of your state.
If you want to keep your job AND stay out of prison, don't record someone without their knowledge, period.
It doesn't make sense to talk about the "free market" in this context, because the very premise is that the government is controlling it through overtime pay regulations. And the workers sued IBM for not paying what they wanted, instead of just walking. If selecting a higher-paying job is what they wanted to do, they would have already switched, instead of trying to get the government to increase the amount on their IBM paycheck.
This isn't an anti-proletariat bitch or anything, just an acknowledgment that we're not talking about a free market situation. Society as a whole has decided that many aspects of the labor market will be highly regulated, i.e. planned by a central authority.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
What I've wondered is what happens when you decide you don't want the pay-cut and are forced to quit? I know if I'm fired I get a severance package. If I quit I get nothing. Likewise, my severance is equal to my pay rate. What keeps a company from dropping your salary, then if you don't quit, lower your salary again and then fire you?
Depends on the gigs. I know people that work 6 mos a year, and enjoy the other half of the year off. Or, you can find gigs, often with the govt. that are contract positions...but, pretty much permanet..at least in the contract sense. Gigs that last multiple years are out there. So, it is pretty much like a steady job.
There are all kinds of gigs out there to suit various tastes. There are a number of companies, that if you do the corp-to-corp thing...will take you over a salaried employee, just to bypass the HR and legal grief. I think more of this is to come in the future.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Working as a contractor only works if you multiple clients, at least over a period of time.
This is also the main reason that many companies haven't converted employees to contractors."
There are ways around that. I you can work as a sub to a prime contractor on govt. jobs for an indeterminate amount of time....no problems there, I've seen it in practice.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
There's a lot of back and forth here about what's fair and what isn't, who's right and who's wrong. Let's cut to the chase. Corporations are for-profit entities whose job is to maximize profits. Their profits are generated by exploiting their workers--paying them less than what their labor is worth. Workers get screwed over with every paycheck. The easiest way for corporations to increase profits is to squeeze their workers--by speeding up work, requiring longer hours or reducing pay. The *only* means workers have to improve their working conditions is by organizing themselves and withdrawing their labor--in other words, forming a union (and striking). Only the workers can be counted on to look after their own interests, and their only weapon is the strike. The simple fact is that the bosses need the workers to create their profits. Unless the workers fight back then management will continue to walk all over them.
And spare me the usual claptrap about how shitty unions are--yeah, many are bureaucratic, collaborate with management and are out of touch with their members. Most of them waste their members' dues on Democrats instead of organizing drives and fighting for real gains. But that doesn't change the fact that through hard work, organizing and grassroots democracy, workers have the power to win concessions from management. Once a better contract is won it is necessary for workers to remain involved in their union and prevent it from degenerating into a bureaucratic mess.
Unfortunately at this time, no. I live in LA, and by law here you HAVE to have >= 2 employees in the corp. to even qualify for group insurance. I'm currently paying my own private insurance, but, that isn't bad. I have a high deductible ($1200) policy, which enables me to set up my own HSA (Health Savings Account), which I can put money in pre-tax...and it isn't use it or lose it, like you get with the similar flexible spending accounts you get working direct. I can take this money in the HSA, and invest it in the mkt too....in the long run, you can come out better than paying high ins. premiums over the lifetime, and at retirement, you can get it as retirement income...look into this.
I did see another poster on this thread mention checking into the local Chamber of Commerce...I'm gonna look into that to see about maybe LTD policies .....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
My boss was a nice guy, but not the most educated. Being just out of school, I realized immediately that he had just violated my rights to organize, protected under the Taft-Hartley Act. For grins, I jotted down the date and time of the incident.
I never had to use that, as I climbed the ladder at HP. But it was always comforting to know that I had a basis for a suit. In fact, it allowed me to take some risks in my career that really paid off!
When is the last time IBM produced something good that people wanted to buy?
What planet are you living on? IBM is, and has been since the day it was founded as the Tabulating Machine Company by Herman Hollerith in the 1880's, the largest provider of electronic IT to the businesses of the world.
For the $98.8 Billion they made in revenue last year, somebody must think they have something worth buying; like:
Mainframes: The world's largest IT systems still run on IBM Mainframes because they simply pretty much never break, and they have had continuous, complete, software and hardware backward compatibility for about forty years. (As in, you can theoretically take a functioning punch-card reader from the '70's, a succession of interface adapters, a stack of cards, and use them to boot a mainframe fresh off the assembly line in New York without changing a single line, er... card, of code.) This sort of stuff is important to large businesses, who hate re-writing major, working, systems. I have personally seen an insurance company still using reel-to-reel tape connected to a mainframe only a couple of years old. (They received employee data from the state on the tapes.)
Chips: All three major game consoles use IBM processors.
Software: Somebody must like Lotus Notes, because a lot of people still use it. IBM also produces the DB2 database, Tivoli management software, WebSphere middleware, Rational dev tools, and a host of other products.
Services: IBM is the largest provider of IT services spanning the whole spectrum of services a business might want to provide from hardware field service to management consulting.
Servers: They still have the largest market share for servers.
OS'es: Plenty of folks still purchase z/OS, i/OS, and AIX. OS/2 was small potatoes in comparison...
Oh, also, the Rational Unified Process is more than just a book with some suggestions in it. There is also a large suite of tools to back it up. And for large I/T projects involving very large teams of programmers, it doesn't pay to just make up a development process on the fly.
Lastly, Google does indeed spend more per employee than this, but all the "scut" work at Google (i.e. Hardware Maint., customer service, etc.) is farmed out to contractors, who don't get Google benefits or Google pay.
SirWired
As a guy who has been full-time salaried, a contractor, self-employed, and part-time salaried while contracting/self-employed, I can tell you that 1099 is not universally better than W2.
For one, being a contractor is inefficient use of resources. Companies with employees have efficient structures in place to manage those employees - from paying them to health insurance to retirement plans.
For two, at-will employment cuts both ways - sure, you can be laid off at any time, but you can also leave at any time too. And you probably have fewer job transitions with at-will employment than you do with contract employment. Hiring and firing employees is expensive, and companies would like to avoid that expense. If they're going to be laying off employees, chances are they're going to be not renewing contracts as well.
For three, ever tried to get your own health insurance when you're not 18-29, single, male, and healthy? My wife has scoliosis and steel rods in her back - and a full-time job just for the health insurance.
For four, being a contractor just doesn't fit a lot of people's mindsets. They just want regular employment - show up, do the work, get a paycheck. For a lot of people, that's LESS stressful than trying to negotiate contracts all the time.
paintball
That is, of course, only if you live in one of the fifteen or so states that have two-party recording laws. The rest of the states have one-party recording laws, so as long as one of the people in the conversation (i.e. you) knows that it is being recorded, you would not be in violation of the law.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
It's too true to be "+1 funny". :(
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Taking home less than half of the billing rate means you're either a sucker or a parent.
I have this theory that most companies create their own competition. There's multiple ways this happens. . . but one of them is certainly stuff like this. Jerk your employees around and eventually, some of them will go out and start their own companies that compete with you. If you'd spent a little more money in the short run to keep them happy, you might not have created more competition for yourself.
I'm not saying that's going to happen in this specific case, but I know it happens to companies all the time.
Remember that recording someone without their prior knowledge in the US, is wire fraud.
100% wrong. Recording an in-face conversation is legal in all locations in the US. Recording a phone conversation is legal in about half of the US. When I lived in Texas, I could record any phone call with another Texan without permission. I would run into trouble if the person called from Virginia, as theoretically I could be charged in a state I'd never stepped in with a crime that was committed over 1000 miles away. But there is no US law that requires notification prior to recording in person or over the phone (as long as you are one of the parties involved in the conversation).
And my statement before was to toss the pen in your pocket and go to their office. A pen recorder recording a phone conversation would be pretty useless. That type of recording is legal everywhere in the US.
Learn to love Alaska
That's why I charge a flat rate for services rendered. It motivates me to work faster (and thus get more free time), and insures the company from overage problems.
Like I said, I used to think that way. But since it motivates you to work faster, it also motivates you to do only what is minimally required by the specification so you can work faster.
