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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....
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 ...)
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)
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
And how exactly do you live if you don't work? Property is owned by the government so you must always pay taxes or you loose "your" land. Food, power, transportation? Yes, why don't you show us all how you can live without working aside from taking up residence in a shopping cart on the corner. Also, don't the employees who do the work deserve some of the benefit? It seems corporate executives want to make multi-million dollar bonuses based on the work of others without sharing. Work hard so the boss can buy his 16 year old daughter a $65,000 car! Look at the striking writers guild in Hollywood. Are they wrong for wanting a piece of what they create or should they allow the executives who do nothing to take all the money for themselves? How about all these mergers? Can anyone compete against a mega-corp that owns politicians and writes the laws themselves? If you think the market is "free" then you are living in another world.
Here it is...
Seems they settled or something...
IBM's way of handling this just sucks for those employees...
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If you want to keep your employees, or keep them motivated, showing them a modicum of respect and some common goddamn decency goes a long way, though.
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."
Sounds good in theory, but that's not what really happens to exempt employees: You never work less than 45, and you average something in the 50s. Ask to leave early, and you get yelled at.
As for me, I've proudly held onto my non-exempt status as long as I can. I might have to give it up to get the next promotion I'm looking for, but I'll be damned sure to make up for the extra hours while negotiating my new salary.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
According to Cringely ( http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071228_003726.html ) that would be a good thing since if they quit there's no severance package.
If I was a clockwatcher just putting in time at the job, I think I'd be shopping around my resume, too. There's nothing worse than a company actually paying attention to the number of hours an employee works and paying them accordingly. Except, maybe not.
Why computer workers haven't properly organised with a union is something I still don't understand. If you work for someone else: YOU'RE A SLAVE. So ORGANISE! If you employ others, you're a SLAVE OWNER so EXPECT ORGANISATION.
RS
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I wouldn't be surprised to see a (relative) handful of people quit over this, but I'd bet good money the majority will stay put - despite the 'insult' the paycut hands out. The reason - take a good look at the US economy. There isn't a lot of upward mobility it the numbers, economists are worried about a recession - and that fear usually turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy; at least to a point. Things aren't looking so good right now, people are worried. The Housing sector is the number one place not to be stuck working right now, tech isn't far behind.
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.
I live in Canada, and I have a friend who works for our tax collectors. He says that Canada won't take your land. You won't be able to sell it, and they can make life miserable for you in other ways, but you can keep on living under your roof and on your property.
That seems fair to me, by today's standards.
testing out my trending skills
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".
The union, by contrast, is paid by you to get as much for as little as possible.
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
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Jackie Vatour FTW!
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rewriting history since 2109
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.
The free market only works if everyone is on a level playing field. The employees of IBM and IBM itself are far from being on a level playing field.
This does sound like a slap in the face, but the first slap was by the employees -- suing your employer (or anyone) "means war".
No, the first slap was IBM breaking the law by classifying employees as exempt when they were not. The employees are totally in the right here, and IBM 100% on the wrong side.
Companies like to claim exempt vs. non-exempt is a "gray area." Its only gray when you're trying to screw your employees out of overtime pay.
My personal belief is that salary pay should be made illegal except for strickly management positions. That would solve this problem nicely.
Free market can do no wrong -- by definition.
that's only true if you are a free market. If you are a human being affected by markets, free or otherwise, then yes, it can do wrong.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
Exempt employees get paid more because it's anticipated that they will work some uncompensated overtime. If you change from exempt to non-exempt, then your pay SHOULD be cut. You can't get the best of both worlds - unless you're a contractor. This is especially important for government contracts - you negotiate rates for certain job categories, and you're stuck with them. Your profit is limited by law, so you can't just absorb a 15% hit like this. So you've got to cut the salaries.
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).
That's exactly why Unions, in their current form, have outlived their usefulness. The only way for a union to operate in the best interests of the employees is for the employees of each company to create their own union, run by themselves, with no dues. They should be working together for their own common good, not paying some group of schmucks who are only in it for themselves.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Agreed immediately. However, the story moved from the realm of "normal" relationship, when the employees tried to force IBM via lawsuits. That "meant war" and moved things into the legal realms. Now IBM is simply looking for legal ways to continue paying these people, what they have always been paid.
If that is making a mockery of the law, well, the laws, which attempt to regulate relationship between private parties, are largely idiotic to begin with...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I disagree, because the free market needs to be protected. Not paying for overtime is abuse. The government should conduct surprise inspections to see who is working overtime, and figure out how much are getting paid and whether or not they are being paid.
I think that the reason companies get away with this is because people have to file lawsuits or go through difficult tasks to make a significant difference. If the government found out that the company wasn't paying taxes, then do you think that that they are going to wait till the employees sue their masters in court, before politely asking for the taxes?
Another idea is to make over time painful, so that even at minimum wage levels, their is no incentive to keep servants and slaves working overtime. For starters, the companies should be paying overtime by the second; none of this, "Oh, if you work for us 7 minutes overtime, then we don't pay you.". After all, they don't appreciate us being 7 minutes late. Secondly, they should be paying a rate of something like 2 times the normal wage for the first hour, and then 4 times the wage for the second hour, and just keep on doubling. After 1 hour of extra work, the company should buy a full healthy meal for the worker and his family, on top of his wages and overtime pay. After all, they took his family time away, so they should save him time at home. After the second hour, they should provide a taxi cab home, or some equivalent. After a third hour, then they should provide a house cleaner for 3 full hours of work. The painful list just keeps adding up. The clock never stops until the food is in his hands, and he is able to leave freely.
testing out my trending skills
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.
And good riddance, the company doesn't need disloyal employes ready to sue their own employer.
(no, the above is not -my- opinion. It's just how the corporation will see it.)
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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
Amen, except the last part. Why should managers work overtime?
testing out my trending skills
You have obviously not thought that through to completion. You decide to form a union, and your employer does not like it. One of several things can happen:
1) Your employer takes it on the chin and suffers from a significant loss in net earnings (usually gets executive types all fired up, pun intended).
2) Your employer accepts it after fighting about it and is then undercut by union free competitors, typically using H1B labor, or worse yet simply outsourcing to another country altogether.
3) Your employer gets smart and simply outsources your job, thereby skipping all of the intermediate steps.
