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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
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...
It's their Jobs.
Damn right, they are 'Resources' not Slaves.
They Live, We Sleep
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.
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?
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.
"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.
... 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
iWork, iSlave...iSolonely, iCouldcry
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The point you make is the exact point all corporations make in order to exploit cheap foreign labor. "Well, their lives sucked, so let us pay them peanuts, then they must be happy"
Also it is beyond my understanding that someone tells us that what is being done is good for them without seeing there, talking to anyone working there. Don't you think it is way too arrogant to "know" what is good for them?
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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He'd say, you don't need to get paid. I agree. Steve Jobs agrees. Where's the problem?
it's mostly because of tariffs, not because of the unions.
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Blaming the union != Blaming the workers
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
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?
I don't think it's so much the strength of the labor regulations - though if you're going to move, choosing less restrictive countries makes sense. But I think it's more of a "do-over". Once your workforce has gone union in a particular country, it's pretty much impossible to un-unionize it, so you basically have to move it overseas somewhere and fight the unionization move there if you want to survive. So Japanese and German companies can make cars in the US, the US companies can make cars in Mexico, etc.
"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.
No, they assemble in the US because of the anti-competitive proctectionist tariffs in place on auto imports to the US. It costs them the same as the big three, it's just that they are better and more efficiently run companies. All this bullshit about union costs dragging them down is a smokescreen; Germany is one of the most highly unionized countries in the world with astronomical rates of tax, yet BMW seem to manage ok.
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 *
If the foreign manufacturers can find ways to keep health care costs under control they will continue to have a serious advantage over GM and Ford...
My brother works for a Toyota plant. They have a pharmacy on site where employees can get over the counter medicine for free. Toyota pays 100% of his monthly premium and his coverage is significantly better than any I've had anywhere I've worked. They already absorb much more of their employees' health care costs than most corporations, which they can do thanks to little retiree benefit costs right now.
...and be able to keep the "built in the USA" perception.
Perception? Their vehicles are "built in the USA" more so than the so-called American car companies.
while we think working 15 hour days is ridiculous, let's keep in mind that a lot of people in China pray for any employment... remember that China's population is measured in BILLIONS- there's just not enough work to go around.
If there's not enough work to go around, then how come people have to work 15 hours a day to do it?
Personally I have no respect for unions anymore since they are actively trying to unionize illegal workers. The union was supposed to be about protecting American jobs, not encouraging those who are breaking the law. Now it's all about the $$$.
Unions are about protecting workers, as people.
Solidarity with your fellow worker doesn't necessarily end at the border, at least not for all of us. The whole idea of unionizing is to avoid exploited workers. Illegal immigrants are more vulnerable to that. In fact, their vulnerability is what makes them more interesting for employers.
If illegal immigrants were unionized, they would lose some of their appeal as slave workers, which could even have a beneficial effect for all workers.
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.
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
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;
Unions will negotiate a "quota" for each job. I worked in a union shop, and was moved into another persons position for a day. The job was to program EPROMs (remember those?). The quota was obviously set when it was done using a slow, single chip programmer, as the quota was about 2 per hour. The hardware did 16 at a time in less than 2 minutes. Unions don't like workers to bust the quota. I had to run around and look for a corner to hide in for most of the day.
That is just ONE of the specific ways that unions add overhead. I could list many more:
- 'senior' employees being promoted over 'experienced' ones.
- job division. Person A can't pick up a wrench (it's a mechanics job). Person B can't flip a switch (it's the electrician's job). Neither can turn on the water (it's the plumber's job).
- I had an engineer come to me one day and ask that I take a box to the other building. I put the empty box on a cart and start down the hall with it. He walked beside me. When I asked what the hell he was doing, he said that he had to go there anyway. !!!???!!! He wasn't allowed to push a cart with an empty box on it. That was a UNION job.
After a while, it just gets boring listing all the ways that a union can fubar a company.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba