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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

#141

Post by crdoconnor »

Kluny wrote: post #115
mreiland wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 could very well have been an unintentional violation of the rules. A few bad habits here and there turn into a cultural practice before anyone notices, everyone assumes that someone else must be in charge of enforcing compliance with that particular rule and that mythical someone must know something they don't that makes the rule breaking okay, somehow. It's easy to do. Never ascribe to malice what can be covered…

"This accidental car thief has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make the car owner whole ... We are particularly pleased that the car thief also has committed to take positive and practical steps towards securing future compliance." -- nobody, ever.

Let's be honest here: the prosecutors are praising them because corporate regulatory capture is so deeply embedded within our regulatory institutions. NOT because it was unintentional.

I can't really bring myself to believe that it wasn't intentional either.

You get the same kind of "let's let 'em down easy" speak from the SEC & from the Federal Reserve toward the banks. Hell, you even get it from the courts when it's a rich white guy indicted for a DUI or snorting cocaine.

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

#142

Post by jcrites »

crdoconnor wrote: post #141
Kluny wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could very well have been an unintentional violation of the rules. A few bad habits here and there turn into a cultural practice before anyone notices, everyone assumes that someone else must be in charge of enforcing compliance with that particular rule and that mythical someone must know something they don't that makes the rule breaking okay, somehow. It's easy to do. Never ascribe to malice what can be covered…

"This accidental car thief has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make the car owner whole ... We are particularly pleased that the car thief also has committed to take positive and practical steps towards securing future compliance." -- nobody, ever. Let's be honest here: the prosecutors are praising them because corporate r…

The car thief doesn't seem like a great analogy.

If an hourly employee checks and responds to email in the evening on their phone then they are probably "on the clock" and need to be paid for it. How many companies enforce that? Probably not a lot. It's very easy for me to imagine the situation that Kluny described.

If employees are trusted with discretion about when they work, and the company benefits from flexible work hours (responding to email at home), then the solution of course is for employees to be salaried.

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

#143

Post by crdoconnor »

jcrites wrote: post #142
crdoconnor wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This accidental car thief has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make the car owner whole ... We are particularly pleased that the car thief also has committed to take positive and practical steps towards securing future compliance." -- nobody, ever. Let's be honest here: the prosecutors are praising them because corporate r…

The car thief doesn't seem like a great analogy. If an hourly employee checks and responds to email in the evening on their phone then they are probably "on the clock" and need to be paid for it. How many companies enforce that? Probably not a lot. It's very easy for me to imagine the situation that Kluny described. If employees are trusted with discretion about when they work, and the company benefits from flexible…

>The car thief doesn't seem like a great analogy.

I don't see why not. It is about as easy for a company like linkedin to commit accidental wage theft as it is for a black guy in the 'hood to accidentally steal a car.

>If employees are trusted with discretion about when they work, and the company benefits from flexible work hours (responding to email at home), then the solution of course is for employees to be salaried.

The point being that this solution is SO simple and obvious that not implementing it couldn't possibly have been an accident.

Companies like LinkedIn don't make 'mistakes' like this that benefit their employees to the tune of $6m. Ever.

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

#144

Post by crdoconnor »

biot wrote: post #111
mreiland wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since we're going with car analogies, it's more like a company leases a fleet of vehicles where each vehicle can be driven up to 20,000 km/year for the price negotiated. However, the cars don't have odometers to keep track of distance traveled. The dealership who leased the cars thinks that they've been driven further and complains to the Department of Transport. The DoT investigates and adds up third-party records o…

Bad analogy. The rights / obligations are upside down.

The company leasing the fleet of vehicles was responsible for installing the odometer.

In LinkedIn's case, the company was obligated to account for the hours worked (which presumably the employees reported correctly, since the employees won the case).

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

#145

Post by Chronic29 »

jpatokal wrote: post #140
groovylick wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like a machine learning problem. Surely we can find one of the tens of thousands who are interested in ML to do this.

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

#147

Post by Chronic29 »

fred_durst wrote: post #127
jonathansizz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I know a couple of guys who work nights at Wal-Mart, and they make around $10/hr.

My back of the napkin put $50K @ 60 hours put at just above $13/hr base rate. Taking a look at Glassdoor, my guess would be several years of small raises would get you pretty close. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/night-stocker-salary-SRCH_... I would assume it depends on the part of the country you are in as well.

Good thing I work 30 hour weeks

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

#148

Post by vidarh »

hueving wrote: post #101
yulaow wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry, but what I meant was "I thought that in any developed country the overtime work was obviously paid" not that "oh I think you were in EU zone". Basically for me is very hard to understand why I should work for free ( I could want to work overtime for free, but if I am imposed to work overtime I must be paid)

>Basically for me is very hard to understand why I should work for free ( I could want to work overtime for free, but if I am imposed to work overtime I must be paid) If you are in software engineering, the answer is that the US pays the best salaries in the world. You are not working for free if you are salaried. You sign a contract to fulfill certain duties regardless of the amount of time it takes.

> US pays the best salaries in the world.

No, a few small regions in the US pays amongst the best salaries in the world. Most of the US have software engineering salaries that are nothing special. And lots of places in Europe have plenty of jobs at similar salary levels to e.g. Silicon Valley.

> You are not working for free if you are salaried. You sign a contract to fulfill certain duties regardless of the amount of time it takes.

... and most of the developed world have seen through this bullshit. In the EU, for example, the Working Time Directive sets limits, and if the company assigns duties that are impossible to carry out within those limits, then that is the company's problem. For a reason: A lot of companies tried (and try) to abuse the notion of a salaried employee to pile on duties far in excess of what can reasonably be carried out within the expected contract period.

(looking to exempted groups in the UK: my ex was until recently a lawyer for one of the largest lawfirms in the world, based out of London; while on paper her contracted hours are about 40 and her salary on that basis seemed amazing, her actual hours based on assigned duties that would never be possible to fit into 40 hours per week brought her actual hourly rate below that of he secretary)

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

#149

Post by danm_cc »

larrys wrote: post #129
gergles wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquidated damages the DOL collects are paid out to the workers, so the assumption is that you are bragging about screwing the workers by 'negotiating' damages.

Let me ask you a question. Do you personally (or anyone else) think that there is anything wrong with trying to negotiate down what the government tried to recover and possibly penalize? Before you answer please review the facts here again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138922

"Do you personally (or anyone else) think that there is anything wrong with trying to negotiate down ... backpay owed by law to employees of my own company" FTFY.

Oh, and the answer is yes; there's a lot wrong with that.

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

#150

Post by greggman »

conistonwater wrote: post #23
Smudge wrote: post #2

> This company has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make workers whole ... We are particularly pleased that LinkedIn also has committed to take positive and practical steps towards securing future compliance. I'm surprised they're getting praised so much for complying. It's not like they had a choice. Instead of commending…

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…

I'm not apologizing for LinkedIn, with 5400 employees you'd expect them to have people that know the laws.

But, ... Most small businesses don't know the laws. I worked at a company that threatened to doc pay if people didn't show up for "core hours". My understanding though IANAL is that if they did that we'd instantly become non-exempt because docking pay by hours makes us not salaried. They can fire you if you're not doing the job they want but they can't pay based on hours worked as part of the definition of "salaried" is that you set your own hours and get paid a fixed salary. (if someone knows if that's incorrect please correct me)

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