With a fixed price scenario your product probably won't look as good as if you knew that you have some flexibility to spend a few hours making something look awesome rather than just acceptable. And if your estimate is already a little high (which I still do because I prefer to prepare the customer for the worst case scenario so he's happy when we come in under the estimate) then you have the freedom to spend a little extra time making it look downright awesome... but you're still getting paid for that extra effort. And the client is still happy because you still bill less than what you estimated.
Put it this way: I want a fair wage for a fair day's work. If we look at a project and agree on $40,000 because I think it's going to take 320 hours but then it only ends up taking 160 hours, is that fair to the client? Like I said, I'm a happy camper because I just made twice my normal rate. But that just means I over-billed the client which I don't think is ethical.
On the other hand, if we agree on $40,000 because we think it'll take 320 hours but then it ends up taking 640 hours, I just ended up making half my normal rate. The client is happy because he got an awesome deal. But that just means he paid me less than we really thought he was going to pay me for my time. I don't think that's ethical either.
As long as both sides are honest, hourly billing is the fairest approach for both the client and the consultant. The client needs to trust that the consultant is not milking the clock, and the consultant needs to be honest and not milk the clock.
If either the client or the consultant is dishonest then the relationship is going to fail eventually anyway.
Retribution against an employee for filing a lawsuit when the suit has merit is illegal. If someone takes them to court again and successfully argues that the pay cut is retribution for the suit, IBM could be in for a world of hurt.
That's why you do a variable bid with a time sensitive incentive. Have the best of both worlds.
It is only natural to expect that an agreement forced by a third party will be inferior to an agreement mutually acceptable to both parties.
This estimate of labor billing is EXACTLY how i bill my clients (I run network support for businesses around town.) They LOVE it, and it works great for me too!
Where do you work? I want that vacation time...
Bottles.
This is really funny...
"We're not professionals!" - "We don't possess special skills!" - "We have no management authority!" - "You need to pay us by the hour like burger flippers!"
"Hey - why'd you cut our pay? This is not fair!"
Waaaaa!!!! Cry me a river.
It's the primary fallacy with Communism that a man-hour is a man-hour. That's why they made so many bad products.
In software (especially) a good programmer can work 10x or 100x as fast as an average programmer. If a work is worth $40k, then it's worth $40k, regardless of how much time went into it. You can see that it's not overcharging a customer if you think of the work produced as being worth $40k, not X hours (even if you used hours as a baseline way of coming up with an estimate).
With a real-life example, I'm not even vaguely interested in hearing how many man-hours a contractor will spend installing granite countertops -- I just want a start date, and end, and a total amount. If the work isn't done to spec, as it wasn't, you bring the contractor back in and make it to spec. Similarly, when I do contract work for people, if there's a feature or something they want added (as often happens) or a bug that needs to be fixed, I go back and happily do it, as long as it doesn't represent a major new feature, or deviate too far from what we agreed upon me providing.
Don't even specify the man-hours you'll work on a project if it involves the creation of a work. Of course, if your task is inherently hours-related (like providing 10 hours of technical support), then by hours is how you'll have to roll.
If they are able to do that, they have to be exempt employees. Non-exempt employees are generally busy on something concrete (picking phone calls, etc.) instead of meditating on abstract stuff (creating an algorithm, etc.), and their performance are measured differently from an exempt employee.
How nice, I wonder who lobbied for such vagueness.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In all other civilized countries socialist is a legitimate term to describe a valid political philosophy.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In spite of being the most prosperous time for US people in the history of their country
/.ers whine about how difficult they have it is frankly tedious (Oh! Put a roof on the top of your head.! Feed yourself! And the children! You shall not forget the children!).
Reading US
With minimal planning you should be in a position to resign at any moment if you are being mistreated. If you can't do that that means you are not handling your money wisely.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Why not have everyone do it and be done with it? It's the little things, like having a steady paycheck and not having to hassle with trying to find a new job every few months. Oh, and being employable in the future when one's resume is loaded with lots of short-term jobs. There's something to be said for also not having to deal with a new company's bonehead policies every few months, like discovering that they actually expect you to use vi and SCCS. Another poster wrote something about only billing by the hour. Perhaps that works great for someone who's been doing it for years, but for someone who's been working a regular job, there's no hourly-rate or productivity precedent and thus bidding a flat rate for the job may well be the only way to even be considered.
