Apple Cheats Tech Workers On Overtime Pay, Lawsuit Claims

Source: Information Week

The attorneys pressing the suit are seeking to include all of Apple's California IT workers, including those who are dispatched to Apple retail stores.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
August 5, 2008 12:18 PM


IT workers at Apple are subject to conditions resembling indentured servitude and, in violation of California state law, are denied required overtime pay and meal benefits, a lawsuit filed Monday against the computer maker alleges.

David Walsh, who worked as a network engineer at Apple from 1995 until last year, was routinely forced to work more than 40 hours per week, missed meals, and often had to spend evenings and entire weekends on call without receiving an extra dollar of pay, according to the suit.

During his on-call hours, Walsh "was required to remain on stand-by for the entire night, every night of the week, for the entire week without compensation," contends the suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for Southern California.

"After working an entire workday on the Friday of the rotation, was required to remain on call twenty-four hours a day from Friday evening until Monday morning, when he would report to the employer's work site for his 'regular' workday without compensation," the complaint continues.





Read more: http://www.informationweek.com/news/management/compensation/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209903263&subSection=News

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Nice...

...the conditions described in the article are pretty much standard operating procedure in the IT industry. I've been a programmer, project manager, systems engineer, and network administrator for more years that I'd care to admit, and working horrendous overtime without compensation is par for the course. All those lovely stock options are supposed to make up for it. Guess that's not true any more.

This is definitely standard operating procedure. Electronic Arts faced a similar lawsuit a few years ago and had to pay out $$$ and change their policy.

The catch is that they try to use the line that you are an "exempt" employee - meaning that you are exempt from overtime pay and hour restrictions. It looks like that excuse is no longer holding up.

There are also no unions in the IT business (or games) which doesn't help matters either.

They are easily make $20,000 less than they would in a similar position anywhere else and live in a micro-managed paranoid fantasy world where secrecy is more important that performance or quality. Yet they totally buy into this Apple changing the world bullshit and won't leave for anything - as much as they hate their individual positions.

she did Italian translation for them for the past couple of years. She said they would always set ridiculous deadlines for her, frequently emailing her jobs late on a Friday night and expecting them to be done by Monday morning, even though she told them she doesn't work weekends! This didn't change, so she eventually had to "fire" them.

She was the main translator for the Italian version of ITunes and she loved it, actually.

To keep Steve Jobs the highest-paid CEO in America!

Stockholders would be better off if all CEO salaries were one dollar a year.