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Apple Loses In Court, Owes $2 Million For Not Giving Workers Meal Breaks (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Apple has been ordered to cut a $2 million check for denying some of its retail workers meal breaks. The lawsuit was first filed in 2011 by four Apple employees in San Diego. They alleged that the company failed to give them meal and rest breaks [as required by California law], and didn't pay them in a timely manner, among other complaints. In 2013, the case became a class action lawsuit that included California employees who had worked at Apple between 2007 and 2012, approximately 21,000 people...
The complaint says Apple's culture of secrecy keeps employees from talking about the company's poor working conditions. "If [employees] so much as discuss the various labor policies, they run the risk of being fired, sued or disciplined."
Apple changed their break policy in 2012, according to CNN, which reports that the second half of the case should conclude later this week. The employees that had been affected by Apple's original break policy could get as much as $95 each from Friday's settlement, according to CNN, "but it's likely some of the money will go toward attorney fees."
The complaint says Apple's culture of secrecy keeps employees from talking about the company's poor working conditions. "If [employees] so much as discuss the various labor policies, they run the risk of being fired, sued or disciplined."
Apple changed their break policy in 2012, according to CNN, which reports that the second half of the case should conclude later this week. The employees that had been affected by Apple's original break policy could get as much as $95 each from Friday's settlement, according to CNN, "but it's likely some of the money will go toward attorney fees."
Let's see: with their market cap at about 620 BILLION dollars, 2 million is: a pinch of shit. They lose more than that annually in stolen office supplies.
Well, to counter - the law is fairly clear. Apple chose to transfer that money to lawyers. They could do like most everyone else and just, you know, follow the law. We've had it since before I worked - and I am getting up there now. My first job - at a Burger King franchise when I was 16 - in about 1983 was subject to this rule. Employees who worked more than 5.5 hours got a lunch and two short breaks. More than 3 hours one short break. The rules may have changed a bit since then, but they are still similar at least. It can't be that hard to comply since most businesses manage to do so.
How on earth can it be so little? Let's say you worked there 5 days a week for one year, and you were denied a 30 minute lunch break on every shift. That would be around 130 hours of your time... or $1300 per employee per year... how does that become $95? If the practices were in place for 5 years, that could be $7500 for a full time worker who was there the whole time.
Without lawyers extorting money from the landlord? How is that possible?
Which is why employers would have meal breaks for employees even without these rights and the lawyerly looting they enable.
Employers like Apple?
I know. Assuming they made $10/hr, thats a mere 19 days of 30 minute lunch breaks. Unless 19 days was the longest anyone could ever stand to work in one of those stores, thats a ridiculously low compensation
It doesn't matter what's on the books, does Washington ENFORCE meal breaks? Apparently California didn't, thus this lawsuit and somewhere a middle manager who made a nice bonus for several years for forward thinking.
It's like, every Wal-Mart employee knows they have paid time off. It's in their paperwork, it's the law in most areas. Yet they also "know" that if they take a minute of it they'll be told their services are no longer needed. They also better show up for those 4 hour "management meetings" off the clock where they do a suspicious amount of shelf stocking.
You americans are slaves, indentured. You work 4 hours for free, and the no meal breaks? No wonder you are being replaced by more "efficient" robots. Worst off all noones hearth breaks knowing this, as you idiots defend corporate rights to run over people, because you retards think one day you might be owner of such corporation or something idiotic like that.
Apple Wins In Court, Owes Only $2 Million For Not Giving 21,000 Workers Meal Breaks And Other Abusive And Illegal Employment Practices For 5 Years
There. FTFY
California is so huge you have to look at it piecewise, otherwise you're doing apples-and-oranges comparisons.
For example the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland CSA is an economic behemoth that is likely the richest region of that size in the world. Yes, Qatar, Macau, Luxemburg and Lichtenstein would beat it for per capita GDP, but compared to the Bay Area those places have tiny populations.
Does it make sense to average a place like that with San Joaquin County, which has the highest percentage of people living below the poverty line in California? That's entirely a function of the industry that dominates the county: agriculture. Over 20% of the workers are immigrants, 3/4 of them fairly recent.
So it's like a card game in which California was dealt 58 very different cards. What you have to do is compare different CSAs to comparable CSAs elsewhere in the county. If you want to start a tech business, you aren't very likely going to start it in Riverside, but that'd be a good place to start a trucking business. The same applies to states; sometime social dysfunction is useful. Arkansas and West Virginia have the lowest educational attainment in the US, which makes them a great place to start a low-wage business. Massachusetts and Maryland have the highest educational attainment in the US, which makes it a great place to start, say, a biotech firm. California has counties that resemble either end of the spectrum.
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