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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."
I recently got a class action settlement from Wal-Mart for $3.66. I would have bought a gift card from the online website to use it elsewhere. Alas, Wal-Mart won't let use that balance for a gift card. Now I have buy something else that I don't need or want from Wal-Mart.
There are some miscellaneous aspects of it covering consecutive hours worked to make allowances for split shifts, but that's the jist of it.
A lot of people seem to think employers are out to squeeze every drop of life they can from their employees at the lowest wage possible. That might be true for some big companies or awful employers, but the vast majority of us (mostly small businesses) care about our employees. Having small details like break times laid down in law makes our lives easier too, since we don't have to stumble around in a legal grey area guessing what's acceptable and what's not. (That's the situation with illegal immigrants as workers. We're not supposed to hire illegal immigrants, but the government doesn't give us any tools to determine if someone is an illegal immigrant so that we can not-hire them. According to my lawyer, having acceptable copies of government-issued ID on file is enough. Except sometimes we get IDs which are fake, or worse, which might or might not be fake. You can get in trouble for hiring someone whose ID is obviously fake, and you can get in trouble for not-hiring someone whose ID is real. Which leaves you in a pickle when faced with an applicant whose ID looks like could be fake but you're not really sure.)
As they should, because they have the largest population of any state in the US. About 1 of 8 people in the US live in California.
A more interesting statistic would be Gross State Product GSP per capita in each state. In 2012, California's GSP ranked 17 among all states and in 2015 it still only ranked 10. In 2015, California's GSP per capita was only about 11% higher than the US GDP per capita.
Income in California is also very much distributed at the upper end -- from 2012 through 2014, 48% of the state income tax was paid by the top 1% of taxpayers.
As well, according to the Department of Labor, in November 2016 California had relatively high unemployment compared to other states -- 38 states had lower unemployment rates.
Overall, California's economy isn't particularly impressive.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
"I do agree that small businesses should be subject to less regulation than the large multinationals though."
No, they shouldn't. As a small business owner myself, I have no problems with California regulations and I do give my employees lunch and breaks if they want too (Hell, some of them I have work from home now). The fact is, a lot of the big companies will follow most of California regulations to the letter because they don't have time to deal with all the liability if they don't. It's actually the damn small businesses that abuse the hell out of employees and don't follow the rules. As for costs, it's minuscule to follow for me because I actually know how to plan things for the long term and actually have procedures.
So, a good example of a small business is the building down from me, a paper converter. They don't follow any regulations, hire illegals to run their machines, abuse the hell out of their workers by overworking them over 12 hours a day (How do I know? They all come to my building looking for work telling me about this). So whenever I go to lunch with the owner, he bitches and moans about California laws everyday because he wants to pay his workers even less than minimum wage. Complains he has to pay overtime for his employees because he doesn't want to hire more people to deal with the overflow. Then he bitches and moans to me how he can't find any maintenance guy worth anything because he wants to pay them minimum wage and the guys he interviews laugh at him (Wants an engineer to work minimum wage or close to it). The guy has no permits, but plays the game with the city and OSHA like a flute. That is the small business you are talking about that you want to subject to less regulations. And this is actually very typical of every small business in California. Stop thinking that mom & pop shop is ethical, because this guy is a mom & pop shop, they're actually the worse.
And this isn't the only guy, I have a logistics company up the street from me doing the same thing, a screen printing business doing the same thing, and a company making spices doing the same thing.
And somehow I have no problem dealing with the regulations, but everyone else does! In my opinion, small businesses need to be subject to more regulations and scrutiny because they get away with so much, you wouldn't believe. If it was so bad in California, they would have moved out long ago.
Overall, California's economy isn't particularly impressive.
Except for, you know, being the 6th largest economy in the entire world, with it taking the rest of the entire US combined to be larger...
The Swiss tend to be quite impressive. Their FOIA system is just mindblowing. Walk into any government office, fill in a request, and if they don't give you the document you demanded within an hour somebody WILL get fired. No cumbersome multi-month turn-arounds, not court appeals to be allowed to keep it secret.
Anything less than national security top-secret classification and if they don't give you the paperwork within the hour - they are breaking the law. Now that makes corruption almost non-existent, it makes government oversight easy and immediate and powerful.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *