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Apple Sued For Turning Workers Into Slaves
SwiftyNifty writes "Apple employees are putting together a class action lawsuit for not receiving overtime pay. A Lawsuit filed Monday in California seeks class action status alleging that Apple denied technical staffers required overtime pay and meal compensation in violation of state law.
Filed in the US District Court for Southern California, the complaint claims that many Apple employees are routinely subjected to working conditions resembling indentured servitude, or 'modern day slaves,' for lack of better words."
Just wait until they win their suit..Apple will pay the court required payments.. then convert all those employee to an hourly status...at a base pay cut design to make it so that all the overtime is required to make it back to what they were getting in salary in the first place.
For the IBM employeesu in California that sued for the same thing.. the class won $56M and everyone in the class was reclassified as hourly at a 15% pay cut, because based on IBM's calculations that would keep the wage payments at the same level after the switch from salary to hourly. And oh by the way.. IBM applied the reclassification across all American employees in the same job category, but not the class action payments.
So how does this compare, to BMW for example, where their German workforce is also highly unionized? Have they essentially done the same thing as the U.S. automakers, essentially shipping jobs away from heavy regulations in favor of lighter ones?
A quick Google search http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=bmw+unionization+U.S.+plants tells me that the U.S. plant is non-unionized but pays competitive wages. What this doesn't say is how their non-wage costs, benefits and retirement for example, compare with their unionized force in German and with the Big 3.
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"They can't fire you for not working overtime. "
Yes, yes they can, they can fire you without even giving a reason in any of the "at will" states.
Speaking as someone who actually works at a school district, you either misunderstand what that money represents, or you know some pretty damned lucky teachers. The district I work at (and I've heard teachers from other places describe it this way as well) gives you two options: 1) Full pay for nine months. It's up to you to either budget responsibly or find a summer job to hold you over for those summer months. 2) Average out your salary over twelve months - you get the same amount of money, but some of it is held during the school months so that you can continue to receive a steady paycheck over the summer. Either way, the teachers are only contracted for the days they work in the school year - summer isn't considered paid work or paid vacation. Now, if things are different in your district, that's fine - just remember that different places and people will have different perspectives.
If demand for work is higher than supply of work, then people who provide work can charge a premium; this translates to increased hours.
In other words, one worker for 15 hours is one bed and three meals. Two workers for 8 hours is two beds and six meals.
If there were more work than workers, workers could dictate their hours, their pay, and their benefits. Make sense?
GPL Deconstructed
My girlfriend used to work for AppleCare (in the call center). Here's what she said about it (from IM, so excuse the grammar/typing):
Was the call center actually Apple owned? Or was it one of the many "Teleservice" outsourcing companies? Either way, the described situation sounds exactly like standard call center practices. The sad part is most companies seem to think call center = help desk. You can have one or the other, but not both. A help desk costs more, but yields better results whereas a call center costs less and yields nothing but frustrated customers. Unfortunately most organizations seem unable to see past the bottom line of the next quarter.
Shift happens. Fire it up.
I've been teaching for twenty years now and I can attest to the fact that slave labor is rampant in education. Many are require to volunteer (work) for the good of the institution---and it's often a money-maker for the institution. Even with the world's strongest union, we're typically forced into slave labor. Just the other day my boss told me that we as teacher are going to have to increase our non-teaching workload by 40%. The number is nonsense, but it basically suggest that we're going to have to increase our workload.
Anyway, the point being, even with a strong union you can't stop this from happening, so I am kind of surprised that people see this as unusual at Apple, everyone's doing it.
I also see this as hitting the educated more than any other group.
Man, if that's what they were doing they are screwed, from:
http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2003/11/24/daily21.html
"T-Mobile said 20,546 workers at 13 call centers, including one in Salem, were required to perform "preparatory activities" prior to the beginning of their normal shifts. Such activities -- and any other work-related activity beyond 40 hours per week -- must be compensated under the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to an announcement."
T-Mobile lost to the tune of 4.8 Million. Can we say precedence?
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Other companies in the past have tried to get away with this and been slapped hard. The case Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. was specifically decided in the employees favor on just this issue.
The pottery company did not start paying the employees until after they had reached their workstations, put on their work clothes, cleaned and sharpened their tools. The court ruled that any activity performed exclusively for the benefit of the company counts as paid time, even walking to your workstation. Hence the name "portal-to-portal decision" - employees must be paid as soon as they walk in the door and don't stop until they walk out of it.
I think Apple is probably in trouble here.
Many programmers (especially interns and entry level) are non-exempt. I fail to see how a call center worker would be exempt from overtime rules.
In California, most exempt workers operate under the administrative exemption. An employee is an exempt administrator if he/she regularly exercises discretion and independent judgment, performs under only general supervision, and is primarily engaged in duties that require the exercise of discretion and independent judgment. This means that in the course of day-to-day activities, the employee frequently compares and evaluates possible courses of conduct and, after considering various possibilities, acts or makes a decision. An employee who follows a prescribed procedure, or determines which procedure to follow, is not exercising independent judgment.
While most if not all employees are required to exercise discretion in decision making, an exempt employee must be dealing with matters that are significant to the policies or operations of the business or its customers.
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