8 ms·

Don’t mess with IBM

135 points by Toshio 14y ago

andyjohnson0 14y ago
The post by Cringely provides no references, which I find odd. I found a Bloomberg wire article [1] about the judgement, but nothing at all about the alleged subsequent retribution. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/technology/23IBM.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/technology/23IBM.html
- PakG1 14y ago
  How often do you find out about such insider level information? Even stories like EA Spouse, how much detail do we really know that would be considered deeper than surface-level stuff?
- symmetricsaurus 14y ago
  I agree that some more references are in order. As it is now, all this post does is spread rumors. At least the lawsuit happened but it's hard to tell about the rest from the information we're given.
- rada 14y ago
  Recap of the "payroll restructuring": http://www.informationweek.com/ibm-responds-to-overtime-lawsuits-with-1/205917177 http://www.informationweek.com/ibm-responds-to-overtime-laws... Workers' petition, with names and an occasional email: http://www.petitiononline.com/petitions/ibm1701/signatures http://www.petitiononline.com/petitions/ibm1701/signatures Short legal recap: http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/features/overtime_california/overtime-california-ibm.html#.UIaphcWHLh5 http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/features/overtime_calif...
  - andyjohnson0 14y ago
    That seems to be appalling behaviour by IBM. I did an intern year with IBM UK in the late eighties and (with hindsight) it seemed to have very good employment practices. I wonder if IBM in the US was once like that, and if so when things changed.
- kokey 14y ago
  To me it sounds just like he framed what happened in the IT industry in most corporations from 2001 onwards in a 'IBM is evil' manner. Dotcom happened, bombed, local skills got paid less while jobs got shipped offshore or automated away. The post about H1-B visas that he mentions, appears to be what most large corporations do with L1 visas, and that's probably what IBM was doing too.
Nursie 14y ago
If you're with them in the US right now and you want to keep your job, yeah, probably best not to mess. This is because it is pretty much stated policy to scale the company back in that area, in favour of building the company in 'growth' markets where people are cheaper and closer to the action. There's not enough growth in the US to support the revenue requirements of the behemoth, and as US employees are both expensive and easy to get rid of, they tend to be the first to suffer. (compared to, say, EU employees who are also expensive but harder to ditch).
- kalms 14y ago
  Denmark is known for its flexicurity model. We're not hard to ditch, and we're even easier to employ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
  - Nursie 14y ago
    Interesting. I think the (generous) social security provision is what's missing from the US at-will model.
    - LaRakel 14y ago
      Europe is doing it's best to weaken social security as well, they can't afford to take care of people who have no job. "flexicurity" is an eupheumism invented by the EU for the central neoliberal tenet "you are now a product". It's not only making it easier to fire someone, it also reduces employees to the subjective opinion of the manager; whether or not you do your job properly is no longer the main issue, your personality is. The idea is that since you can get fired at whim, you'll be able to get a job faster and you'll be more productive, which is great because the economy is the only thing that matters in today's politics.
      - kalms 14y ago
        The term was coined by former danish prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. Hardly a libertarian.
bluedanieru 14y ago
Don't work for IBM. I'm not one to normally subscribe to the 'if you don't like the working conditions don't work there' line of reasoning, especially in the US where unions are so weak. But in tech, eh, we have options.
- gvb 14y ago
  That's naive. a) The lawsuit was settled in 2006 (ref andyjohnson0's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687336 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687336). The article doesn't say when it was instigated, but it was likely a couple of years prior to that. In 2006, the tech industry was still working its way out of the collapse of the tech bubble.[1][2] Workers and companies were still pretty shell-shocked. b) A lot of people live in places where the technology sector is not that strong and thus there are not that many options. Often moving is not a viable option due to family responsibilities or other circumstances. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nasdaq2.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nasdaq2.png
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    No What's naive is subjecting yourself to a company with known practices of this magnitude. What's the saying again? "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me?!" Of course some people's options are limited, but most aren't.
  - bluedanieru 14y ago
    Uh, thanks for the wiki link to the dot-com bubble, I guess. a) I don't really care about. I doubt much has changed and I don't think it was from fiscal necessity. Also, if they were shell-shocked in 2006 I can't imagine things have improved since then. It's actually disappointing as I rather admire IBM's leadership in open source. Alas, much easier to damage a reputation than build and keep a good one. As for b), okay point taken. So, don't work at IBM, if you can help it.
    - Hairy_Sandwich 14y ago
macavity23 14y ago
Offtopic, but the flash on that page slows my browser down to a crawl. C'mon, guys, this is 2012, you can't write a tag cloud in JavaScript?
- conradfr 14y ago
  Yes, FF took 50% of my CPU just by browsing this page.
- mike-cardwell 14y ago
  It's 2012 and you're still letting Flash run automatically on arbitrary web pages? Next you'll be telling me you still have the Java plugin enabled...
  - wtvanhest 14y ago
    I don't have control over it on my work computer.
    - npsimons 14y ago
      That's employee abuse, just like this article is talking about! You should quit and find a better job, the market always provides! (sarcasm).
      - LearnYouALisp 14y ago
        That would be a doubtful reason to put on an application: "Corporate computer did not have script & embedded content control."
- benologist 14y ago
  They have a non-Flash tag cloud as well that it falls back to. But the larger question is why they need any tag cloud at all in 2012, they were fun for about 3 seconds and then they became just another tool for SEO.
- treenyc 14y ago
guard-of-terra 14y ago
If the company is in position to treat you as a slave (e.g. it can decrease your compensation or degrade your status without suffering and the only thing preventing it from this is their goodwill), there is a good chance they would. If the jobs market is so badly screwed that they can treat server admins as slaves, maybe USA is no longer sustainable after all? Because you know, in a normal job market, those server admins quit. And IBM has to hire new server admins. For considerably higher salaries (because of bubble inflation and because of haste to fill positions).
- PakG1 14y ago
  No, it's quite possible to hire new server admins at the same salaries or less, and just endure lower quality work. I see it all the time. It all depends on where the company's priorities are, normal job market be damned.
  - wabash 14y ago
    I think you didn't get his point. You're actually agreeing with him. You're saying that it's quite possible to ignore the notion of a normal job market in the USA. So, it's not sustainable, competitive equilibrium don't exists.
    - mpyne 14y ago
      I think instead he's saying that in a "normal" job market it's possible to higher server admins of lesser experience for lower pay and suffer through the consequences of having to train them up and get them proficient. There's good business reasons not to do this but that doesn't make it any less of a normal job market
      - PakG1 14y ago
        There are 3 other variables to consider: 1. How low a quality of service are customers willing to bear, trading off price and quality? 2. What is the supply of such lower-rate employees who can continue feeding the beast, once the trained employees become too expensive for the company to keep? If they could afford to keep well-trained employees, they probably would be able to attract good employees from the get go. 3. How good is the company's employee retention rate for keeping well-trained employees without significantly raising salaries?
lnanek2 14y ago
This doesn't really surprise me. At some point IBM did the numbers and figured out they were more profitable concentrating on services, and they ditched their printer division, ditched their storage division, ditched their laptop division, etc.. Companies are supposed to be money making machines that always follow logical decisions to make more, it's supposed to make selling business services/software to them easier because you just have to prove you'll save them money, but I don't think a lot of them would have changed over like that. They play hard ball, even with themselves. That said, I've worked for IBM, and was treated very well. I worked overtime all the time, though, and it wasn't odd to see managers around even very late at night doing the same thing. I don't think I've ever had a full time programming job where everyone didn't work overtime for salary without overtime pay, actually. I think there were some contractors around when I was there, but they counted their hours, only did little jobs that amounted to exactly what they were told, and were not very effective or useful. You didn't want one on your projects, that was for sure. So it doesn't surprise me if IT professionals who start demanding that start getting listed as more expensive for the business and cut out. It is the logical money making decision by the business after all.
- thewarrior 14y ago
  Just because its a logical decision on IBMs part dosent make it ethical . You 've completely neglected to mention your view on whether this is right or wrong.
- amorphid 14y ago
  Any idea why IBM still sells servers and mainframes? Is it because the hardware is a nice tie-in to the services they sell?
- mcguire 14y ago
  "I worked overtime all the time, though" Were they doing the "unofficial" 80-hour workweeks?
notlisted 14y ago
I wonder how they could have won the lawsuit... http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/overtime/info.htm http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/overtime/info.htm "The FLSA requires that covered employees in the United States be paid at least the federal minimum wage for each hour they work and overtime pay at one and one-half the employee's regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek." For the FLSA section 13(a)(1) exemptions to apply, an employee generally must be paid on a salary basis of no less than $455 per week and perform certain types of work that: [...] is in the computer field, or [...]
