LinkedIn ordered to pay $6 million in unpaid overtime wages and damages

[Newsjock]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

LinkedIn Corp. paid almost $6 million in unpaid overtime pay and damages to 359 current and former employees in California, Illinois, Nebraska and New York after a U.S. Department of Labor investigation found that the San Francisco company violated the overtime and record-keeping provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

When notified of the violations, LinkedIn agreed to pay all the overtime back wages due and take steps to prevent repeat violations, the labor department said in a press release.

The law requires that covered, non-exempt employees be paid for all hours worked, plus time and a half for hours worked beyond 40 per week. Sources within the department who agreed to speak anonymously said the investigation focused on LinkedIn employees in marketing, recruiting, talent and sales who — based on their duties — should have been eligible for overtime pay but were classified as exempt from overtime. Because they were exempt, LinkedIn did not track their hours. But based on interviews with several employees, the investigators found that on average, they worked about five hours per week of overtime.

... Workers who were misclassified received anywhere from $270 to $34,127 based on their rate of pay and length of employment. The median payment was $11,824.


Read more: http://blog.sfgate.com/pender/2014/08/04/linkedin-ordered-to-pay-6-million-in-unpaid-overtime-wages-and-damages/

[Omaha Steve]

1. I got the first R

For the workers!!!

[JackRiddler]

2. Oh the ironies...

for what is basically a career search site.

Wonder what hides behind monster.com? (Are they still around?)

[shenmue]

6. Yes

[shenmue]

3. I had no idea

[Xithras]

4. This has happened to a number of small tech companies.

The problem tends to stem from the same place. Computer software professionals are considered "exempt" employees, which means that they don't get overtime even if they're worked 100 hours a week. Most small technology companies start up with 100% of their employees being overtime exempt.

Eventually the companies hire sales people, telephone support people and other staff to keep the company running as it grows. By that time, the payroll practices have become routine, and the non-exempt new employees get treated just like the existing exempt employees. This usually continues until one of the company lawyers finds out about it, until the company grows enough to establish a real payroll department (staffed with payroll professionals who usually freak out when they realize what their employer has been doing), or until someone sues. It looks like LinkedIn went the third route.

[Retrograde]

7. And many larger ones

The original reason was that computer programming was considered an art, like composing, that required creativity and independent thought, qualities that could not be simply turned on and off with a timeclock. Then it got expanded to be not just programmers, but people who ran tests and diagnostics, people who documented the programs, etc., just as the term "manager" grew to encompass not just people who directed other people, but project managers, program managers, product managers, sales managers and all sorts of other folk (I once observed that everyone at one particular meeting at a major company had "manager" in their title, although none of them were responsible for actual people).

It's been a long standing assumption in Silicon Valley that anyone in a position labeled exempt will work well over 40 hours a week. (Or at least be present and claiming to work that much: it was my experience as an actual manager that if the company expected those kinds of hours a lot of personal business got done on "company" time.)

[Xithras]

8. The current exemption only dates back to 1996.

The original exemption, which dated back to the 1960's, only applied to people who worked in highly specialized wings of computer science. It was intended to exempt only the most advanced engineers, who were seen as being educationally and professionally equivalent to doctors and lawyers (my father in law, who holds three PhD's in computer science, aerospace engineering, and math, and who wrote software to augment primitive fly-by-wire systems for Grumman in the 1960's and 1970's and rocket guidance software for the Pentagon after that, was an example of the type of specialized workers they wanted to exempt).

In the early 1990's, Congress ordered the Department of Labor to expand their definition to include programmers, system analysts, and the like. The Department of Labor complied, but kept the requirement that they be specialized. Congress responded in 1996 by passing a law to override the Department of Labor's rules and allow just about any computer professional to be exempted. That change (predictably) came after years of lobbying and big campaign donations from the then-dominant powers in the computer world (IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, etc.) That gave us the system we have today.

Even this wasn't enough, though. They tried to push the CPU Act through a couple of years ago, which would have relaxed the rules even further. The CPU Act would have relaxed the rules for anyone in an "information technology related occupation", including everyone from graphic artists to QA testers. Luckily, that one was beaten back.

[Retrograde]

9. Title inflation was underway by the early 80s

Silicon Valley employers were classifying even entry programmers as exempt in the early 80s - at least the government contractor I worked for back then did. I actually read the labor notices posted in the break room: programmers were called out, but not well defined. How legal was it? Don't know. Why did (and do) workers put up with it? If the Valley's in one of its bust cycles, you take what job you can find. If its in a boom cycle, if you're lucky and pick the right company there can be big bucks in store, with stock options, profit sharing (anybody remember that?) and other perks.

[Mr.Bill]

10. I worked for a company one (non-tech)

where every salesman was called a vice president.

[Ash_F]

5. Linkedin was founded in 2002. The statute of limitations for recovering lost wages is 1 year

How much stealing did they get away with? Fuck them.