The whole exempt thing is a joke. As a professional there are jobs out there that pay squat and you work 70-80 hours per week. Seems to be smaller companies but I've heard of larger companies that do the same thing. There should be a limit to exempt overtime hours to something like 60 hours then afterwards you get overtime. If you're doing 70-80 hours per week it is going to interfere with your family life. The thing is some companies don't care about retaining people which is a bad thing for the company and employer. I always have thought a professional workers union would be a good idea but with jobs going over seas it wouldn't do any good.
When IT people were classified as exempt, they were called "IT Pros". Now, IT people, particularly programmers and administrators, are treated exactly like clerks, except they are expected to work a lot of free OT. If management considers us clerks, they should pay us in the same manner as clerks, including overtime. As far as pay cuts, either IBM was overpaying in the first place, or they are going to lose their best people.
I've worked as programmer for Microsoft and Electronic Arts, and both companies, though they're supposed to pay overtime will use every sleazy trick in the book to avoid having to pay time-and-a-half. They even give exempted contractors (read: no time-and-a-half) a hard time when they bill more than 40 hours a week.
I recently had one manager say, "If you bill over-time again I'm not approving your paycheck." I billed an extra hour when I had really worked an extra 20; and I sit right behind my boss so there was no way that he couldn't have seen that I was working that extra time.
IBM isn't cutting 15% of all base salaries to account for over-time. It's to eek-out that extra little bit of profit.
Actually - only 50% wrong. As the other poster indicated some states require both parties to consent to recording. Pennsylvania is among them - I looked it up. It is illegal to record a conversation there without the consent of all parties involved. However, in most states it is legal as long as at least one party consents.
IBM expects 15% overtime from all their employees. That is they expect 200 hours of overtime per year. I can say this with some confidence. What IBM has done here is subtract their expected overtime from these individuals salaries. I think its a lot to ask people to work what turns out to be an extra day per week, every week of the year.
It is measured.
And you are wrong. Inflation in the US is pretty low.
You may not agree with the methodology to measure it, but once a given methodology is chosen inflation is the result of applying a pretty boring formula.
It is like if you disagree with 2+2=4.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And those of us who have to use the systems consultants deployed "to spec - without any style" (to paraphrase your message) hate both the people who write the specs and also that the consultants don't speak up and ask if they can do more.
Why? Because systems built to spec usually don't do everything they should, and getting them changed or upgraded later becomes a huge chore because "the budget is already spent and we'll have to get a new budget for the updates NEXT year"... which never comes.
Our company ticketing system (Siebel) is an utter hunk of crap, and the data imports from various previous systems were riddled with errors... which those of us who tried to report them later on, found out that the contractors who knew how to work on the thing are long gone, and a handful of admins here who now run the thing don't have time for things like re-importing hundreds of thousands of items from previous databases where the import was done incorrectly (wrong fields, etc.).
I have a VERY unique last name, and when I found that I was both listed in the new system as an employee and also as a customer in Kansas City (I don't live there), I knew someone had screwed up royally...
But the system "meets spec" and the hourly contractors are long gone... and it's been two years since I noticed that AND reported it. No one cares because upper management touted the thing as a grand success, and moved on... the day the check was paid out to the contractors.
Does this mean the company has problems managing contractors? Sure. But ALL COMPANIES DO. So my view of contract help with no VESTED INTEREST in our business, is pretty damn low.
You guys move on, leaving destruction and steaming piles of crap in your wake, don't even know it most of the time, and as long as the special management team who wrote the spec (but has no idea what the people that actually use the system DO with it) is happy at the end outcome (they always are -- they have no idea what the system's really going to be used for), you're long gone.
Buh-bye... see ya. Have fun with that database mess we built for you. We're happy to come back at twice the price and work on it again later for you!
+++OK ATH