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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."
Breaks for workers have been with us for a hundred years, it to take courage to change that.
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.
So people having the right to eat and being paid in a timely manner is bad for business? Unfortunately to counter your point, California has the largest economy in the US, so these laws are obviously not bad for business.
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.
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.
(Most Europe also has meal brake.
They aren't very effective though. Bonded composites like those used in the USA make better brake pads.
It might explain the prevalence of small scooters in European cities. They don't require much braking force to stop.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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.)
The employees that had been affected by Apple's original break policy could get as much as $20 each from Friday's settlement, according to reality, "but it's likely most of the money will go toward attorney fees."
FTFY
California does give a damn about its working population. The asymmetrical negotiating advantage of employers needs to be balanced with statutes protecting the worker class from large multinational corporations. Sorry, the free market doesn't work well when the balance of power is so heavily tilted towards these large players. I do agree that small businesses should be subject to less regulation than the large multinationals though.
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.
The nerve of those workers wanting to eat meals!
What will they demand next, bathroom breaks? Clean air? Properly grounded equipment?
Please, Mein Fuhrer Trump, put an end to this anti-capitialist craziness!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Which is why employers would have meal breaks for employees even without these rights and the lawyerly looting they enable.
Employers like Apple?
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 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
"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.
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.
When Trump follows the law, he can start dictating to others.
Somehow I doubt that if your employer took away your meal breaks, you'd be so blase about turning to a lawyer to secure your rights.
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...
If you believe fictional stories about us, yes. Also we spend our nights huddled in our homes hiding from vampires.
Yeah, sorry, I mistyped "beark"...
huh... "breka"....
no... "braek"...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Then what in your estimable opinion did happen and can you back it up with... evidence?
Your manager's a cock and breaking the law, in almost any first-world country (and the US).
You sit down for a break, stick to your allowed time, wait for them to complain. If they sack you (a distinct possibility), you can take them to court quite easily.
The problem is that people are SO scared of losing their job that they won't ever question it, as it sounds like you haven't, and they get away with it.
What gets me more is "One of the largest companies in the world thinks that they can't afford to give you your statutory legal breaks". If that doesn't say "Don't ever touch that company", I don't know what does.
Overall I have been screwed over FAR more commonly from a small business than a large one. What I have found is that large businesses don't screw you over on small contracts since it is not worth the time to do it. It gets them more negative press and for no reason at all. I have also found that small businesses tend to be the most abusive and deceptive in what they want to do.
I once had a contract to build an electronic voting system for a professional ethics body and they wanted the ability to tamper with the election, They where PISSED when they found out the system notified everyone voting when they tried to temper with the system. I have just never seen a large business do that.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Or we could just use currency to compensate people for their time and get currency for giving our time to others...
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
OK, even on Slashdot you need to read the post you're replying to!
"A lot of people live in California" is a different thing to claim than "California does well by the average guy". Do you get that?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The Swiss already do this for speeding tickets - a millionaire was fined £180,000.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/eur...
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 *
Then let me give you a very good rule of thumb.
If the "person" is actually a BUSINESS -then ALL laws ARE sacrosanct and MUST be obeyed without question.
If it's an actual PERSON - then some laws may be wrong and may on occasion deserve to broken. A good example of a law that SHOULD be broken is a law that unjustly denies some people a right that others have. Like making Rosa Parks move to the back of the bus - it was right of her to break that law.
The reason this rule of thumb is so uncannilly good at telling the difference is because there is a key difference between a person and a business: a business is not a human being and does not HAVE rights. The law cannot violate the rights of a business since it HAS none and never SHOULD have any.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually that's not quite as true as you think.
For example - adjusted for inflation and cost-of-living changes, what the average 14th century English peasant earned in a year, would be equivalent to earning 20 thousand pounds a year today - that's a VERY comfortable salary.
The great poverty ever experienced in England happened during industrial revolution. Child mortality before 10 went up from about 50% in the 18th century to over 90% with starvation and worked-to-death being prime factors in the increase. More people were homeless or starving in 19th century English society than at any time before. It lasted until the end of World War 2 - when the welfare state (and critically the NHS) became a thing.
This was Britain in the 1920s: http://www.newstatesman.com/po...
There are still people who remember what life before the welfare state was REALLY like - and none of THEM want to go back, and the libertarians who do - either don't know, or are so convinced of their own superiority that they are absolutely certain they would be in the top 5% and never experience the results of the policies they promote. A few of them, of course, have bought the bullshit that Murray Rothbard and co have been telling them about how getting rid of welfare and regulations will actually improve their lives - they are just in for a shock when they discover how austerity makes them even more poor. They'll end up looking back at the last few years as a heaven on earth compared to what their lives will be like if the Koch brothers and their pet-republicans get their way.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I can't imagine how much it must suck working for Apple with the type of rude assfuck customers they get there.
If I worked at an apple store I would tell people the most retarded shit about the phones to see what they believed. "Oh yeah they have a microwave receptor converter so if you ever lose your charger you can stick it in the microwave for 30 seconds for a full charge" etc..... I probably wouldn't work there long
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
It works like that in Switzerland because they are a very small, homogenous society. They also share social and cultural values consistent among the populace. They basically agree on a standard for expectations. Try to actualize such a rule in the US and you will see how it falls apart. We're a far to vast, divergent and disagreeable society to ever achieve this level of pristine regeneration.
LOL. No. It's not because you have such a wonderfully 'diverse' society.
It's because your goverment is corrupt, the ruling elite have clubbed together and successfully locked out everyone else.
The foxes are running your henhouse and have for a long time.
Switzerland has a real democracy. You don't. End of story.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Yes. These lawsuits are about maybe one or two "people" missing part of their lunch (or getting lunch a little late) probably just the once
.
I just wondered to myself if I could minimise it even more than your (really quite ridiculously) biased language. Turns out I could - just a tad.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.