LinkedIn to pay nearly $6M in unpaid overtime wages and damages to 359 employees
dol.gov
dol.gov
I'm surprised they're getting praised so much for complying. It's not like they had a choice.
Instead of commending them on their newfound diligence, we should be asking why and how these overtime violations occurred in the first place. Was it a systemic problem with lower management incentives? How far up did knowledge of the violations extend? Why wasn't it detected until now, and what can we do to prevent it from happening elsewhere, not just within LinkedIn?
It's ridiculous that employees would work their guts out for companies that they don't hold significant shares in without receiving even normal hourly pay.
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.
If your job duties are flexible and can be performed at anytime, why not pay "overtime" when someone has to work 60 hrs a week to cover their duties (or not get "let go" due to appearances) ?
Dont get me wrong, I know ahead of time that I will be required to work more than 40 hrs a week and thus price it into my salary, making the overall points a little moot in practice. But, there is something odd, a smell of sorts, about saying "You get your salary for 40 hrs a week, and the other 20 are not paid" ...
Say I would only work for $30 an hour, and I know the employer is going to require 60 hrs a week of work, then I'd only settle for a salary that is 3000*30 = $90k a year. If the employer has a standard that says "I will pay you for overtime" then I can accept a salary of 60k a year and know that I will make $30k in overtime pay.
The real hard part comes when the work is presumed the later and is the former in reality. One takes a wage on the presumption of 40 hrs a week and ends up working 60.. decreasing their compensation for time by 33% .
Corporations liked LinkedIn ought know better, but smaller companies don't get the 101 on things like this.
This is one of many opportunities for companies like YC to lay out some of these 101s and work to make them industry standards.
The investigators never had enough resources to do an investigation on their own, they check that LinkedIn's report is roughly as stern as their own report would have been based on evidence and interpretations presented in LinkedIn's report and what investigators already knew, agree to a settlement. The outcome is that LinkedIn is "punished" and investigators look like they are doing their job.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Do you think that consumer cares if the lack of PCI compliance caused them to have their CC information stolen and used because someone internally thought someone else was responsible for PCI compliance?
If you choose to store CC information it's your responsibility to make sure you're PCI compliant, if you employ people, it's your responsibility to make sure they get paid.
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)
There are so many laws on the books (statutory and administrative) that is is not remotely possible to follow them all. FFS, there are 40,000 words regulating the sale of cheese. Nobody knows how many laws there even are ESTIMATES range up to 300,000 different laws. But nobody knows for sure http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230431980...
I mean these as honest questions. The law is complicated, and it's easy to accidentally run afoul of some provision somewhere while acting in good faith. Outside of retribution, it's preferable to resolve these situations amicably. It's faster for the employee and less risky for the business. So when I hear these kinds of stories, I like to identify where the breakdown happened. Was it a bad hire? A broken reporting process? A failure of the lawyers to assess the claim?
Definitely not. Was a small company so I would have known.
"And if the employee did not, do you have an idea of why?"
I think they were probably upset about something else. One interesting thing was the DOL office was a mere 2 blocks from our office. Perhaps that played into it.
(More detail in my other reply)
I get that my work after hours is essentially "free" labor. But I wasn't aware that there are actually laws that say salaried employees are entitled to more compensation when working after hours.
Granted I am not afraid to get fired so there is no fear involved. However I never got fired in my life.
Should that not happen, I will assume the firm doesn't care if I move on after 2-3 years for opportunities with better compensation.
It is what it is. I'm married and have financial obligations. That said, who's to say I don't moonlight and make extra cash that way? ;-)
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 exempt job duties. These requirements are outlined in the FLSA Regulations (promulgated by the U.S. Department of Labor). Most employees must meet all three "tests" to be exempt.
An employee who meets the salary level tests and also the salary basis tests is exempt only if s/he also performs exempt job duties. These FLSA exemptions are limited to employees who perform relatively high-level work. Whether the duties of a particular job qualify as exempt depends on what they are. Job titles or position descriptions are of limited usefulness in this determination. (A secretary is still a secretary even if s/he is called an "administrative assistant," and the chief executive officer is still the CEO even if s/he is called a janitor.) It is the actual job tasks that must be evaluated, along with how the particular job tasks "fit" into the employer's overall operations.
http://www.flsa.com/coverage.html
Generally managers, engineers, and most salaried office jobs are "exempt". Lately more focus has gone towards defining who exactly is an exempt vs non-exempt salaried employee in white collar office jobs.
> Computer Employees: Those who work in computer-related occupations, for example computer systems analysts, computer programmers and computer software engineers, are exempt as long as their work involves a combination of primary duties that include applying systems analysis techniques and procedures, consulting with users to determine specifications, and designing, developing, analyzing, creating, testing and modifying computer systems and programs.
Edit: State laws sometimes offer more protection, e.g. California, for non-high salary professionals.
It is surprisingly hard to find explanations for this - the web is choked with articles explaining who's exempt and who's not, but not so many with justifications or reasoning or historical context.
Another round of policy discussion is underway: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/us/politics/obama-will-see...
A third reason might be the argument from market power stemming from the fact that if you can personally create $10 million of cold hard cash value using nothing but a bit of time in front of a computer, and with no long-term detrimental effects on you of any kind, then the fact that you are minting money creates a seller's market (just as there will always be a seller's market for legal currency), and it [might be an argument for] allowing you to work whatever hours you wanted - or sleep in the office, be offered legal drugs, whatever. if you didn't like it you could go somewhere else.
it's very different if you were cleaning staff at any of the same companies. they "need" more protection than you do!
Edit: from your responses it is clear that many people it applies to should also be owed overtime. I was just throwing out one "logical reason".
In addition I've thought of the crazy hours residents and doctors put in - so that high earnings / value add might not guarantee that much market power, if the conditions are the same at all hospitals.
on the other hand much of computer labor is absolutely in a seller's market (from the point of view of the employee) and clearly does not need the same level of protection. there is a lot in many workplaces that a "computer professional" wouldn't put up with for a second.
It's not like being exempt means an employer is not allowed to offer you overtime pay. They can still do it. You can still demand it.
Cleaning staff are (overwhelmingly) entitled to overtime pay, by law.
Tech workers are more-well-paid than the cleaning staff and generally better situated to negotiate for any given job. But I don't see how that necessarily carries over to increased success in negotiating payment schemes that differ from the legal and industry standard for the position.
"...Under current rules, if an employer declares that an employee’s primary responsibility is executive, such as overseeing a cleanup crew, then that worker can be exempted from overtime.
White House officials said those rules were sometimes abused by employers in an attempt to avoid paying overtime. The new rules could require that employees perform a minimum percentage of “executive” work before they can be exempted from qualifying for overtime pay.
“Under current rules, it literally means that you can spend 95 percent of the time sweeping floors and stocking shelves, and if you’re responsible for supervising people 5 percent of the time, you can then be considered executive and be exempt"
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/11/17/maxx-assistan...
If you happen to be a tech writer, you are not exempt from overtime pay in California. Why is that, you ask? Are tech writers not minting money using a bit of time in front of a computer? Is there not a sellers market for tech writers?
But of course these are all the wrong questions to ask. It is because tech writers thought they deserved overtime pay, lobbied for it, and were granted their wishes. Scroll down for how that happened.
Scroll a bit further and you might realize that the original exemption was put in place by a long dead Republican senator from Idaho in 1990. I'm not convinced he had those deep insights into the market of computer professionals.
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.
Edit - IANAL of course, but all research I've been able to find on the subject indicates this is likely true. The statute of limitations is 4 years I think, so there's a lot of back-pay that can accumulate in this sort of situation. Keep in mind that in CA overtime is defined as 1.5x for hours that exceed 40 in a week or 8 in a day, and 2x for hours that exceed 12 in day. Even if you only work 40 hours a week if you occasionally pull a long day or all-nighter you are supposed to be receiving overtime.
2. Go out and enjoy life
3. Commit something at 7 PM
4. Profit!
I'm in.
My mom is a soon-to-retire nurse and she was a salaried employee who, if she worked overtime, made either time-and-a-half (1.5x) or double-time (2x) pay depending upon the situation.
But software developers, for all of the talk of ninjas and rockstars and whatnot, are a socially low and easily exploited class that make decisions against our own interests (laughing off the idea of unions, etc); so we often work up to 1.5 to 2 times (60-80 hours is very common) over our official salaried hours for free.
I'm just older now (41 this year) and while I still work as a software developer and have avoided the management route (since I still love coding), I've become somewhat jaded on the business end of things.
Don't get me wrong, I think in certain situations (eg. developer is a founder or has meaningful preferential equity in a company) that working very long hours toward a goal without directly being paid for those hours is perfectly acceptable; but I cringe when I think of how many hours of sleep I missed in my younger days for a pat on the back or token meaningless non-monetary perks when I was a common-stock-holding pleb being constantly diluted out of equity in even the moderately successful companies.
But I _do_ agree that, compared to many other professions prestiges is low. I also agree that it's time for unions, although simply owing the company collectively may work better. More importantly, people should not allow themselves to be exploited and realise that doing so is just as bad for them as for their fellow developers.
I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US it is kind of a complex situation where we are externally not regarded as socially lower (from the outside it is all very glamorous and we are all Silicon Valley millionaires) and we do make decent baseline wages (though outside of a few companies like Google there tends to be a glass ceiling on our earnings unless we become something other than software developers, eg become tech managers) and (rather importantly right now) we do have a very high level of employability relative to many other professional fields.
But all that aside, we are still often exploited as a resource (IMO) by the "ruling class" of business people/MBA types/investors/etc in ways they would not allow themselves to be exploited.
That will definitely not help bring prestige to the field. Professions that require unions are seen as being so easy to enter that they need to form unions to avoid the effects of the free market.
I'd also trade in a lot of prestige for the guarantee of employers not having overtime as a free resource that employees are expected to give with a smile.
But I agree on the prestige thing, I'm a non-union web developer and I don't feel much prestige in my position.
Software is in high demand but still a middle class job (similar to nursing). It's very mentally demanding. The physical demand is different as it's a problem of not being active enough to be healthy. Not to mention that in software you are likely spending a significant time working outside of normal working hours if it's for your company or just to increase your skills/learn something new. How else are you supposed to have the required a super awesome github profile to show when you go for an interview?
Take this with a grain of salt, it really depends on where you live. I live in the Ohio area and of everyone I went to college with and everyone I have ever worked with I have never met someone that has worked more than 45 hours a week.
That said, most people try to average out to around 40 hours, because they usually agree to five 8 hour days.
Previously I had to work over 50-60 hours regularly without over time pay. That probably goes against what is expected of an "exempt" employee and I probably should have been compensated. I left that position for obvious reasons.
Generally in the US if you are paid a guaranteed yearly salary, meaning not paid hourly, you do not get overtime pay. One exception I've experience is in retail. For example the manager of our deli department would get paid 1/2 time (not time + 1/2) for overtime.
If that's the case, then Silicon Valley doesn't deserve to exist.
The only people for whom it's reasonable to expect unpaid overtime are genuine founders with real control over the company and their place in it, and who will get real rewards if it succeeds,
You work so many unpaid overtime hours that your actual hourly wage isn't THAT high anymore.
Maybe you do. Except on projects with direct benefit to your career, it's a waste of time and you'd be better off to stop. You don't get more respect by being a chump. You just get loaded with more grunt work.
You want your bosses to think you have leadership potential, not that you're a hard worker who can be used as a garbage disposal for stuff no one else wants to do, or who will accept abuse downwind of others' mistakes (understaffing, bad planning, etc.)
especially if you also take only 10 vacation days into account
Don't work for shitty companies. Three weeks is the absolute minimum.
I wished that for specific topics such as this one where the geographical location of a poster is highly relevant we would post our locations or have a switch in our profile to get a better outlook of where people are coming from.
And penalties for requiring employees to work over that, apply only when this is exceeded when it's averaged over a 17 week period.
But you're right, many fields pretty much bring up the 48-hour overtime exemption contract to you on day 1, many temp jobs, or things like catering/bar-work require you to sign one of these.
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 are expected to do whatever it takes to get things working.
One of my colleagues received comments on a recent evaluation after he refused to come in on a Saturday because there was a problem with a display driver on a project he hadn't worked on for weeks.
The 38 hours we work each week is more of a guideline than a rule really. Unless of course you want to work less, in which case that would be grounds for immediate dismissal.
You could even try proving you worked too many hours, but that's quite hard to do (a list of start and end times would surely not suffice).
Edit: Also, they will surely claim that they did not tell you to perform that overtime, and that in fact you did so without them knowing.
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.
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)
Honest question: where? Switzerland? And how much are we talking? A fresh 22-year-old graduate can easily make $110k + stock his first year out of school in SV.
Comes out to around $22/hr base rate.
