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LinkedIn Busted In Wage Theft Investigation
fiannaFailMan (702447) writes that LinkedIn was just fined for the all too common practice of requiring workers to work off the clock Following an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor, LinkedIn has agreed to pay over $3 million in overtime back wages and $2.5 million in liquidated damages to 359 former and current employees working at company branches in four states. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires companies to have record-keeping systems in place to record overtime hours worked and to ensure that employees are paid for those hours, requirements that the company was not meeting.
H1b's just do the OT with out makeing a big deal and if they quit or get fired they have to go home right away so they don't rock the boat and they will take pay that is like $10K less then what most US workers want to start at the base level for all kinds of work.
For Silicon Valley Companies, perma-temping and hiring H1B's is part of their business practice, and crap like this is written into unofficial cost of risk reports to execs.
"High Reliability, High Availability, High Productivity through Meat Grinding."
The underlying cost of perma-temping is you communicate to individuals who otherwise are worth it to invest in, or who want to invest in themselves, that they are not worth it to invest in only to be exploited, and that you as a company are not worth it to work for. Obviously, if you're an insecure executive manager, keeping the bar low is optimal.
Remember, This comes on the heels of their entire customer password database being taken off with 2 years back and that feeding spamming and other sideband attacks for years and years. So you know they have significant technical debt.
In Illinois, where I work, it's a misdemeanor for each offense of this, and a felony if you commit enough of them. Problem is the corrupt politics.
Doesn't really matter at the end of the day though, because companies who engage in this sort of practice get known and get black listed by the competent.
big shocker here... asshole companies that do asshole things to their customers also do asshole things to their employees.
I'm glad they got caught, but I have little sympathy for collaborators (people who take jobs at evil corps).
It must be neat to be eligible for the section of the justice system where merely fulfilling your past obligations and agreeing to try harder next time is enough to get an official press release praising your integrity, never mind the absence of any actual penalty...
It's about time for one for Tech / IT as a union will put a stop to a lot of this BS and the 1HB abuse.
That'll teach Reid Hoffman to click 'Accept'...
It's about time for one for Tech / IT as a union will put a stop to a lot of this BS and the 1HB abuse.
So what is stopping you from organizing a union? If you think it is so important then why are you not doing it instead of just complaining here on slashdot where it doesn't matter at all? Or are you just all talk and no action? Every time this topic comes up there is a bunch of complaining about how IT workers "need a union" but nobody ever seems to think it important enough to actually bother organizing.
The DoL statement is pretty generic..
and the quote from LinkedIn "This was a function of not having the right tools in place for a small subset of our sales force to track hours properly,"
said Shannon Stubo, vice president of corporate communications.
Let's see... 359 current and former employees received back pay. Linkedin has about 6500 employees. so 360 is about 5% of the *total* linked in workforce. I guess that could be a "small subset"
Ok so they got caught for involvement with internal shenanigans, now someone just needs to look into all of those mailserver logs where linkedin tries to access corporate email accounts using linkedin credentials when they haven't been authorized to...
Get a web developer
If you pay some people for working, pretty soon everyone will expect to be paid for working!
The job market views labor unions as damage and routes around it.
Many employees at tech companies are "exempt"; they don't get overtime pay. LinkedIn's dispute is about overtime for non-exempt sales people. The law is pretty murky, so calling this "wage theft" is a stretch. And this isn't going to change anything for tech employees; they are usually exempt anyway.
Is this good for the employees? I doubt it. LinkedIn isn't going to pay more compensation overall, they are simply going to shift it around. If it has any effect, it's going to be shifting money from higher performing sales people to lower performing sales people in the short term, and make it more likely that lower performers get fired in the long term.
You don't want to be an hourly employee. First of all, it means a sh*tload of bookkeeping. If you're a good performer, you'll be underpaid, and if you're a bad performer, you're more likely to get fired.
