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:Go figure.

[swb]

While this makes sense in simple, easy to type in Excel, dollars and cents numbers, how is it good for productivity?

Nearly every place I've ever worked where the company appears more interested in exploitation the quality of work suffers. The really talented people leave. The decent people do a lot less and the crappy people even manage to be even crappier.

The quality of the work product sucks.

Re:Need to hire more H1b's

[Anonymous Coward]

They also refuse to fritter away valuable keystrokes and time on trivial things, like punctuation.

Ooh, get tough...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

Re:Ooh, get tough...

[Noughmad]

Pirate mp3's? Pay damages of up to 600.000 times the cost of the album.
Don't pay $3M in wages? Pay damages of less than the amount owed.

If only we had a union

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

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.

Salaried Employees Get This All The Time

[James-NSC]

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:

• They've been exempt at every job they've ever had, so they no know different
• Many - even some of the learned ones - do not know how the FLSA applies to them in this situation
• Everyone around them is expected to work overtime w/out compensation, so it's not unusual.
• Regardless of what job duties they will be doing up to and, frankly, especially those including "non-exempt" duties they are told by management that they are doing "exempt" duties
• They have little real recourse, even if they know they are "non-exempt", unless other co-workers join them in a complaint. Co-workers who are unlikely to do so as:
  • There is little perceived gain and significant risk
  • It is expensive to the point of being cost-prohibitive in order to make a successful claim
  • Any employee who were to be successful would likely find repercussions pertaining to employ-ability later down the road. While not legal to do so above the board, it happens nevertheless (just look at all the wage-fixing and collusion in the valley - you actually think they'll hire someone again, or promote them over a co-worker who didn't sue?)

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.