Our economy has become a service economy because those are the only jobs that cannot be outsourced easily, but a service economy can't survive indefinitely without outside support. Either way, unionization is not the answer, the only viable answer is to accept that you will suffer a significant drop in standard of living to adjust for the fact that you were way far above the median to start with. Don't like it? tough, welcome to the global economy, there isn't a damn thing you or I can do about it. If you shut down all foriegn trade, there goes your cheap goodies from china, and your standard of living plummets. Imagine if you had to pay $30,000 for a low end car, because it was made using exclusively american labor? How about $120 for a pair of jeans? What about $5,000 for an entry level PC? If you need proof, just look at the cost of housing. It is hideously expensive because there is no good way to offshore the labor needed to build the houses, and as such the cost of these things has been rising at many times the rate of inflation. It is a no-win situation. Americans are not going to enjoy their standard of living much longer, but there isn't anything we can do to stop it. Maybe slow it down a little, or speed it up, but there is no stopping it.
-=Geoskd
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Ask to leave early, and you get yelled at.
Who the hell would work in a place like this. There is no need to ask to leave if you've done your hours. You just leave. If they want you to work overtime then they have to convince you.
In the case the free market can also do no right, by definition.
"I only speak the truth"
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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.
Not paying overtime is not abuse - it's the definition of an exempt employee. That's why certain professions are exempt, and some are not - you might be able to program 60 hours a week, but you can't do that week in and week out with a physically demanding job. Abusing the free overtime is abuse - but if you're working for, say, Microsoft or a game company, you've got to expect a lot of overtime, and you're probably compensated for it in your salary already. But just saying "not paying overtime is abuse" is ridiculous.
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.
saddly i live in the US.. and i did the math for the "unemployment pay" here you need to be laid off and unable to find a job.. once you get "unemployment pay" you have to show at regual intervals that you are trying to find a job and have attended interviews.. what you get paid (last time i checked) was 50% of what your last job was.... and you don't pay taxes on it......
..
so i got to thinking.. if i got a t-shirt that said "i kill babies for fun" and didn't bath (basicly making NO one want to employ me).. i could sit at home most of the time and get 50% of what i make..
take my pay now.. realize that i pay 30% to 401k/retierment stuff.. and another 30% to taxes..
i could get laied off and collect unemployment.. get more money per month (take home) than i do now.. and all i would lose is not having a nice nest egg when i am 65.. although i would still get SS.. and the way the market is going right now i may not have a nice nest egg anyways.. hell i have lost 15% of my 401k just this month
so yea.. as messed up as it is.. unemployment isn't that bad.. sicking really that that 30% taxes i am paying is paying for someone else to do what i jsut discribed
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Somebody who wants to make more money. This is the best-paying company for IT workers within 100 miles, so they have some leverage to get away with it. If there was somebody else around here who paid as well, but treated their employees better, there'd be a massive exodus.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
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
Unemployment is taxed in the US; the government just doesn't take the taxes out up front. Unemployment is only good for a certain number of weeks, it is not pertetual.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Under the FLSA, exempt status can be granted for: administrative, executive, professional and outside sales personnel. I'm fairly sure that most people would trade a crappy hourly wage plus the 1.5x overtime pay for a professional salary any day of the week.
...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.
The free market only works if everyone is on a level playing field. The employees of IBM and IBM itself are far from being on a level playing field.
I don't understand this attitude. The employees and IBM are entered into a business agreement. At any time, either can negotiate the payment. Either can decide to no longer continue the agreement at any time. Where's the unlevel playing field?
Employees think it's unlevel because they don't understand that they're ALWAYS independent contractors. Now, you could argue that labor unions and employers (for different reasons) work hard to convince employees that they're helpless children who can't take care of themselves... but that's not the reality.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm guessing that the rise of value in the stock option plans after announcing a 15% salary cut is going to be more of an incentive to the management than 'keeping employees' (after all, in a free market with rising unemployment, employees are cheap as chips).
How so? Are the employees not free to leave for some reason?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Except it doesn't take into account benefits, which can be very expensive. And, of course, exempt status.
And the employees who leave will be the ones best able to leave. The employees most valuable to other prospective employers will be the ones that have been most valuable to IBM.
...
How, exactly, does this make sense?
The market is "free" in the sense that you're free to spend your money anyway you wish, and to earn it anyway you can. "Free Market" doesn't mean that things are free, or even cheap. Free means that anyone can do business (in theory).
You are right that there are sickening excesses at the top of our system, but your post and the logic behind it are at best sloppy.
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.
The union is just another company that contracts itself to the other company. If you can get paid minimum wage, and still have to pay union dues, then unions are no different than any other company.
Companies and unions, *both*, have incentives to treat their customers and the workers well. Period. However, they both can rip you off and get away with it.
testing out my trending skills
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.
Your insight is so sad, but I do agree with you. I assume that although you are speaking about the US economy, it also applies in the exact same manner to the Canadian economy.
*sigh*
It's truly discouraging.
testing out my trending skills
Those would be the same gutless slaves who sued their employer in the first place?
C'mon. There's two sides to this story and if you don't consider both, you will continue to blather mindless tripe like this.
If someone is working 45 hours/week, this will net them slightly more, but only if the OT pay is straight. If it is time and a half, then the employee will actually make more. If the employee winds up putting in 50 or 60 hour weeks, they get even more yet.
Isn't this what they sued for?
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.
Markets can't do any "right", either.
Anyway, in a true "free market", without government intervention, IBM would not exist. All corporations owe their existence to government-issued charters, and IBM also does a great deal of business based on government-issued copyrights and patents. We can eliminate government actions that protect workers just as soon as we eliminate those government actions that enable the concentration of wealth and power: corporations, reserve banking, copyrights, patents, inherited wealth, land and resource deeds...
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A union that spans only a single company is almost completely useless. Employers gain power over employees from the fact that, despite being competitive in the consumer marketplace, their interests are generally aligned when it comes to their operating practices. Likewise unions only gain any kind of power to negotiate by recognizing that the interests of employees spans different companies and in some cases, even different industries. That is, they prevent an employer from saying to the in-company union "we don't want to negotiate with you, you're all fired", because the employer knows that terms for the replacement set of employees will be identical (and don't kid yourself, more and more people worldwide work in jobs for which they are completely replaceable.)
Unions got you the weekend, the 40 hour week, paid vacation and health benefits. Yes, US unions abdicated most of their power in silly per-company deals and forgot about the wider political arena, which is why their power is a fraction of that in Europe where they have remained political organizations with stated goals and interests in national issues. But then again, I guess since you think per-company unions are the only form that make sense, you're a part of that sellout too?
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.
Workers benefit by actually having jobs. THAT is the basis of a free-market economy. It's free as in beer...not free as in no-cost. There is no such thing as free, as in getting something for nothing.
Workers don't "deserve" anything more than a salary as compensation for their work. These jackasses got exactly what they deserved. I'm just a regular guy and I don't understand this "entitlement" ideology than is overtaking the minds of Americans. If you are a worker bee at a successful company, you benefit by continuing to have a job, and if you are lucky, occasional salary increases.
It sounds like these people didn't like the fact that they were salaried, but worked more than forty hours. I guarantee you, most, if not all, of these same people have worked less than 40 hours a week here and there. One of the perks of being salaried, is that your hours are generally more flexible and get get away with working fewer hours when the workload is light or heading out early now and then because you don't feel well, yet maintain the same pay.
The one thing to remember about all these executives is that they work 24/7 and make more sacrifices than you do. If they don't perform, they get axed in the blink of an eye. When they get the kinds of salaries they do, they are pretty much company property.
Not bad. Not bad until you got to the part about housing.
US housing costs are dramatically cheaper (on average) than those in western Europe. The primary reason for the difference is that housing costs in the US reflect the fact that land on which to build is cheap, so the cost of buying an existing house has to compete with the fact that you could, if you were willing, simply build a new one. This option is generally unimaginable for inhabitants of most of Europe, where land prices make this option absurd. As a result, house/apartment/rental costs there are not competing with the "i'll do it myself" option, and can climb to levels contained only by median salaries.
Your inevitablity stance on a global economy is also a little sad. Things like the "global economy" don't just happen. They happen because a specific (if large) set of vested interests arrange/push for it to happen. In this case, owners of capital who stand to see huge benefits from the free flow of their property, have pushed hard for it while telling everyone that the whole world will benefit from it. They have resisted similarly free flow of labor, while relying on the fact that moving labor around is much harder than moving capital. It was never inevitable - its the result of power and money seeking more power and more money, just like so much of human history has been.
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.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
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!)
Why should Microsoft or game company employees work overtime? What's so special about those companies?
testing out my trending skills
Time and a half, is only 1.5 employees, and thus is cheaper than 2 employees. So, that's not painful enough. The pain of the punishment has to be more painful than the hiring of more employees.
Regarding benefits, maybe they need to change the benefits laws. Maybe the laws should require benefits for everybody, based on the number of hours worked.
testing out my trending skills
Yeah, I agree with you. I work as a cashier at a department store. It's kind of shameful, but still. I learned 1 thing from my manager. She too wants her time off, when it's her time off. She doesn't like being asked for things when she's off.
Everybody should get paid.
testing out my trending skills
Yes, I understand that there are laws like that in the US, Canada, and many other countries, but what should it be allowed? Why can't it be classified as abuse?
testing out my trending skills
I'm in the UK, and our unemployment works much the same (except you get a flat rate per week, instead of x% of pay). You also have to prove you've been looking for work and interviewing, and the agency that runs it will contact the people you have interviewed with to check you really did - and that also includes checking you didn't turn up stinking to high heaven, and tell the employer you didn't really want to work there.
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
Managers are the ones that force others to work overtime; they themselves rarely work overtime anyway. Also, remember that a manager is also the President, VP, etc. If they choose to work overtime for no more money, let them.
Our economy has become a service economy...
I HATE when people say this. All of those good manufacturing and labor jobs aren't disappearing. Corporate America is just shipping them off to countries with no workers' rights and dirt cheap wages. We're not becoming a service economy, we're becoming trans national at the expense of the working class.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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...
I don't understand this attitude. The employees and IBM are entered into a business agreement. At any time, either can negotiate the payment. Either can decide to no longer continue the agreement at any time. Where's the unlevel playing field?
The unlevel playing field is that any given employee can leave IBM, and IBM will contine just fine. At the same time, IBM can fire someone, who, depending on the job market, may end up losing their house, car and going into bankruptcy.
I don't like the idea that as individuals we lose a lot of freedom because another "individual" decides if we can eat or not.
Please, explain what the affected IBM employees can do besides suck up the pay cut? Some can and will leave. Will all of them be able to? No, and that's the reality of it; some are now getting a paycut because a petty company broke fair labor laws and got smacked for it.
Marx was right about the owners of capital having most of the power; I don't agree with his solution to the problem, but to say there's nothing unequal is not looking at reality.
I have no problem with the law, so I don't agree with applying the term "abuse" to something that is neither illegal nor abusive.
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.
I would hate to be moved to non-exempt status... it completely removes the flexibility... If I have to leave for an hour to go to the doctor, it's no problem if I've got my work done. I'm not penalized for working efficiently... or maybe put more appropriately people who aren't efficient don't get rewarded for being bad at their job.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Yes, they are free to leave. It has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with the fact that the employee still needs to eat. If they can find another job, great. But you can't argue that a sudden 15% paycut won't have an effect on the employees, and may put them in danger of losing their house, depending on individual situation. One employee leaving IBM won't have any effect whatsoever. That's where the power divide lies.
More to the point, does it do the employee any good to leave if any other company knows they can break the law, lose a lawsuit but be able to cut everyone's base pay so everything evens out for them?
Kind of like it was before workers saftey rights; your employer doesn't make your workplace safe, so you're free to leave... except without force of law, no other employer bothers to ensure the saftey of their employees either. So what good does freedom to leave do you?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
TNSTAAFL
Get your own free personal location tracker
Obviously you didn't read the article, just saw that it said applications were up and assumed the rest.
"Tighter lending conditions make it hard to estimate how many of the applications will be successful" and "Refinancings accounted for two-thirds of all applications." Would tend to indicate that while the NUMBER of applications is up, only a third are geared towards people getting into new (to them) homes - and only some (some not being defined anywhere) will be approved.
So a variable number of a third of a small number of NEW applications will come to be. That's not enough to jumpstart the entire housing market; which consists of, but is not limited to - buying existing homes, building new homes (and all things construction related by extension), realtors, landscaping, moving companies, et ad infinitum.
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.
And silly me deleted my paragraph about inter-company union alliances...
I agree with you, that independent, single-company-only unions can't work in large-scale industries for large-scale problems (like those things you cited). They can work for small-scale problems, and workers don't have to fork over X% of their pay to a dedicated team of union admins who have their own best interests at heart rather than the interests of the employees.
My solution to this problem is that the individual company-sized unions must form firm alliances with each other. That way, the "we don't want to negotiate with you, you're all fired" solution becomes unavailable. It also gets rid of the union admins who these days do a pretty good job of lining their own pockets.
I don't dispute that unions have done their share of good. Especially in the early days, they brought about staggering improvements for the regular folks. Over time, they've blown up into monsters that exist mostly to feed themselves, and the benefits for the workers have not improved at an equal rate. Making unions self-administering, cutting out the middle-man, and having people work for their own improvement like they did in the old days takes care of that problem.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Depends. If the employees most valuable to IBM are the ones who were working 20 hours of overtime a week, they won't be leaving -- this amounts to a 48% pay increase for them. Break-even is at about 7:12 overtime a week.
At my very large employer, where I've worked for about a year and a half, we receive bonuses at the end of the year. The bonuses are given only to overtime-exempt employees. I think the company's perspective -- which I agree with -- is that if you're eligible for overtime, you were already compensated anytime you went above and beyond a typical day's work.
