LinkedIn Busted In Wage Theft Investigation 108
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.
Need to hire more H1b's (Score:3, Insightful)
H1b's just do the OT with out makeing a big deal and if they quit or get fired they have to go home right away so they don't rock the boat and they will take pay that is like $10K less then what most US workers want to start at the base level for all kinds of work.
Ooh, get tough... (Score:5, Insightful)
If only we had a union (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
So start organizing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
So what is stopping you from organizing a union? If you think it is so important then why are you not doing it instead of just complaining here on slashdot where it doesn't matter at all? Or are you just all talk and no action? Every time this topic comes up there is a bunch of complaining about how IT workers "need a union" but nobody ever seems to think it important enough to actually bother organizing.
Re:So start organizing (Score:4, Insightful)
the dirty secret is we all hate each other
Slippery Slope (Score:4, Insightful)
If you pay some people for working, pretty soon everyone will expect to be paid for working!
Re:Ooh, get tough... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Go figure. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Time for a professional organization in IT (Score:5, Insightful)
The current culture in IT is a breeding ground for problems like this. LinkedIn is a public company now, but I'm sure they still operate in Silicon Valley start up mode trying to grind 80-hour weeks out of everyone without paying for them or staffing appropriately.
I know it's a total pipe dream, but I have an idea that would get IT the representation it needed without the Randian folk getting upset about unions...a professional organization. The AMA ensures high salaries for physicians by limiting the number of spots in medical school as well as setting a high bar for licensure. Professional Engineers (the actual licensed kind) are liable for their work and can refuse to sign off on things that they deem unsafe. Law is a bad example (the ABA went down the same roads we in IT are traveling.) Professional organizations would bring at least a minimum level of universal training to the field. Right now, what passes for education beyond a CS degree is provided by vendors with a vested interest in you buying their product. Projects that you see all over the IT press that blow up after millions of wasted dollars were flushed down the toilet probably would have a better chance of getting shot down right away.
The problem is that there would have to be a split in the field with regards to job duties, and I don't know how that would be easily separated. Things like tech support, documentation and basic systems administration might be better classed as paraprofessional jobs so that things like OT and on-call hours would be easier to ensure compliance on. And on the other side, systems architects and engineers would need to step their game up...mandatory continuing education, etc. Right now, skill levels and education experiences vary wildly. Hiring someone involves either giving them ridiculous tests to see if they're lying about their experience or just hoping you can smell BS. It would be a good thing for employers as well in the long run.
I'm sure things will have to get very bad indeed for anything to happen given the culture in IT. IT people have really done a good job convincing themselves that they're white collar professionals, lone wolves and would never need any leverage against an employer. Having a professional organization rather than a union would probably quiet some of this, espeically when people see that they could increase their income and improve working conditions for everyone by doing it. The problem is the toxic "job creators vs. lazy entitled workers" meme -- people need to realize that business owners aren't just going to welcome you into their club if you play by their rules. It's an adversarial relationship, always has been, and people need to treat it that way. Workers will always try to get more for their labor, and management will always try to squeeze as hard as they can. The only way to balance that out is to organize.
Re:Time for a professional organization in IT (Score:5, Insightful)
... And on the other side, systems architects and engineers would need to step their game up...mandatory continuing education, etc.
Here's part of the problem. Long, long ago, there was this thing called "Certified Data Professional" Locally, some people tried to make a big deal of it, and I even knew 1 or 2 people who took the exam. In fact, I have the study guide.
But it didn't work then, and that was back when just knowing COBOL and basic I/O was good for the majority of the jobs. Unless, of course, you worked exclusively with FORTRAN, PL/1, RPG or Assembler. And then there's which OS to be proficient in JCL for. Or which brand of hardware: IBM, Univac, Burroughs, or one of the other "7 dwarfs".
The field has exploded since then. We have batch and interactive, multiple flavors of GUI systems, mobile devices, various and sundry web platforms - and I can't even count just the ones for Java, even before Ruby on Rails, Django, and on and on. We have scientific computing, AI, business processes, multiple database options, LDAP, virtualization, containers, clouds, Big Data - something new every week.
There's NO TIME to make a one-size-fits-all professional competence exam based on continuous learning. We're all learning different things, and we can't slow down because we're already at the point where we need to learn something else.
I have no solution, other than to notice that the cram-and-barf exam/cert solution is obviously worthless. The only certs I've seen that I'll credit are less on details and more on things like whether you can bring up a general-purpose Linux (or Windows) server in 4 hours.
I'd be inclined to simply make it a "web of trust" thing where to be certified, you needed a certain number of votes from people already in the club. Meaning that they're willing to risk their reputations that you're decently competent. But that, too has its flaws. Good Ole Boys get free passes and unwashed twerps with bad social skills get left out. And bad social skills are almost a badge of honor in IT!