You start doing that around $50k and you are around the same pay rate as an overnight stocker at a grocery with couple years on the job.
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.
In any case, I don't believe that these companies will give overtime. In fact, your glassdoor link doesn't show any company paying over $30,000/year to their night workers, with the average being around $25,000.
Assuming the position required 60 hour work weeks(as a non trivial amount of developer positions do) this is what the two would look like for exactly the same final pay.
With salary one can say: $50,000/year
With hourly one would say: $13/hr + overtime
While being the exact same pay, it looks quite a bit different. No?
Seriously though, there are companies all over the place, from startups where everyone is expected to work 80 hours a week to established companies where people have kids and most employees work 40-45 hours a week with the occasional 50-60 during a release.
Some companies leverage it (the term we use her is "work-life balance").
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/eng?query=work+life+balan...
No system is perfect, but let's not pretend labor laws in the EU don't come with massive downsides (unemployment, difficulty to start or grow a business, purchasing power of discretionary income).
Here's a simple rule of thumb for understanding the situation in the US: if you have to be at work at a specific time and get scheduled breaks, you probably get paid overtime. If you're judged on your output and nobody notices when you go get coffee, eat lunch or start in the morning, you probably get paid a consistent salary regardless of exact hours you were in the office.
Unemployment wasn't caused by labor laws, it was caused by intentionally destructive pan-EU fiscal policy.
Difficulty to start or grow a business - compared to silicon valley, maybe. Fewer investors / smaller markets. Not really a labor law thing.
Purchasing power of discretionary income - caused by the high dollar, which is in turn caused by US military hegemony. Not labor laws.
I'd think that the majority of LinkedIn employees are computer professionals or sales people, to whom overtime laws don't apply.
Also, this thread has a lot of consternation/discussion about overtime payment for software developers. If you consider our bargaining power, overtime protection is completely unnecessary. Just find a new job where people will either pay you a commiserate salary with your work hours, or find one which doesn't expect ludicrous hours.
Despite the stereotypes, it's perfectly possible to find great technology jobs where you work 40-45 hours a week.
Edit: Reason for downvotes?
In your other comment, you mentioned "some hidden rule"– what rule? How did you go about resolving it? I expect you could have some extra insight given that you did not involve a lawyer on your behalf. Size of the company, timeframe which this took place, etc. would all probably be helpful. We want to know what the less nefarious reasons you mentioned above actually are.
Well yes I was bragging. I was pretty proud that I got it cut in half after an attorney told me to just pay the full amount that (he was a labor lawyer) he didn't think they would budge. So yes I was proud that I did that but more importantly wanted to point out that it was possible, at least then in that particular office. In business sometimes just knowing something is possible can enable you to try.
"except that the money that you managed to owe them less than half of what the DOL originally figured"
Well as a business person of course I'm going to try and minimize the dollars owed. But further to the employees it was essentially found money they didn't have an issue (other than the one employee who did apparently) in the first place.
The company was about 20 employees. This happened over the course of a few years. It involved the fact (from memory) that you didn't have to give employees (of this type) any breaks but if you did give them breaks they had to be 15 or 20 minutes (don't remember).
So here is the scenario (for this type of employee).
You work and you don't get any breaks. - Ok says the DOL
You work and you get, say, 20 minutes break. - Ok says the DOL.
You work and you get, say, 15 minutes break. - No says the DOL must be 20 minutes you owe them pay for the 15 minutes they weren't working.
Only thing I don't remember is if it was 15 minutes needed or 20 minutes. The point is we were off by 5 minutes so we owed back pay for that.
So once again breaks weren't required but if you give them they have to be of a certain length. And it had nothing to do with a job description that generally referenced breaks either. No mention was made of breaks when hiring. And they didn't have to take breaks either.
Because you're bragging about screwing workers out of paid rest time.
http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/hoursworked/screenEE5.asp
How obscure!
Oh, and the answer is yes; there's a lot wrong with that.
People have died working overtime in the past: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-22/bank-of-america-sta...
I presume this doesn't include computer professionals, which for some reason are exempt [1], as are sales staff on commission or, you know, farmworkers. Can someone explain why this insanity continues?
The original source for that exemption seems to be [2], an act from 1990
To eliminate "substantial documentary evidence" requirement for minimum wage determination for American Samoa
which also includes this provision. All I can figure from the history of this bill that can be found online is that in 1990 Idaho, senator James McClure decided to fuck over tech workers and sneaked that into a bill on American samoa (snooze). 25 years later and here we are not getting paid.
[1]: http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/screen75.asp
[2]: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-104/pdf/STATUTE-104-Pg2...
That, and powerful lobbyists keep anything from changing.
Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote also comes to mind here. It has far more broad application than merely as a suggested explanation for the failure of socialism to take root in America. I find it is a very useful shorthand to describe a great many interactions between labor and ownership in this country, whatever the industry.
The tech industry is especially bad in that regard. It's not just the startup culture; it's more general than that. Many programmers have serious ego issues (as in, big egos and unjustifiable arrogance) and, in a somewhat amusing and baffling way, believe very strongly in the notion that the software industry is a meritocracy.
Very well said. They take everything literally and accept management's account of all things uncritically, which makes it really easy to run divide-and-conquer games over them.
It also lowers their status (as I discussed here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other...) because they out themselves as chumps when they take a shitty deal. If you make it clear that you'll let people take advantage of you, they never stop doing so.
On the other hand, those who show themselves to be politically astute are either tapped for executive roles or "culture fitted" (read: fired for their threat to the cult of cluelessness, although it's often dressed as performance-based). Which of those two outcomes one gets tends to happen for political, rather than "meritocratic" reasons, and can be hard to predict before the fact. So that's a risky avenue, too.
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?
And I don't think there are really any Losers destined for Cluelessness. The Clueless are the people who don't understand office politics, or think they can climb the career ladder simply by working hard and being loyal employees (not through strategic social climbing). Losers are people who understand and see the ladder there but choose not to be social climbers. They gossip, do crossword puzzles, punch out and go spend time with their kids. There are lots of Clueless destined to become Losers once they get burned out and realize what's up. Once you've learned that you can't unlearn it.
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.
Pretty much everyone is an at will employee, free to go find another job. Since these exempt positions tend to be high skill, the logic behind these laws is that these kinds of employees don't need this extra layer of government protection between them and their paycheck. They have the wherewithal to go find another employer if they feel they're being treated unfairly.
The left wing side of this argument is certainly getting a hearing, but coming to a different conclusion doesn't make you a deluded member of the under class (if I'm interpreting your claptrap correctly).
I am fairly certain that even if you include work outside of the 40 hours, my hourly rate is better than I would do otherwise.
On top of that, I can probably continue at this career for the next 35 years without a significant physical toll on my body.
If I thought otherwise, I would probably want to be an electrician; where if I owned my own business I still end up as an exempt employee.
I understand you are taking the "free market" side of the argument but at a certain point employers hold too much power and employees start fight back. Things like that are why unions exist which are also a part of the free market.
That completely misses the point.
The parent is observing a behavior in the industry as a whole, not a specific employer.
Argue that the industry doesn't evidence this or argue that programmers should become plumbers, but boiling it down to 'go find another job' is nonsense in the context of an entire industry demonstrating the issue you mean to avoid.
All I'm saying that given the job fluidity within the tech industry as a whole, it is unlikely that individuals are going to allow themselves to be compensated at rates very much less than the value they provide. Having the government force employers and employees to account for their work on an hourly basis, so that their labor is not "stolen," is a restriction on their respective individual freedom. So the other side to the parents argument is that maybe the tech industry as a whole is not deluded, maybe it just wants this freedom.
The industry is not necessarily fluid [1] and more importantly any intra-industry fluidity there might be is irrelevant in the context of an entire industry demonstrating the issue you mean to avoid.
>'So the other side to the parents argument is that maybe the tech industry as a whole is not deluded, maybe it just wants this freedom.'
I'd hardly call that 'the other side'. A possibility, sure and if you personally feel that way, fine.
To suggest that the industry as a whole would or does consciously trade an considerable amount of pay for that 'freedom' is absurd.
Also, please stop selectively quoting the grandparent (neatly avoiding the predicating 'partially' of course) in these responses as if you didn't just sum up and summarily dismiss an entire side of this discussion with 'go find another job' in the intervening posts.
1: http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-... - Note: 1M people is a enormous number in relation to an industry the BLS sizes at ~4M, plenty large enough to be worth considering as capable of characterizing an entire industry.
