A former Apple employee is filing suit against the company for violating labor laws.

The ex-network engineer is claiming that the company asked him and other employees to work beyond the standard 40 hour work week without properly compensating them for the overtime. The man also claims that he and other network engineers were required to be on call for stretches of up to seven days at a time.

To top it all off, he says that Apple was aware of this and skirted labor laws by creating meaningless titles for employees which allowed the company to "promote" them to positions that required more hours and no pay increase.

Now, Apple employees are known even within the workaholic tech world for being very tied to their jobs. Perhaps it's a labor of love, perhaps it's fear of Steve Jobs seeing you in the parking lot before 7 PM and firing you in front of everyone, perhaps it's a small mixture of both. But in this case, it doesn't look like Apple is doing anything extraordinary.

Not to be too cynical here, but isn't this the description of just about every IT job in existence? I don't know of too many network engineers that don't spend one or two weekends a month on call (or even in the office, for that matter.)

If this case goes in favor of the plaintiff, it sounds like a LOT of companies are going to have to change their ways. Sounds like Apple was just par for the course here.

07 Aug 2008