If IBM is going to continue to expect their employees to work as many hours, it wouldn't surprise me if some of them make more than they did before the change and base pay cut.
you benefit by continuing to have a job
Exactly; in fact, if you were NOT benefiting, "nobody's holding a gun to your head, there's the door" --- you must be benefiting because you choose to stay. If you would benefit more by leaving, you would. (GP might argue "but I have to work to eat" - well, now you *can* eat, that is certainly a benefit to you; we weren't born into this world with a right to food, we were born into a dangerous bush with wild animals that ate us and scarce food, moreover, if you claim a right to food, *somebody* has to work to grow that food for you, if it is your "right" (i.e. government enforces someone grow food and give it to you) then you effectively subjugating as a kind of 'slave' the poor food-grower.)
Anyway, if GP wants to buy his daughter a $65K car (or whatever), he is free to attempt to negotiate with IBM a threefold salary increase. IBM is free to either accept the kind offer, or say no thank you, there's another guy over there who will do the same for less. If there are lots of other other guys who can do your job for less, it means your labour/contribution is genuinely just not that valuable.
It remains that you have a right to organise labour, e.g. unions, and attempt to use collective bargaining (suppliers remain free to 'say no' and may even go under if no alternate labour is available - a huge risk, I might add, that your boss's boss takes on and NOT you, and which may be a hint as to why you might not quite deserve to be able to buy lots of cars for the hell of it); the writer's strike is in fact a demonstration that the system 'works', so to speak.
I'm not saying there aren't some worrying inequities and imbalances in the system, but many of these are caused not by the problems of free markets, but by NOT ENOUGH free markets. Excessive CEO bonuses means the labour supply for good CEOs is low (hint: become a CEO, if you can do as well, you can also get those bonuses - chairpeople would always welcome a better CEO, it's not some conspiracy, because they would benefit). You could also increase your ownership stake in companies by investing more of your cash instead of buying toys like iPods, and struggling for years (like many of those board members did to get where they are, I guarantee you). I'm a bit tired of all these people who natter about how they're being 'oppressed' and 'enslaved' by 'big corporates' - come on, we haven't quite reached that level yet. What laws did "IBM write"? OK, maybe some 'patent reform laws', hardly makes them slavemasters.
Doesn't everyone think the tag: letthemhavetheirtartar would be appropriate?
The unlevel playing field is that any given employee can leave IBM, and IBM will contine just fine. At the same time, IBM can fire someone, who, depending on the job market, may end up losing their house, car and going into bankruptcy.
And exactly whose fault is it that the employee is so overextended that losing their job will cause loss of house, car and going into bankruptcy? It's not IBM's responsibility to ensure their employees are financially responsible adults.
I don't like the idea that as individuals we lose a lot of freedom because another "individual" decides if we can eat or not.
That's the fundamental problem with today's society. People think it's someone else's job to feed them. Sorry, but it's your job to feed yourself by entering into agreements with others to exchange work for money.
Will all of them be able to? No, and that's the reality of it; some are now getting a paycut because a petty company broke fair labor laws and got smacked for it.
Every single employee could leave if they wanted to. Exactly which ones can't? And if they can't find another job where they are, then they should move. That's how responsible adults act. The biggest lesson in life that everyone seems to learn sooner or later is that NO ONE OWES YOU ANYTHING. And that's the way life should be. It's a better world when people take care of themselves.
In any case, the reason IBM did the pay cut was so that the net pay would stay the same. So the employees are working the same number of hours for the same net amount of money (I'm sure there are some variations here and there). The only difference is in how the hours are counted. Some employees will probably make more money since they're working more hours.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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).
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.
Have you actually looked for a programming job lately? They're still very easy to find. The biggest thing you need is a good answer to 'why did you quit your last job', and this gives those employees a great 'IBM was getting a little too big and impersonal' answer.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Yes, this exactly. Nothing is "free" in the sense that you get something for nothing. The market is not free in this sense, nor should it be. The market is "free" in the sense that (in theory) you are not beholden to do business with anyone you don't wish to. The reality is far different (infrastructure related costs for example, as well as government "protection") than the theory, but misstating that a lack of "free" in the free market because you have to pay taxes is patently idiotic.
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.........
No, I haven't. I'm not a programmer. I'm QA and every where I've looked the response has been the same - "there's an opening, but you'd have to take a paycut".
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] To the person consuming it, obviously.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Market can regulate itself much better when the number of un-natural laws is minimized. Making salary pay illegal for non-management position for just add to a collection of idiotic laws that already exist to interfere with the market. When a person is hired they know if they get paid overtime or they are salaried, you are free to take the job or NOT. These people effectively accepted employment with exempt status and now want to retroactively re-negotiate the contract between themselves and their employer. I call BS. You don't like your job - you quit!!
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
Exempt employees never get paid the difference that they would otherwise make from their overtime hours. This much should be obvious!
Yet it is not at all surprising on Slashdot, where the almighty buck is, for a word, always right.
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.
And exactly whose fault is it that the employee is so overextended that losing their job will cause loss of house, car and going into bankruptcy? It's not IBM's responsibility to ensure their employees are financially responsible adults.
Wow, lots of assumptions in there. Is someone out of work for a year and runs out of savings "finicanlly irresponsible?" Or are you arguing that everyone should be paying cash for their homes? You're out of touch of reality either way it would seem.
To the point though, it IS IBM's responsiblity to pay their employees in accordence with the law. They don't have a right to cut someone's pay when they are caught and that person has planned things so that his salary DOES meet his finincal responsiblities.
That's the fundamental problem with today's society. People think it's someone else's job to feed them. Sorry, but it's your job to feed yourself by entering into agreements with others to exchange work for money.
Yes, and because I need to eat, those contracts are often unfair and unbalanced. I think the fundamentl problem with today's society are sociopaths like you that feel they can do whatever they want to employees, because its THEIR company. Sorry, but your right to swing your fist ends at other people's faces.
Lets get real here; weren't not talking about people sitting around getting handed money by IBM; the workers were WORKING, IBM was not paying them what they LEGALLY were entitled to and you think IBM has the right to hit back because they got caught? Bull.
Every single employee could leave if they wanted to. Exactly which ones can't? And if they can't find another job where they are, then they should move. That's how responsible adults act.
Moving in and of itself is a huge cost. All the employees could leave in theory. In practice they can't, because there aer only so many open jobs, and not all of them can move. You talk a lot about employees being responsible; how has IBM acted responsiblely in this? That's right, they don't have to, because the legal fiction doesn't force them to.
The biggest lesson in life that everyone seems to learn sooner or later is that NO ONE OWES YOU ANYTHING. And that's the way life should be. It's a better world when people take care of themselves.