Implicit in your comment is an assumption that there is no information asymmetry and that power (real power--the social, political, and economic ability to actually assert oneself) is shared relatively equally between the owners of capital and laborers. I stopped being surprised that people actually believe such "claptrap" long ago, but am still amused by it.
"people who don't demand overtime pay are deluded/stupid/victims of false consciousness/act against their own interest"
right? This is was I took him gnu8 to mean when he said "... 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." What other point am I missing?
I think my post and the follow up make a pretty coherent argument that no, in fact, mass delusion on the part of tech industry workers is not the best explanation. The delusion argument is an argument from the "left wing," especially when given in terms of capital and labor and conflict between classes and so forth. That's just a positive statement, not a normative one, so I don't understand how that can constitute a "rant."
What I think might be illuminating to Europeans who are incredulous about how our workers would allow the "fruits of their labor to be stolen," would be to hear why they might not consider working unpaid overtime to be being stolen from.
You suggest that they look elsewhere for a better deal, as if the free market price for their labor is by definition a fair price, but it is not, because of the power differential between capital and labor. It's not that all business collude consciously against labor(1), it's simply that the exception in the law for tech workers drives the price down, because it's purely good management not to pay any more than necessary for labor.
I'm not suggesting mass strikes, labor unions, and Marxist claptrap as a solution. Removing the loophole would be an entirely reasonable starting point. I've never seen anything approaching a rational justification for the tech worker exemption.
(1) Except when they do, like with the recent wage fixing scandal amongst a subset of well known companies.
[1]: http://www.shrm.org/templatestools/hrqa/pages/california-min...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XSpG9Y8...
EDIT: So there's this little gem in there:
> However, the above exemption does not apply to an employee if any of the following apply:
...
> The employee is a writer engaged in writing material, including box labels, product descriptions, documentation, promotional material, setup and installation instructions, and other similar written information, either for print or for onscreen media or who writes or provides content material intended to be read by customers, subscribers or visitors to computer-related media such as the Internet or CD-ROMs.
So if you're a frontend dev who isn't spoon-fed 100% of the copy you put up on the site, it's apparently illegal for you to be paid below $84k if you work more than 12 hours in a day without getting overtime? IANAL, but there's no other exemption for co-founders and other early employees, then I'd venture to say that 99% of startups have broken this law...
However, if it is discovered that a "contractor" is an employee everywhere but on paper, then the employer can still be liable for labor law violations. IIRC part of the test is "Can they choose their own hours? Do they use their own tools or are they provided/maintained by the employer? Does the employer dictate how they must do their work, or only specify deliverables?"
HR regulations, always fun!
The computer employee exemption does not include employees engaged in the manufacture or repair of computer hardware and related equipment. Employees whose work is highly dependent upon, or facilitated by, the use of computers and computer software programs (e.g., engineers, drafters and others skilled in computer-aided design software), but who are not primarily engaged in computer systems analysis and programming or other similarly skilled computer-related occupations identified in the primary duties test described above, are also not exempt under the computer employee exemption.
I worked at a major defense contractor as a mechanical engineer, and they worked really hard to make sure all of the engineers were classified as exempt. We filled out a questionnaire every year that was definitely crafted to proved that we were high level employees and therefore exempt. Yet they still paid OT anyway to avoid future liability, if you worked >45 hours a week, we got time and a half for every hour above 40. Considering most people worked ~50 hours a week, everyone collected OT every pay cycle. I actually funneled the OT off into a separate bank account for spending on vacation, it was that consistent.
Meanwhile OT for software engineers is seemingly non-existent for effectively the same job. I'd love to find out who got that loophole passed.
Recruiter lobby: http://andreas.com/faq-overtime.html
"The recruiters accepted our exemptions because they were going after bigger fish: the engineers. The computer engineers who work as W-2 contractors are generally earning $100-300/hr and often work 60-80 hours per week. The recruiters were afraid that if such workers were entitled to overtime pay, the companies may cut overtime work, and therefore the recruiters would lose their 30-50% share of that money (this can be much as $6,000 per week to a recruiter for a single worker.)
Engineers have always refused to organize or even to be aware of their interests: they think recruiters are their friends. One engineer said to me: "Engineers think they're so smart that no one could do such a thing to them. Wow. They got really screwed." The law is an annual loss of as much as $50-75,000 dollars per each engineer. Yep, it's legal. The recuiters wrote a law to take away their money. Silicon Valley engineers were plundered by their "friends"."