- jonknee 14y ago
  Did you not keep reading? > A number of states have also enacted minimum wage and overtime pay laws, some of which provide greater worker protections than those provided by FLSA. In those situations where an employee is covered by both Federal and state wage laws, the employee is entitled to the greater benefit or more generous rights provided under the different parts of each law.
debacle 14y ago
The solution is to unionize. I really don't understand why we don't have an IT union, especially for network ops and engineering - it's a very logical aspect of the industry to standardize and unionize.
- killface 14y ago
  I think the reason we haven't is many-fold: - We all believe we're above average in our field, and unions would hold us back. - We all know people who have skated by on incompetence, and wouldn't want a union to protect their jobs. - Our field moves quickly, and we don't want a union that would hamper our ability to make quick moves. - Union is a dirty word, especially when the mind disease of libertarianism is more prevalent among tech workers. I think the easier way to solve this is for IT/computer workers to stop being paid salaries, and get paid hourly. If it weren't for a special exemption from congress that was passed in the 90s, we would be paid hourly as a matter of law. I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting. Employers value your time when they have to pay for those extra 2 hours of meetings each day, when they have you work a Saturday, or stay a couple hours late to push to the finish line. In addition, things like software efficiency upgrades where I can show 10 hour savings for 3 hours of cost are suddenly on the table, where on a salary you're not a "team player" if don't just put in the extra hours for free to save the company some bucks.
  - codewright 14y ago
    >I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting. This has been my experience as well. My time was considered more valuable, people respected my input and expertise more, I was treated with more courtesy. The works.
    - LearnYouALisp 14y ago
      Isn't that funny? You could be the same person with the same experience as you had in a company somewhere, and in one place it's undervalued and in a new place it's fairly valued (hopefully).
drone 14y ago
The final statement in the article engages in a fallacy that all members in a job market have the same level of mobility without consideration of individual factors, such as: * Potential age-bias for older workers ([1] is an example of the discussion related to this, without being exhaustive obviously) * Local job market (relevant and equivalent positions) * Physical mobility (family situation, value of house in market relative to mortgage for re-location) * Spousal situation (Spouse may not be able to relocate) It's always so easy to dismiss the workers in these cases and say "they should just leave," but this meme gets out-of-hand. The reality is it's often no easier to leave than to stay, and in some situations quite difficult to do so. This should never be used to excuse abusive practices by employers with the line "well, the market will take care of it." [1] http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
scotty79 14y ago
Why does the article talk about lack of overtime as if it was a bad thing?
- trhtrsh 14y ago
  It means overtime work without overtime pay.
  - scotty79 14y ago
    Article says: > Next IBM restricted the workers to 40 hour weeks so there would be no overtime. > VP approval was required each time someone was needed to work overtime. The net result was all the server admins worked exactly 40 hours a week and for 15 percent less pay. I'm assuming they weren't physically allowed to work for more than 40 hours a week and I wonder why it's perceived as a bad thing.
    - yen223 14y ago
      I honestly won't be surprised if the workers were expected to work overtime, but just weren't allowed to log more than 40 hours a week in their timesheets.
JulianMorrison 14y ago
It surprises me that this doesn't count as "constructive dismissal".
- gknoy 14y ago
  It might, but you'd have to argue against IBM's lawyers to prove it. They seem to have a reputation for effectiveness, so that might not go so well.
ck2 14y ago
Sounds vaguely like walmart's anti-union emergency lawyer team: Wal-Mart has responded to the union drive by trying to stop workers from organizing -- sometimes in violation of federal labor law. In 10 separate cases, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Wal-Mart repeatedly broke the law by interrogating workers, confiscating union literature, and firing union supporters. At the first sign of organizing in a store, Wal-Mart dispatches a team of union busters from its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas... ...The retaliation can be extreme. In February 2000, the meat-cutting department at a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to join the UFCW -- the only Wal-Mart in the nation where workers successfully organized a union. Two weeks after the vote, the company announced it was eliminating its meat-cutting departments in all of its stores nationwide. It also fired four workers who voted for the union. "They held a meeting and said there was nothing we could do," recalls Dotty Jones, a former meat cutter in Jacksonville. "No matter which way the election went, they would hold it up in court until we were old and gray." http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/03/against-wal-mart http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/03/against-wal-mart

