From the Frisco Chronicle we read Temporary workers sue HP over overtime pay
Hewlett-Packard has been accused of exploiting temporary workers by forcing them to work overtime without pay or benefits, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
Some contractor persons of my acquaintance working for HP’s Video Server group in Santa Clara in 1995 were asked by their manager to work 80-100 hours a week to meet an aggressive deadline but only to bill 40 since the manager’s budget was maxed-out; she assured them that they would be paid later on by submitting invoices for hours they didn’t work. One poor sap fell for this plan, and when he invoiced them while on vacation in Israel, the company rejected the invoice and terminated his contract for misrepresentation of hours worked.
He sued, but I don’t know what happened with the suit because this was all obviously a verbal deal. HP seems to get itself into these messes with amazing regularity, which makes you think that the HP Way is One Way, right to the crapper.
Meanwhile, back at the marketplace, HP is remains number one in network servers:
Results from a new study by research firm Gartner show that in 2002 H-P held onto its position as the No.1 computer server maker worldwide and in the U.S. Gartner estimates that H-P (HPQ: news, chart, profile) shipped nearly 1.4 million servers worldwide for a 30 percent share.
Message?
Everything I’ve read says that, while HP may be doing well in a few markets, they’ve had all kinds of trouble making money.
Do you think overworking people, long-term, is smart strategy? I don’t. I don’t know what the solution is, though. Most people don’t want to unionize–and can you blame them?
A while back, HP decided it was going to employ about 80% contractors with just a few perms to manage the contractors. They apparently didn’t add up the costs of this approach, and have tried to have the cake and eat it too by screwing around with the contractors’ hours.
Maybe they should have just accepted that laying-off perms when things are dire isn’t as bad as this mess.
I’ve frankly never been impressed by their gear, for what it’s worth.
Neither have I, not for a long while anyway. They used to make top-notch printers, but now you can’t even say that.
Having worked as a bench tech, I can also say that their computers make me shudder.
The local phone company here in Chicago (Ameritech before it became SBC), had a similar IT policy. I was on a project with 150 people, only 3 temps and only one of them in senior management.
Needless to say, the project fell through because of a singular lack of motivation. At all levels of the project.
H1-B holders have one *BIG* cross hanging over their neck – their desire to not do anything to jeapordize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enormously better their circumstances. Bar none. it makes them easy targets for economic blackmail by unscrupulous employers.
I have to add that my personal experience has been nothing short of the best. All the H1-Bs I knew at companies i worked at never complained about lower pay. I think the differentiating factor was that these were all boutique consulting shops who could not afford to hire bad people, and could not afford to let really good people be unmotivated, or leave.