Former Apple engineer sues; Demanding compensation for overtime
Apple has received a lot of attention over the past few years: Awards, new computers like the MacBook Air, the much hyped about iPhone 3G, the new App store, which has hundreds of amazing applications for your iPhone and the iPod touch. We cannot forget about MobileMe and the poor reviews it received at launch, although I’m sure Apple would like to move on past that.
Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes at Apple? At WWDC ’08 Steve Jobs made a point to thank some of the Apple team for making all these products happen. Is Apple a wonderful place to work? It depends on whom you talk to. The few Apple developers that I know seem to like it. I’ve read numerous blogs from former Apple employees that still heap praises on the company but not everyone working that works or has worked for Apple thinks it’s a wonderful place. A prime example is David Walsh, he’s a former Apple engineer. He worked for Apple from 1995 to 2007. Walsh filed a lawsuit against Apple on August 4, 2008.
In the lawsuit Walsh claims that he had to work after hours without overtime compensation. Walsh also claims that Apple created numerous job levels and a multitude of job titles which created the appearance of hundreds of unique jobs. Walsh claims, “these jobs are substantially similar and can be easily grouped together for the purpose of determining whether they are exempt from overtime wages.”
According to Walsh’s claim this didn’t happen in fact, he goes on to state during his on-call hours, he “was required to remain on standby for the entire night, every night of the week, for the entire week without compensation.” Walsh’s attorneys have requested that the court allow a class action status to Apple’s California IT workers. This would include Apple employees that are sent off to provide support duties at Apple retail stores.
When I worked in the corporate setting there were many occasions when I had to work overtime. I traveled often and was a salaried employee although I didn’t get paid for the overtime, working on a project until it was complete was expected I did get to take time off because of the extra hours worked also one of the companies way of compensating employees was through a variety of means my favorite was bonuses; however, they weren’t guaranteed. It will be interesting to see how this case unfolds. Thus far, Apple has not made a formal response regarding this suit.
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August 11th, 2008
Standard operating procedure for most tech companies. I worked for Apple 5.5 years, and found that we rarely if ever had the opportunity to take comp time as a result of ot. But, if one asked, usually a boss would allow for some comp time. Of course, Apple was always came out ahead.
August 11th, 2008
A fine enough article until the final paragraph. What happened in that second sentence? Why did your editor allow that atrocious run-on sentence to be published?
Let’s try that final paragraph again, this time with some punctuation added:
“When I worked in the corporate setting there were many occasions when I had to work overtime. I traveled often and was a salaried employee. Although I didn’t get paid for overtime (working on a project until it was complete was expected), I did get to take time off because of the extra hours worked. The company had a variety of compensations for employees. My favorite was bonuses; however, they weren’t guaranteed.
“It will be interesting to see how this case unfolds. Thus far, Apple has not made a formal response regarding this suit.”