135 points by Toshio 14y ago

The post by Cringely provides no references, which I find odd. I found a Bloomberg wire article [1] about the judgement, but nothing at all about the alleged subsequent retribution. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/technology/23IBM.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/technology/23IBM.html

PakG1 14y ago
How often do you find out about such insider level information? Even stories like EA Spouse, how much detail do we really know that would be considered deeper than surface-level stuff?
symmetricsaurus 14y ago
I agree that some more references are in order. As it is now, all this post does is spread rumors. At least the lawsuit happened but it's hard to tell about the rest from the information we're given.
rada 14y ago
Recap of the "payroll restructuring": http://www.informationweek.com/ibm-responds-to-overtime-lawsuits-with-1/205917177 http://www.informationweek.com/ibm-responds-to-overtime-laws... Workers' petition, with names and an occasional email: http://www.petitiononline.com/petitions/ibm1701/signatures http://www.petitiononline.com/petitions/ibm1701/signatures Short legal recap: http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/features/overtime_california/overtime-california-ibm.html#.UIaphcWHLh5 http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/features/overtime_calif...
- andyjohnson0 14y ago
  That seems to be appalling behaviour by IBM. I did an intern year with IBM UK in the late eighties and (with hindsight) it seemed to have very good employment practices. I wonder if IBM in the US was once like that, and if so when things changed.
kokey 14y ago
To me it sounds just like he framed what happened in the IT industry in most corporations from 2001 onwards in a 'IBM is evil' manner. Dotcom happened, bombed, local skills got paid less while jobs got shipped offshore or automated away. The post about H1-B visas that he mentions, appears to be what most large corporations do with L1 visas, and that's probably what IBM was doing too.

Nursie 14y ago

If you're with them in the US right now and you want to keep your job, yeah, probably best not to mess. This is because it is pretty much stated policy to scale the company back in that area, in favour of building the company in 'growth' markets where people are cheaper and closer to the action. There's not enough growth in the US to support the revenue requirements of the behemoth, and as US employees are both expensive and easy to get rid of, they tend to be the first to suffer. (compared to, say, EU employees who are also expensive but harder to ditch).

kalms 14y ago
Denmark is known for its flexicurity model. We're not hard to ditch, and we're even easier to employ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
- Nursie 14y ago
  Interesting. I think the (generous) social security provision is what's missing from the US at-will model.
  - LaRakel 14y ago
    Europe is doing it's best to weaken social security as well, they can't afford to take care of people who have no job. "flexicurity" is an eupheumism invented by the EU for the central neoliberal tenet "you are now a product". It's not only making it easier to fire someone, it also reduces employees to the subjective opinion of the manager; whether or not you do your job properly is no longer the main issue, your personality is. The idea is that since you can get fired at whim, you'll be able to get a job faster and you'll be more productive, which is great because the economy is the only thing that matters in today's politics.
    - kalms 14y ago
      The term was coined by former danish prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. Hardly a libertarian.

bluedanieru 14y ago

Don't work for IBM. I'm not one to normally subscribe to the 'if you don't like the working conditions don't work there' line of reasoning, especially in the US where unions are so weak. But in tech, eh, we have options.

gvb 14y ago
That's naive. a) The lawsuit was settled in 2006 (ref andyjohnson0's post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687336 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687336). The article doesn't say when it was instigated, but it was likely a couple of years prior to that. In 2006, the tech industry was still working its way out of the collapse of the tech bubble.[1][2] Workers and companies were still pretty shell-shocked. b) A lot of people live in places where the technology sector is not that strong and thus there are not that many options. Often moving is not a viable option due to family responsibilities or other circumstances. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nasdaq2.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nasdaq2.png
- raverbashing 14y ago
  No What's naive is subjecting yourself to a company with known practices of this magnitude. What's the saying again? "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me?!" Of course some people's options are limited, but most aren't.
- bluedanieru 14y ago
  Uh, thanks for the wiki link to the dot-com bubble, I guess. a) I don't really care about. I doubt much has changed and I don't think it was from fiscal necessity. Also, if they were shell-shocked in 2006 I can't imagine things have improved since then. It's actually disappointing as I rather admire IBM's leadership in open source. Alas, much easier to damage a reputation than build and keep a good one. As for b), okay point taken. So, don't work at IBM, if you can help it.
  - Hairy_Sandwich 14y ago

macavity23 14y ago

Offtopic, but the flash on that page slows my browser down to a crawl. C'mon, guys, this is 2012, you can't write a tag cloud in JavaScript?

