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.
Go figure. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
color me surprised (Score:2, Interesting)
big shocker here... asshole companies that do asshole things to their customers also do asshole things to their employees.
I'm glad they got caught, but I have little sympathy for collaborators (people who take jobs at evil corps).
Re:Need to hire more H1b's (Score:2, Interesting)
H1b's just do the OT with out makeing a big deal and if they quit or get fired they have to go home if they cannot find a new job and complete the transfer within 30 days after being fired (which is very likely to be the case).
You are correct about not rocking the boat, but I corrected the sentence for you.
Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
The job market views labor unions as damage and routes around it.
Re:So start organizing (Score:5, Interesting)
As a fellow Slashdotter once said, "the best union is the one you're threatening to form".
Once you actually have a union, you also have a bureaucracy, and rules, and obligations. Sure, they're there to help you, but it still means headaches. On the other hand, if there's just a lot of complaints, the informal process is more flexible and can more easily reach an agreement, as long as the company in question is willing to compromise.
Re:So start organizing (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Unions are a means to create a monopoly out of a fungible resource. IT and similar professionals are having enough trouble trying to convince management that our field is not fungible, and that adding Ned the Noob to a project will not hasten progress enough to reach the random deadlines that have no correlation with reality. Forming a union would be counterproductive.
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.
It is a loud and half-educated minority arguing for a techy union. Mostly 1st year out of college or less. Once they get a solid taste of having to put in three times the work because someone who was nowhere near qualified was added to a project, most will have a bitter distaste toward the idea of unionizing.
What we need is a viable collection of programmer guilds, with actual competence standards to join, so there will be some clear way to identify reasonable tiers of individual ability among those who take the effort to join one. Certifications are supposed to work vaguely like this, but most of those are jokes assembled from nearly related trivia rather than in any way testing ability. College degrees were supposed to be a useful gauge as well, but less than a mile behind my back as I sit at this desk is a state university whose comp-sci courses are somewhere in the realm of a sad joke.
Re:So start organizing (Score:4, Interesting)
Back oh 10-15 years ago, I was part of a group that formed a union at a shop I was working at. We built industrial control panels for heavy machinery, lots of electronics and stuff in them, PLC's, relays and so on. If you ever see a small grey square box on the underside of a truck trailer, we built them too. They're used for shifting the rear wheels. Anyway, while you're right that you get the bureaucracy, rules and obligations. In some cases, the employer is such an ass, that it's worth those headaches vs the complaints, threats, and attempts to push people into non-paid OT.
Some companies are willing to compromise, some businesses too. Some of them just want to see the world burn around them.
Re:If only we had a union (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:So start organizing (Score:5, Interesting)
No the dirty secret is when IT people are young we are all naive, idealistic Libertarians who couldn't fathom the idea that Labor might need protection from Capital when the Free Market can clearly fix all ills if only the government would get out of the way. When we're older one of two things has happened: we're in management and on the other side of the table, or we're still in the trenches and we'd rather dangle in the breeze than swallow the bitter pill of our own reality or try to convince the new, naive. idealistic, Libertarian junior coworker that he's getting the shit end of the stick on purpose.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)