Some companies skirt this rule simply by paying "hourly" employees a salary above $23,600 (per FLSA) then work them 80+ hours a week and call it good. More and more employees, regardless of actual job duties are being paid a salary so they are then "exempt" from any overtime pay, even those that would traditionally qualify under the FLSA & I see this more and more often in the IT sector. If you look at the Computer Employee Exemption - you can make pretty much any IT job fit the bill if you phrase it correctly.
Workers are left with little recourse because:
At the end of the day, LinkedIn is far from an anomaly, it is standard business practice - unless there is a top to bottom review by some third party (I don't know if there is even an entity that would be suited for this sort of endeavor), this practice will continue unabated. We will work more and continue to be paid less than what we earn.
The current culture in IT is a breeding ground for problems like this. LinkedIn is a public company now, but I'm sure they still operate in Silicon Valley start up mode trying to grind 80-hour weeks out of everyone without paying for them or staffing appropriately.
I know it's a total pipe dream, but I have an idea that would get IT the representation it needed without the Randian folk getting upset about unions...a professional organization. The AMA ensures high salaries for physicians by limiting the number of spots in medical school as well as setting a high bar for licensure. Professional Engineers (the actual licensed kind) are liable for their work and can refuse to sign off on things that they deem unsafe. Law is a bad example (the ABA went down the same roads we in IT are traveling.) Professional organizations would bring at least a minimum level of universal training to the field. Right now, what passes for education beyond a CS degree is provided by vendors with a vested interest in you buying their product. Projects that you see all over the IT press that blow up after millions of wasted dollars were flushed down the toilet probably would have a better chance of getting shot down right away.
The problem is that there would have to be a split in the field with regards to job duties, and I don't know how that would be easily separated. Things like tech support, documentation and basic systems administration might be better classed as paraprofessional jobs so that things like OT and on-call hours would be easier to ensure compliance on. And on the other side, systems architects and engineers would need to step their game up...mandatory continuing education, etc. Right now, skill levels and education experiences vary wildly. Hiring someone involves either giving them ridiculous tests to see if they're lying about their experience or just hoping you can smell BS. It would be a good thing for employers as well in the long run.
I'm sure things will have to get very bad indeed for anything to happen given the culture in IT. IT people have really done a good job convincing themselves that they're white collar professionals, lone wolves and would never need any leverage against an employer. Having a professional organization rather than a union would probably quiet some of this, espeically when people see that they could increase their income and improve working conditions for everyone by doing it. The problem is the toxic "job creators vs. lazy entitled workers" meme -- people need to realize that business owners aren't just going to welcome you into their club if you play by their rules. It's an adversarial relationship, always has been, and people need to treat it that way. Workers will always try to get more for their labor, and management will always try to squeeze as hard as they can. The only way to balance that out is to organize.
As a fellow Slashdotter once said, "the best union is the one you're threatening to form".
Not unless it is a credible threat. There is no one actually seriously threatening to form a union and the management of the relevant companies knows this. An actual threat to form a union requires actually talking to (or becoming) union organizers. I'm confident enough I'd put actual money on it that no IT worker reading this has ever seriously taken any of the substantial actions required to form a union of IT workers. It's just a bunch of bitching on a website the management of their company will never read.
Because the US software industry has not yet been completely ruined.
A union will get us to that lofty goal much faster.
The phone rang, middle of Monday morning.
The caller ID said 'Google'. I answered the phone. A slick voice told me that they were calling, because they wanted to interview me for a few positions they had open - but, because they were very busy, they scheduled their activities a week in advance, and so they were calling me, now, to set a call, only fifteen minutes long, next week - on Wednesday, ten days in the future - to discuss a few openings he had.
I agreed, not because I believed what this smooth-talking fellow told me - anyone can program their phone switch to say 'Google' - but because I wanted to see what he was selling. I suggested that he send me an email, confirming this appointment. He said he would.
Tuesday passed, with no email. I started thinking about cold-calling the number on the caller ID, just to see if I could get a name.