conradfr 14y ago
Yes, FF took 50% of my CPU just by browsing this page.
mike-cardwell 14y ago
It's 2012 and you're still letting Flash run automatically on arbitrary web pages? Next you'll be telling me you still have the Java plugin enabled...
- wtvanhest 14y ago
  I don't have control over it on my work computer.
  - npsimons 14y ago
    That's employee abuse, just like this article is talking about! You should quit and find a better job, the market always provides! (sarcasm).
    - LearnYouALisp 14y ago
      That would be a doubtful reason to put on an application: "Corporate computer did not have script & embedded content control."
benologist 14y ago
They have a non-Flash tag cloud as well that it falls back to. But the larger question is why they need any tag cloud at all in 2012, they were fun for about 3 seconds and then they became just another tool for SEO.
treenyc 14y ago

guard-of-terra 14y ago

If the company is in position to treat you as a slave (e.g. it can decrease your compensation or degrade your status without suffering and the only thing preventing it from this is their goodwill), there is a good chance they would. If the jobs market is so badly screwed that they can treat server admins as slaves, maybe USA is no longer sustainable after all? Because you know, in a normal job market, those server admins quit. And IBM has to hire new server admins. For considerably higher salaries (because of bubble inflation and because of haste to fill positions).

PakG1 14y ago
No, it's quite possible to hire new server admins at the same salaries or less, and just endure lower quality work. I see it all the time. It all depends on where the company's priorities are, normal job market be damned.
- wabash 14y ago
  I think you didn't get his point. You're actually agreeing with him. You're saying that it's quite possible to ignore the notion of a normal job market in the USA. So, it's not sustainable, competitive equilibrium don't exists.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    I think instead he's saying that in a "normal" job market it's possible to higher server admins of lesser experience for lower pay and suffer through the consequences of having to train them up and get them proficient. There's good business reasons not to do this but that doesn't make it any less of a normal job market
    - PakG1 14y ago
      There are 3 other variables to consider: 1. How low a quality of service are customers willing to bear, trading off price and quality? 2. What is the supply of such lower-rate employees who can continue feeding the beast, once the trained employees become too expensive for the company to keep? If they could afford to keep well-trained employees, they probably would be able to attract good employees from the get go. 3. How good is the company's employee retention rate for keeping well-trained employees without significantly raising salaries?

lnanek2 14y ago

This doesn't really surprise me. At some point IBM did the numbers and figured out they were more profitable concentrating on services, and they ditched their printer division, ditched their storage division, ditched their laptop division, etc.. Companies are supposed to be money making machines that always follow logical decisions to make more, it's supposed to make selling business services/software to them easier because you just have to prove you'll save them money, but I don't think a lot of them would have changed over like that. They play hard ball, even with themselves. That said, I've worked for IBM, and was treated very well. I worked overtime all the time, though, and it wasn't odd to see managers around even very late at night doing the same thing. I don't think I've ever had a full time programming job where everyone didn't work overtime for salary without overtime pay, actually. I think there were some contractors around when I was there, but they counted their hours, only did little jobs that amounted to exactly what they were told, and were not very effective or useful. You didn't want one on your projects, that was for sure. So it doesn't surprise me if IT professionals who start demanding that start getting listed as more expensive for the business and cut out. It is the logical money making decision by the business after all.

thewarrior 14y ago
Just because its a logical decision on IBMs part dosent make it ethical . You 've completely neglected to mention your view on whether this is right or wrong.
amorphid 14y ago
Any idea why IBM still sells servers and mainframes? Is it because the hardware is a nice tie-in to the services they sell?
mcguire 14y ago
"I worked overtime all the time, though" Were they doing the "unofficial" 80-hour workweeks?

notlisted 14y ago

I wonder how they could have won the lawsuit... http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/overtime/info.htm http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/overtime/info.htm "The FLSA requires that covered employees in the United States be paid at least the federal minimum wage for each hour they work and overtime pay at one and one-half the employee's regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek." For the FLSA section 13(a)(1) exemptions to apply, an employee generally must be paid on a salary basis of no less than $455 per week and perform certain types of work that: [...] is in the computer field, or [...]