Huh.. and here I thought having a job and working WAS taking care of yourself. I don't buy the idea that a company can decide they aren't making enough profit, and show someone the door. Ih other words, its not ok to screw someone over for your own benefit.
In any case, the reason IBM did the pay cut was so that the net pay would stay the same. So the employees are working the same number of hours for the same net amount of money (I'm sure there are some variations here and there). The only difference is in how the hours are counted. Some employees will probably make more money since they're working more hours.
Many will make less, because they weren't working overtime to begin with. Others now have to give more of their life to the company for less money. Sounds dangerously close to slavery to me.
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
I'm exempt, but still need to punch a clock. Yet somehow I still get to go to the doctors. You can have flexibility still; make up your hour at some other point in the pay period. Come in at 8 today, 9 tomorrow... just don't leave until 5 or 6, respectively.
If you can't make up the time, use time off. How is it not flexible?
People that get less done simply get less done; being paid hourly would actually force companies to get rid of those not as efficient, if that's their sole concern.
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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ya, see we tried that free market bullshit for employement in the early 1900s, it didn't work out so well. Years later, those "BS laws" helped create a middle class, which is why there was no Red Revolution here as there was in other industrializing nations. Marx did correctly identify a problem with modern capitalism, just got the solution wrong.
Exempt employees are paid more because they are specialized or managerial employees. http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/fairpay/fs17a_overview.pdf (PDF) Some places may expect such employees to work more than 40 hours, or to work a minimum of 40 hours and more as necessary (such as our accounting department, where they work a lazy 40 hours that should be 30 hours, then for quarterly and annual book closings, they work 60 hour weeks or so). But it is not the basic expectation that all salaried employees are expected to work unpaid overtime. The job description should include hours worked. If it states they should be working 40 hours a week or defines office hours as 8 to 5 and they are expecting people to come early or stay late, then IBM has been requiring unpaid overtime. However, that is not related to the definition of what is exempt. Read the link, that defines the job duties required for exempt status. If IBM made exempt positions for non-exempt duties, they should be forced to back-pay all the affected employees with overtime pay based on their base-rate of their salary at the time (and if the governemnt wasn't run by pro-business anti-citizen people, they'd toss a fine on IBM for about ten times the dollar amount of the judgement). Exempt positions aren't made that way to be able to force unpaid overtime. They were initially made that way because the people that served those positions had great influence over their own pay and are not producing things that are time dependent (knitting a sock takes 5 minutes, so you make someone work 5 minutes longer and you get one more sock from them, vs. someone that balances the books for the company, if they work 20 hours in a week or 60 hours in a week, the books are still balanced). However, the exemptions have gone from just top management to all sorts of lower levels and people that do produce based on time (salesmen, programmers and such that should be exempt based on the current definition).
Learn to love Alaska
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.
It's cheaper than that. Even 2x overtime is cheaper than two employees, since benefit costs and other administrative costs don't change with hours.
But yes, the market will sort it out... I've noticed that in your posts on this article you've made some interesting points that are outside of standard slashdot groupthink. However, it appears that some mods have a hard-on for modding you down because they disagree with the points you're making.
Mods: my post is off-topic, but the parent post is certainly not flamebait.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
And exactly whose fault is it that the employee is so overextended that losing their job will cause loss of house, car and going into bankruptcy?
A person that isn't over extended will still go bankrupt if they have no job for an extended period of time.
That's the fundamental problem with today's society. People think it's someone else's job to feed them.
So we should all stop entering into agreements where others provide the means to care for us, and we should revert to an agrarian society where we grow/raise what we need and never depend on others for anything?
The biggest lesson in life that everyone seems to learn sooner or later is that NO ONE OWES YOU ANYTHING. And that's the way life should be. It's a better world when people take care of themselves.
Yup, that's back to what it seems you are saying. We shouldn't bother to see doctors, since we should be able to treat that sniffle or cancer all by ourselves. We shouldn't buy pants at the store, since we should be able to take care of ourselves and grow our own cotton and make our own. Thanks for your insights, but I think I prefer a society where I depend on others, and they depend on me. That way I get to play on cool computers I'm incapable of fabricating myself, and other such luxuries.
Learn to love Alaska
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
The reason why your analogy doesn't apply is that "not being punched in the face" is a right that all individuals should have, but "working at IBM" is not.
You also "benefit" if you work 12 hours a day, every day, don't get sunday off, don't get Xmas off and die of black lung disease eventually.
IBM was using a loophole in the law to abuse employees.
IBM was held to it's obligations under the law. This is not "entitlement".
This is the rule of law.
Why are you advocating that corporations are above the law and individuals are inferior?
Why don't you bring back serfdom while you're at it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The people at IBM certainly have no business deciding the fate of their employees. However, they should be totally free to decide the fate of their money.
First off, IBM is a corporation, a legal fiction we allow to exist to better society. Court ruling saying they have "rights" are wrong, as they are given the rights with no responsibities expected.
Back to the main point, isn't that what IBM is doing by cutting its employees pay, deciding their employees fates, knowing that some were not expecting a cut can it will hurt them? I think it is.
These freedoms are rights that belong to the company, and these rights trump any individual's desire to be employed by IBM and receive their desired salary.
Again, companies are not people and should not have rights. However, you're conviently ignoring the context of IBM's actions; they were breaking the law, knowingly or not (and given the number of lawyers they have, I suspect they knew). Whatever happened to ignorance is no excuse?
So, they broke the law, and caused harm to their employees by not paying overtime whcih they were entitled. They then turn around and cut their employees pay, undoing the correction of their previous harm. The end result is that the employees are still harmed and treated unfairly.
The reason why your analogy doesn't apply is that "not being punched in the face" is a right that all individuals should have, but "working at IBM" is not.
I never said that working at IBM is a right. But if you do work for them, its reasonable to expect to be treated reasonably and within the confines of the law. Their freedom to "decide the fate of their money" ends when it unjustly causes harm to their employees. Its one thing to fire an employee because they weren't doing their job, its quite another to cut everyone's pay because IBM wants that much more profit.
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.
Take an example. You have three employees who make $10/hr, and work them sixty hours a week each. that's 180 hours, and $1200 for the first 40 hours (total of all three employees), and 900 for the extra 20 hours (again, total for all three employees). $2100 total.
Suppose you hired an extra worker, and could reduce the amount of overtime worked by 40 hours. That makes $1600 for the first 40 hours, and $300 for the overtime (20 hours total). $1900.
You've just saved $200 a week by hiring an extra person. This was the original idea behind overtime.
This is, of course, ignoring benefits and some other costs (administrative, etc). By far the largest benefit cost is health insurance, which is only going to go up. It's prompted some companies to drop their employee health insurance entirely, and many to hire a much larger number of part time employees.
The only way to require these benefits for everybody is national health care.
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.
Is that you Oscar Wilde?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Actually,
By hobbes leviathan, that's exactly what they do.
Underlying any system is the fact that if you push hard enough, people will rise up and kill you and take all your stuff.
The wealthy in america have gotten so greedy and deluded that they seem to think they can take 95% of the wealth and keep it and the other 98% of the country is going to allow them to get away with it forever.
What made america work was that things were fair. They haven't been remotely fair for the last 15 years or so.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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
False. And irrelevant — there is nothing in this story about IBM doing something, that an individual would/could not do.
Owners of the companies are people. And they have rights, however irritating that may be to you. The "legal fiction", that you call a corporation, derives its rights from the rights of its owners.
Yep — it is a silly law to begin with. It should, of course, be obeyed, because it is still a law — if you can describe, how IBM is disobeying it now, please do...
"Unfairly" is not a legal term, but all of your arguments are of legal kind ("broke a law", "legal fiction"). In other words, the claim of "unfair" treatment is unsubstantiated... The employees in question are not slaves — if they feel unfair treatment, they can leave for greener pastures.
Well, it seems like IBM has found a way to do both — continue to treat them reasonably and get into compliance with the law (however unreasonable the law). This may not be quite what the employees expected, when they initiated the lawsuits, but — given their complete freedom to chose different employment and not doing so — I think, their compensation remains "reasonable".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
We shouldn't bother to see doctors, since we should be able to treat that sniffle or cancer all by ourselves.
I haven't the faintest idea how you jumped from the idea that people should be responsible for their own agreements with others to the above. The point is that people shouldn't look for handouts. If they think an employer isn't giving them adequate compensation (whatever it is), then renegotiate or go somewhere else. Adults negotiate. Children whine about fairness.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's widely known that employees for those companies work a lot of overtime. If you're accepting a salary, you should know how much overtime they expect you to work. If they misrepresent how much overtime they anticipate you to have, then you have a right to be upset. Otherwise, that's why Microsoft pays the big bucks.
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?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Of course they do have the right to cut anybody's pay — unless a law or a contract says otherwise. And neither is the case here.
What a profound demagoguery! So my decisions to cut somebody's pay are equivalent to my punching somebody's nose? What else is equivalent in your opinion? Action vs. inaction?..
But please do cite a LAW supporting your claims. What LAW — other than the minimum wage regulation — affects the amounts an employer must pay their employees? Put up or shut up...
"Sociopath"? Did you call him a sociopath, commie? You belong on a lamp-post, asshole — along with all the other illiberals hell-bent on dictating free men, what they must pay for what...
Oh, I see. You are not really an asshole — just a moron... "Dangerously close to slavery" — awesome!.. Slavery, dear, is when you can not leave — held against your will, deprived of personal freedoms, and compelled to work. None of this is true about the employees in question. None...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm sure that employees complained to their Human Resources departments first and then took legal action. The Human Resources department has a legal responsibility to advocate on behalf of the employee to the company when the law is in their favor. The morons who approved making people Salary-Exempt when they knew damn well they didn't qualify to exempt them from overtime pay should be sent to jail. Enough of this hiding behind the corporate veil. Make people responsible for THEIR illegal actions!
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.........
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.........
False. And irrelevant -- there is nothing in this story about IBM doing something, that an individual would/could not do.
Not quite true. An individual acting irresponsibly like IBM is would be called to task on it.
Owners of the companies are people. And they have rights, however irritating that may be to you. The "legal fiction", that you call a corporation, derives its rights from the rights of its owners.
They have rights, and as I said, their right to do whatever they want stops when it harms another.. especially when that other person is being harmed because the owners weren't following the law to begin with. The corporation can't derive rights from its owners anymore than a rock can. All you're doing is giving a company rights and removing responsiblity from the owners.
Yep -- it is a silly law to begin with. It should, of course, be obeyed, because it is still a law -- if you can describe, how IBM is disobeying it now, please do...
No, the law is there for good reason. We tried employement without restriction in the 1900s. Go research how well that did; people became little more than disposible machines. Those "silly" laws helped form a middle class (because we COULD demand more, because the field was made slightly more level), which is why we never had a Red revolution.
"Unfairly" is not a legal term, but all of your arguments are of legal kind ("broke a law", "legal fiction"). In other words, the claim of "unfair" treatment is unsubstantiated... The employees in question are not slaves -- if they feel unfair treatment, they can leave for greener pastures.
Not at all. Fair is certainly expected, especially in contract law. One of the underpinnings of contract law is that both sides must benefit equally; too far to one side, and the whole contract can be thrown out.
You also miss the point; without the "silly" laws, there would be no greener pastures to go to. Even now, its unlikely a majority will be able to leave, because they may not be able to afford to move, and there are probably not enough openings to absorb all those wishing to leave. Did you ever see what happens when a major employer pulls out? The people are left behind, and things quickly deteriorate.
Following your line of reasoning, a woman that sues her employer for sexual harrasment and wins can then be terminated. At that point, the actions of the company undermine the intention of the law, and if allowed, the law becomes effectively useless. Of course that's exactly what you seem to want, but I'd rather live in a world where the standards of living are modern, not those of the 1900s.
Well, it seems like IBM has found a way to do both -- continue to treat them reasonably
Treating them reasonably would have been paying the overtime to begin with, or not expecting the overtime. So they weren't treating them reasonably.
This may not be quite what the employees expected, when they initiated the lawsuits, but -- given their complete freedom to chose different employment and not doing so -- I think, their compensation remains "reasonable".
Again, you miss the point. There are no greener pastures if employers are allowed to act in this way.
But you can think whatever you like, I suspect you own a business, probably with high turnover. I suspect IBM will suffer some harsh feelings as well; not only will some likely leave, others like me won't consider them for employment in the future if they have openings.
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
For that, they must've violated a criminal law. Have they? Can you cite the law? If you can, please, call the District Attorney.
Yep, that's what I think every time a jay-walker forces me to slow down on the street...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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?
What a profound demagoguery! So my decisions to cut somebody's pay are equivalent to my punching somebody's nose? What else is equivalent in your opinion? Action vs. inaction?..
If the result is that person going bancrupt, and you decided to cut pay because you knowing broke overtime laws, yes, that is causing harm to someone. Not physical.
But please do cite a LAW supporting your claims. What LAW -- other than the minimum wage regulation -- affects the amounts an employer must pay their employees? Put up or shut up...
I'm not arguing based exclusively on the law. If IBM can do this though, then what would be the point of having overtime laws? They can't realistically be enforced, because employees will stay quiet for fear of reprisal.
"Sociopath"? Did you call him a sociopath, commie? You belong on a lamp-post, asshole -- along with all the other illiberals hell-bent on dictating free men, what they must pay for what...