Wednesday morning, I saw an email confirming the appointment:
I asked:
'David' replied:
At this point I did some research on my interviewer-to-be.
I was not too surprised to discover that my would-be interlocutor was a salesman - his voice had oozed superficiality from its very first syllable.
He even had a degree in marketing, from the University of Florida. as online sales manager, he claimed to be 'Responsible for Worldwide Online sales for fashion beauty products'.
In 2011 - just a few years ago - he'd started selling, for another company, using Google, and apparently he'd done quite well.
So, naturally, this led to his switching careers entirely, in January of 2014, and becoming a technical recruiter.
WTF, Google? I thought you were smart.
How do you expect a salesman to hire an engineer?
I began to wonder if this was a training exercise.
I asked Bozo, right out front, like a good engineer, what was going on:
So, if we have a union and we go on strike, can we put the servers on strike too?
"HTTP Error 525: Host is on strike"
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
I'm not interested in another battery of wanna-be MENSA admission tests.
I never interviewed at Google, because I know several first-rate developers that got screened out by those hoop-jumping exercises. I have one friend there who asked me several times to apply, but he couldn't tell me what he was working on. Turned out his project was Google Earth. Might have been interesting to work on, but I think I did much better for myself and my career by going to Apple.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Might have been interesting to work on, but I think I did much better for myself and my career by going to Apple.
-jcr
First world problems?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
..but domain was already taken.
Guess they should polish up their LinkedIn profiles.
I think I did much better for myself and my career by going to Apple.
My experience with Apple recruiting left a lot to be desired. They called me, set up a phone interview, and then canceled that interview, by email, about two minutes before the call was supposed to start. I was waiting for the call and not watching email, so it took me half an hour to realize what happened. Then they emailed twice more saying they'd try to schedule a new interview, and then went completely silent, never following up or replying to my polite inquiry as to what was going on. My brother works there and seems to like it, but I was seriously unimpressed by the entire interaction.
Perhaps you are correct about the value of YOUR union, but in my own experience with two somewhat-non-technical unions (IATS&E, and another national one I won't name) I was treated as a disposable non-entity whose only purpose was the payment of dues, my verbal or written input was not solicited nor heard, and I never even SAW my union "representative" at the jobsite(s). Ever. NOT EVEN ONCE. I'm not bitter about it (much.) To this day I avoid all "Union Shops" because of those two jobs ...
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Yeah, my datapoints on Apple recruiting aren't good either. I had a friend who applied once, then applied again several years later. When he came onsite he realized after a few interviews that the interviewers were going off his obsolete resume (because that's what the HR system gave them) and were guessing (incorrectly) what job he was going for based on that. So clearly their resume management system was messed up and they gave interviewers no background on the candidates.
My own experiences with Apple have also been screwed up. First time was when my company was shutting down the site where I worked, and I was very keen to talk when they called. We traded a few emails, but in the meantime I got laid off and made the mistake of saying I was available immediately and why. After my last email the recruiter seemed to cut off contact and never replied or called.
Then about a year later, I hear from a different recruiter at Apple. We trade some emails, but now I am wary of Apple and have a new job that I'm not going to leave unless the circumstances are very favorable. Recruiter sends me a job description, it's kind of vague and seems geared toward someone with ~5 years experience, even though I had explained I'm looking for a design lead / architect job like my last role. Not too big of a deal, some companies place little emphasis on job descriptions for reqs especially when they are doing a lot of hiring, but I thought it best that the recruiter and I both clarify what each of us is looking for in a phone conversation. He responds positively to my email, says I can call whenever, so I do.
Six times I call over the next two weeks. First 4 times it doesn't even let me leave a voicemail. (I can understand not always being a available to take calls, but seriously, a recruiter without voicemail?) Eventually I do leave a voicemail but never hear back. So Apple recruiting, yeah.
To work at Apple, you have to be persistent. Very few people there are in the first job they interviewed for.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."