jonknee 14y ago
Did you not keep reading? > A number of states have also enacted minimum wage and overtime pay laws, some of which provide greater worker protections than those provided by FLSA. In those situations where an employee is covered by both Federal and state wage laws, the employee is entitled to the greater benefit or more generous rights provided under the different parts of each law.

debacle 14y ago

The solution is to unionize. I really don't understand why we don't have an IT union, especially for network ops and engineering - it's a very logical aspect of the industry to standardize and unionize.

killface 14y ago
I think the reason we haven't is many-fold: - We all believe we're above average in our field, and unions would hold us back. - We all know people who have skated by on incompetence, and wouldn't want a union to protect their jobs. - Our field moves quickly, and we don't want a union that would hamper our ability to make quick moves. - Union is a dirty word, especially when the mind disease of libertarianism is more prevalent among tech workers. I think the easier way to solve this is for IT/computer workers to stop being paid salaries, and get paid hourly. If it weren't for a special exemption from congress that was passed in the 90s, we would be paid hourly as a matter of law. I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting. Employers value your time when they have to pay for those extra 2 hours of meetings each day, when they have you work a Saturday, or stay a couple hours late to push to the finish line. In addition, things like software efficiency upgrades where I can show 10 hour savings for 3 hours of cost are suddenly on the table, where on a salary you're not a "team player" if don't just put in the extra hours for free to save the company some bucks.
- codewright 14y ago
  >I know I've been treated MUCH better since I switched to consulting. This has been my experience as well. My time was considered more valuable, people respected my input and expertise more, I was treated with more courtesy. The works.
  - LearnYouALisp 14y ago
    Isn't that funny? You could be the same person with the same experience as you had in a company somewhere, and in one place it's undervalued and in a new place it's fairly valued (hopefully).

drone 14y ago

The final statement in the article engages in a fallacy that all members in a job market have the same level of mobility without consideration of individual factors, such as: * Potential age-bias for older workers ([1] is an example of the discussion related to this, without being exhaustive obviously) * Local job market (relevant and equivalent positions) * Physical mobility (family situation, value of house in market relative to mortgage for re-location) * Spousal situation (Spouse may not be able to relocate) It's always so easy to dismiss the workers in these cases and say "they should just leave," but this meme gets out-of-hand. The reality is it's often no easier to leave than to stay, and in some situations quite difficult to do so. This should never be used to excuse abusive practices by employers with the line "well, the market will take care of it." [1] http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

scotty79 14y ago

Why does the article talk about lack of overtime as if it was a bad thing?

trhtrsh 14y ago
It means overtime work without overtime pay.
- scotty79 14y ago
  Article says: > Next IBM restricted the workers to 40 hour weeks so there would be no overtime. > VP approval was required each time someone was needed to work overtime. The net result was all the server admins worked exactly 40 hours a week and for 15 percent less pay. I'm assuming they weren't physically allowed to work for more than 40 hours a week and I wonder why it's perceived as a bad thing.
  - yen223 14y ago
    I honestly won't be surprised if the workers were expected to work overtime, but just weren't allowed to log more than 40 hours a week in their timesheets.

JulianMorrison 14y ago

It surprises me that this doesn't count as "constructive dismissal".

gknoy 14y ago
It might, but you'd have to argue against IBM's lawyers to prove it. They seem to have a reputation for effectiveness, so that might not go so well.

ck2 14y ago

Sounds vaguely like walmart's anti-union emergency lawyer team: Wal-Mart has responded to the union drive by trying to stop workers from organizing -- sometimes in violation of federal labor law. In 10 separate cases, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Wal-Mart repeatedly broke the law by interrogating workers, confiscating union literature, and firing union supporters. At the first sign of organizing in a store, Wal-Mart dispatches a team of union busters from its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas... ...The retaliation can be extreme. In February 2000, the meat-cutting department at a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to join the UFCW -- the only Wal-Mart in the nation where workers successfully organized a union. Two weeks after the vote, the company announced it was eliminating its meat-cutting departments in all of its stores nationwide. It also fired four workers who voted for the union. "They held a meeting and said there was nothing we could do," recalls Dotty Jones, a former meat cutter in Jacksonville. "No matter which way the election went, they would hold it up in court until we were old and gray." http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/03/against-wal-mart http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/03/against-wal-mart