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LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

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Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#131

Post by endeavor »

shepardrtc wrote: post #93
johnward wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some debate about what exactly an exempt position is too. Companies seem to abuse what they consider to be an exempt position to the point that eventually employees fight back. I believe this happened a few years ago a RIM or AT&T. For example if you are working a support job that regularly requires you to work 50+ hour weeks you should probably be getting overtime pay.

I worked for a University that classified some maintenance workers (among others) as exempt using the excuse that they had "supervisory" duties. The reality was that these people were on-call 24/7 and would have to come in whenever there was a problem, in addition to working a 40 hour week. Overtime was becoming expensive, so upper management decided that their duties weren't really fixing things, but rather supervis…

IIRC in California you need to have at least 2 direct reports to be considered a supervisor vis-a-vis exempt status.

Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#132

Post by rmrfrmrf »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #117
Shivetya wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, it was because LinkedIn was guilty of overtime of non exempt employees. I find that in most shops I have seen nearly everyone is exempt. I record hours per day for my work, I am fully exempt. Many in the tech industry will voluntarily put in excessive hours and this causes pressure on others to do similar, unless within a protected class of workers.

To me it begs the question why there is an exempt class? To me its like saying some people are exempt from the realities that inform the 40 hr work week. Things like productivity research, health and wellness research etc.

Not every job is based around clocking in and clocking out, though, and there are a lot of complications for things like traveling, lunch meetings, and business trips. There are also strict laws about overtime pay and the max time that a person is allowed to work before being required a break. There's also the issue of employees recording their own times worked (it's a compliance nightmare that can lead to lots of payment adjustments, fines, and/or lawsuits).

Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#133

Post by rahimnathwani »

jboggan wrote: post #94
krschultz wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some excerpts that help explain it: The FLSA requires that covered, nonexempt employees be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for all hours worked, plus time and one-half their regular hourly rates for hours worked beyond 40 per week. With few exceptions, to be exempt an employee must (a) be paid at least $23,600 per year ($455 per week), and (b) be paid on a salary basis, and also (c) perform e…

California law makes it a lot harder to exempt programmers via this route - roughly speaking if you're a salaried programmer in CA making less than $85k a year you are actually NOT exempt from overtime. I know of a lot of startups that run afoul of this but thankfully for them their employees are unaware. Edit - IANAL of course, but all research I've been able to find on the subject indicates this is likely true. The…

Someone should make a tool to calculate working hours from a git commit history and/or bash history.

Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#134

Post by michaelochurch »

bentcorner wrote: post #113
michaelochurch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It persists partially because tech industry workers are especially susceptible to class confusion. That is, the startup culture stock option lottery deludes them into thinking they are a part of the ownership class rather than the working class. Thus, they allow basically all of the fruits of their labor to be stolen from them. Very well said. They take everything literally and accept management's account of all thin…

For some reason I find this topic fascinating, and at the same time I feel completely hopeless in navigating in any of it. What do you think of The Gervais Principle? http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o... High Status = Sociopath, Low Status = Losers destined for Cluelessness?

High status: Sociopath.

Low status people tend to divide into three camps: delusional, apathetic, and confrontational.

Low status, delusional: Clueless.

Low status, apathetic: Losers.

The confrontational ones either (a) learn how to play the game and become Sociopaths, (b) consciously develop apathy and learn how to slack and become losers, or (c) continue raging until they're expelled/fired from the organization.

Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#135

Post by roel_v »

yulaow wrote: post #59
honest_george wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had very different experiences working in the EU (Belgium). On my first day of work, I received a document containing company rules and guidelines. Overtime is never paid and it is considered "an engineer's pride" to fix any bugs in his own time. Of course this overtime isn't limited to bugfixing, and when there's a deadline coming up (there's always a deadline coming up) or when someting just isn't working you…

Can't you just signal to authorities or unions that you were dismissed for that reason (that is not a "good enough" reason on my state) and basically fuck up the entire company considering that that guidelines document would come up in even the simplest investigation? This would put your employer in a weak position, so weak you can easily even blackmail him

Have you ever held a real job? Because your understanding of EU employment law and practices sounds very naive, to put it mildly.

Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#136

Post by jboggan »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #133
jboggan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California law makes it a lot harder to exempt programmers via this route - roughly speaking if you're a salaried programmer in CA making less than $85k a year you are actually NOT exempt from overtime. I know of a lot of startups that run afoul of this but thankfully for them their employees are unaware. Edit - IANAL of course, but all research I've been able to find on the subject indicates this is likely true. The…

Someone should make a tool to calculate working hours from a git commit history and/or bash history.

Well, we do a lot of work outside of what our commits show, but that sort of thing would be useful to at least form an estimate. But if you are in the position of the employee claiming that you worked say 50 hours a week for two years, it is the company's responsibility to have your hours accounted for over that whole period. Practically they cannot produce that kind of information and your assertion will probably stand.

Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#137

Post by groovylick »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #133
jboggan wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California law makes it a lot harder to exempt programmers via this route - roughly speaking if you're a salaried programmer in CA making less than $85k a year you are actually NOT exempt from overtime. I know of a lot of startups that run afoul of this but thankfully for them their employees are unaware. Edit - IANAL of course, but all research I've been able to find on the subject indicates this is likely true. The…

Someone should make a tool to calculate working hours from a git commit history and/or bash history.

The amount of time it takes to complete work for a commit is highly variable. I've had commits take a few minutes up to a day's worth of work when debugging something complex. A simple mean time per commit seems like a poor metric.

Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#138

Post by chatmasta »

mreiland wrote: post #92
conistonwater wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a cynical and pessimistic interpretation (just an idle thought; I know nothing at all): the investigators are stretched thin, so instead of investigating anything themselves, they instead ask LinkedIn to investigate itself. LinkedIn slaps itself a little bit, writes a report, agrees to a settlement, maybe manages to soften some language or push its own interpretation of events, "we did this, this and this, b…

does it really matter when they did the thing in the first place? It's like congratulating a car thief for being an upstanding citizen because they admitted to the thievery and promised never to do it again after paying a fine.

It's in the Gov's best interest to praise LinkedIn for their investigation, because a) there is no reason NOT to (other than moral pontificating), and b) it creates goodwill for any future cooperation they need from LinkedIn.

Re: LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees

#140

Post by jpatokal »

groovylick wrote: post #137
rahimnathwani wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should make a tool to calculate working hours from a git commit history and/or bash history.

The amount of time it takes to complete work for a commit is highly variable. I've had commits take a few minutes up to a day's worth of work when debugging something complex. A simple mean time per commit seems like a poor metric.

Sure, but you're obviously working at the point you commit. For example, if my first commit of a day is at 9:15 AM and the last one is at 7 PM, odds are pretty high I've exceeded the 'allowed' 9-to-5 hours.
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