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.

Comments

Go figure.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:If only we had a union

[rockout]

I belong to a union. I'm a full-time freelancer, in a technical field (not IT), but I belong to a union that I pay union dues to.

From your comments, it sounds to me like you either don't work for a union, or at one time you worked for an extremely shitty corrupt one. I assure you that while I pay union dues, I also make a lot more money on union jobs than on non-union ones (which I am far less likely to take on, because of the pay difference). I also now get my health care through a union plan, which is far cheaper than getting it on my own was.

My union dues pay for themselves each year within the first 4 days of work I do, in form of increased day rates that I get paid - and those rates are higher entirely due to my fellow techs and I organizing in 2008. Literally overnight, I suddenly had an about-30% increase in pay, and all I had to do was sign a card saying I wanted to be represented by the union, and I agreed to pay 2% of each check to the union. Pretty good deal by any measure.

Please don't paint all unions with your "commie unions and corrupt union bosses!!!" brush. It doesn't work that way in the majority of unions. But conservatives have done a great job convincing many Americans that that's actually the case. Which is unfortunate, as wealth continues to get more concentrated at the top. The thing is, my clients pay the higher union rates because they're still making money on each job. They just don't make as much of it, but that doesn't mean they just threw up their hands and said "oh well, we're only making 16 cents on the dollar now instead of 18, time to shut the whole thing down!" They have the money. They just want to keep more and more of it, no matter how much they make. Unions serve as a valuable counterweight to that greed.