Ya, except I already said communism isn't a solution either. Might want to work on reading comprehension. Not that I expect some neo-con jackass to agree anyway. Of course by your logic I can have my company dump whatever I want into a river, because I can run my business as I choose.
Oh, I see. You are not really an asshole -- just a moron... "Dangerously close to slavery" -- awesome!.. Slavery, dear, is when you can not leave -- held against your will, deprived of personal freedoms, and compelled to work. None of this is true about the employees in question. None...
Well, if your choice right now is work for IBM or starve, are you not being held? Can you exercise your freedom if your employer can lash back at you? If you like then I can argue its closer to Feudalism, but with the ability to choose your manor. Not that they are any different, if you had your way.
Well then explain the situation where one has the job for a (long) period of time and then the laws are changed. My job was not exempt when I took it and years later the law changes and it is (not that I am complaining, I am happy with my current situation.) As many posters above have noted this is why they call it a gray area, it is not black and white.
There should be a law. That's my point. The law should focus on the individuals responsible instead of the corporate personage.
It was doing perfectly fine. The "disposible" machines part BS — people weren't any more or less "disposible" than they are now.
Please, substantiate this claim, while I substantiate the opposite. The "silly" (more like "idiotic") laws make companies more reluctant to hire people, although in the US the situation is not as bad as in the illiberal Europe. Because if I can not fire someone (or lower their pay) at will, I'll think twice and thrice about hiring them.
The real point in all of this is that we are all employers — to some degree. If you don't want the government to dictate, how much you pay the babysitter, how much tip you leave to the waiter, if you wish to be able to choose, which supermarket or laundromat to patronize (thus "firing" the others), you should defend the IBM's right to pay what they want to their employees.
All of those idiotic laws you advocate ought to apply to your relationship with the people you are paying just as much, as you would like them to apply to the relationships, where someone else pays you.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Let's see... You are proposing a law, that would put non-violent middle-class people to prison over, uhm, not defending somebody's right for slightly more money than they are already getting .. Or defending, but with insufficient vigor. That's fairly draconian — you are not even suggesting a rehab/education — not even for the first-time offenders...
Try talking to your lawmaker, but I doubt, you'll get very far on this one...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
No, you missread my point. I said the person who authorized the pay which would not be the HR person should go to jail if it could be proven that they were aware of the law and pushed the policy anyways. White Collar crime hurts just as much and it CAUSES other types of crime in retaliation.
It's too true to be "+1 funny". :(
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Well, here is your point quoted below. You wanted the HR "morons" to be jailed:
But, whatever. This subthread, really, is off-topic. People win/lose arguments over overtime pay all the time. What's interesting about this case, is that the canny employer cut their base salary in order to continue paying them the same amount of money while complying with the court's ruling.
Your proposal to jail the losers sometimes does not appeal to me. In fact, I think, it is stupid and one-sided. You don't advocate jail-time for those, who attack their employer and lose, for example. Nor are you suggesting, we jail any other meritless claimants... Discuss it with your lawmaker — it is off-topic here...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The law should always side with the employee since that is how labor law is written in the first place. The corporations don't need protection from slimey employees who work so damn hard that they actually make what they are worth. If a company doesn't like an employee they just let them go. When people do bring up meritless lawsuits they are liable to counter-suits that claim legal fees as damages. That's not the point though. When PEOPLE from within companies break the law, they get immunity from being prosecuted. They hide behind corporate personhood. Their actions are looked at from the court as if they were not themselves but instead a corporation. This is completely illogical and immoral. The people who are slimy enough to knowingly break the labor laws which like I said are there to protect the employees since they are the ones who need protection; these lawbreakers should be jailed or fined or both. Right now there is no incentive to obey the law.
and you don't pay taxes on it......
Yes you do, it's still considered income and is taxed at the federal level and state level if you live in an income tax state. It also stops after 6 months, is based on how much you made before (and is only a fraction of your former income -- quite a bit less than half for many people), and depends on what you made for the prior 18 month period. If you had a lapse in work for about a year, your unemployment insurance is gone until about two more years of full-time work have passed.
Frankly, it's a very crappy supplement. If you are broke enough to really need it, it won't be enough to help vault you to a decent job. And if you paid for years and years into it early on, you'll get nothing for it later if you took some time off for medical, e.g. if you took a break from working for maternity.
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
it's also not a free market because the employees could not leave and take their programming work with them to start their own company...
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.
I haven't the faintest idea how you jumped from the idea that people should be responsible for their own agreements with others to the above.
Because you were saying that people should be self-sufficient and independent. You implied that they should be able to survive in the absence of all agreements. As such, the logical conclusion of your statements is that everyone should be able to survive (and live even better than they do now) if they never entered into agreements like for employment or medical treatment. If that's not what you meant, then perhaps you should tone down your sweeping generalizations and broad statements.
Adults negotiate. Children whine about fairness.
Well, given the number of whiners, I find your statement to be false. All people whine, that you find it distasteful doesn't mean it doesn't happen. You are whining about whiners right now, so what does that make you?
Learn to love Alaska
I suspect IBM will suffer some harsh feelings as well; not only will some likely leave, others like me won't consider them for employment in the future if they have openings.
And you would be correct. Those of us who used to work there won't go back no matter what they offerred, since their word is about as solid as wet toilet paper.
It was doing perfectly fine.
No it wasn't. In the early 1900's some workplaces had a 12 percent mortality rate.
Let me repeat that: 12 PERCENT MORTALITY RATE.
Let me repeat that again: There was statistically a 12% chance that you would DIE for every 1 YEAR you worked.
In 1908 US Steel began to record safety incidents and worked to minimize the accident rate in a "safety first" program; in 1913 the Department of Labor was formed to coordinate a federal response; by 1915 the National Safety Council was established to improve working conditions in multiple industries. Without this effort, there was a good chance the US would have gone Communist before 1930.
Their profits are generated by exploiting their workers--paying them less than what their labor is worth.
Absolutely wrong. The value of the labor is determined by the market for that labor, not the proceeds generated by the company as a result of the labor.
Labor unions are a negotiating tactic which attempt to drive up the price obtained for labor. The way the laws work today, they do so by artificial means - the use of government-backed force which eliminates many rightful options the buyer of labor would otherwise have available.
The idea that employees of a company are part of some collective block, some "class" separate from management, regardless of the type of labor they perform, is truly silly. Further, the idea that a strike is employees' "only means of improving their working conditions" is downright stupid. This, in a post on *Slashdot* which caters to people primarily in tech - an industry which is the ultimate counter-example to such a religious belief. The belief doesn't even describe unskilled laborers in the real world, but we're supposed to accept it between calls from headhunters who want to show us another way to "improve our working conditions"? Please.
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
I like Wal-Mart's solution, simply close the store.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_07/b3971115.htm
Unions are for manual labor jobs where you could completely lose your ability to work, and are at risk of being replaced by the next guy that will do it for $1 less. They should not exist for forcing employers to keep paying incompetents an inflated salary.
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
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.
Yeah, I was thinking about that after I left. I think that it could still be cheaper at 4x and maybe even 5x for the first hour, because of Canadian labour laws. The laws require that employees get paid for 4 hours, as long as they show up when they are asked to show up. So, if the company only has 9 hours of work, then the per hour cost of those employees would be like hiring 1 full time 8 hour guy plus 1 part time 4 hour guy. At 5x, the company might want to still keep him because of training, security and proprietary issues.
It's truly amazing, how that final hour can be worth so much to a company. It just shows that it may be worth finding a way for employees to get paid extra.
testing out my trending skills
Yes, I understand what you are saying. However, you needed to put 3 guys in the equation, before you could hire somebody else. It's like me saying, "Time and a half is cheaper than 2 employees.", and then you reply, saying, "4 employees, plus overtime are cheaper than 3 employees and overtime.". You needed 2 extra guys before you could justify hiring your 4th. I guess that you're just picking numbers for simple calculations. But then again, using the same logic, you couldn't justify hiring 3 new guys instead of 1 guy, and that is my point. The cost cutting measures are shouldered by the guys working overtime, and not by the consumer and/or owners.
Thanks for commenting on the benefits. Unfortunately, that's part of the free market, I guess.
testing out my trending skills
I see. Thanks for pointing that out. It makes more sense that way. I still disagree with the attitudes of those companies, but at least that makes more sense.
testing out my trending skills
Actually, housing is expensive because of the credit bubble, exotic-voodoo mortgage and financial instruments to leverage people into houses they cannot afford as well as more idiots who feel that they are entitled to certain lifestyles.
Why is that a 2500 square foot 1980s era home in Houston costs about 1/4 -> 1/3 of the price of an equivalent home in California, despite have roughly the same average yearly income.
Average income in Los Angeles is about $45,000 and change.
Average income for Houston Metro is about $44,000 and change
Source http://www.muninetguide.com/
But I agree with pretty much everything else you said.
The caps on salaries did not apply to other benefits, such as health insurance. So companies gave those incentives to make their job offers more attractive, in lieu of extra money. Enough companies did this that health insurance benefits through employment got tax breaks, and we've been stuck with that situation ever since.
Health insurance doesn't really make sense anyway - you have it in case you get sick - which is almost assured to happen anyway. Plus, it pays for regular checkups. It would make more sense to simply save your money and pay for the doctor yourself.
Except health insurance has inflated the cost of health care to the point where the average person simply can't pay for a lot of things out of pocket.
So unfortunately we've been paying for that one mistake for a long time. I don't think health insurance as we know it will be around much longer anyway, since companies really don't have to try so hard to get most of their employees.
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.
I think that when we think about 1.5 times the pay, then it sounds more expensive than another employee, but aren't there problems there? Why aren't more companies doing this?
Thanks for commenting on health care. I didn't know that about FDR. I guess that I should have been suspicious when prices were involved.
testing out my trending skills
Plus, companies can get around paying overtime (or even paying for extra hours at all) by using this salaried nonsense on employees and requiring them to work 60+ hours.
Of course, I don't necessarily think that 1.5x pay rates for overtime is a magic number or anything. You could increase it to 2x pay rate for over 50 hours, 2.5x pay rate for over 60, etc, or any number of other schemes.
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.
And because free markets are a purely theoretical construct anyway. I dunno why people bring them up in discussions about real life all the time.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
What I mean is, if they aren't giving health benefits to some employees, then why don't they just hire more without the benefits?
testing out my trending skills
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.
It was doing perfectly fine. The "disposible" machines part BS -- people weren't any more or less "disposible" than they are now.
I think you really need to do some research into this, specifically things like safety and child labor; there's a reason the Progressive movement was trying to change things. If the workers weren't on their side, the movement would have failed.
Please, substantiate this claim, while I substantiate the opposite. The "silly" (more like "idiotic") laws make companies more reluctant to hire people, although in the US the situation is not as bad as in the illiberal Europe. Because if I can not fire someone (or lower their pay) at will, I'll think twice and thrice about hiring them.
Again, do research your history. Similar things were NOT done in Russia, and things became bad enough for the revolution.
As for being more relucant to hire people; that's fine. I work for an employer that hires with the attitude that if it "doesn't work out," they'll just can them. The problem is that "working out" is arbitrarly defined, and they never tell the employee what they think the employee is doing wrong. So the employee, lacking any feedback, doesn't even get a chance to improve. Its bad enough that they can't fill professional positions now.
You'll say, "see, the market is working." That doesn't help the people already fired though, and if it keeps up its likely the company will fail. That also won't help the employees that do manage to stay, and ends up being bad for the local economy. In other words, the irresponsible behavior of the owners affects the entire town / county. Why should the town / county pay for the irresponibility of a few? My answer is that it shouldn't.
So yes, I think companies should be acting more responsible when hiring, and it isn't something they should be taking lightly. As far as Europe goes... well the Euro is stronger than the dollar, and their economies are pumping along quite nicely compared to ours... especially England, whose pound is worth two US dollars.
The real point in all of this is that we are all employers -- to some degree.
Nope, most of us aren't.
If you don't want the government to dictate, how much you pay the babysitter, how much tip you leave to the waiter
Hmm, well technically we should be providing 1099-misc to our babysitters, so we're breaking the law by not doing so and reporting their income to the IRS. As far as waiters go, tipping isn't the same as a paycheck. I don't get to decide if they still work at the restraunt or not, so I'm not their employer. I don't manage their 401, health benefits, or anything else. That's also why the restraunts must report to the IRS the tips earned by the waiter. Your attempt to blur things isn't working.
which supermarket or laundromat to patronize (thus "firing" the others), you should defend the IBM's right to pay what they want to their employees.
More crap examples; I don't employ them, I don't have a relationship with them past the I do business with them. Its not ongoing. And if I don't like their "services," I can't cut off all their income, like my boss can do to me. Stop with your strawman arguments.
All of those idiotic laws you advocate ought to apply to your relationship with the people you are paying just as much, as you would like them to apply to the relationships, where someone else pays you.
Nope, because employer / employee means something that vendor / customer do not. There's a reason its called "sales tax" and not part of income tax.
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 think it's a legal thing - if you give health insurance benefits to any of your full time people, you have to offer it to all of them. Plus, anyone that works more than a certain number of hours is full time. And most people can't live on part time only work.
You'd have to try to get the truth out of the companies themselves, though.
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.
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