A former Apple engineer who worked at the company from 1995 to 2007 has filed suit and is the lead plaintiff in asked the court to certify a class action seeking restitution from Apple for overtime pay and meal compensation under California labor law.
David Walsh, a former Network Engineer claims he was required to work after hours and weekends without overtime compensation and that Apple “intentionally and deliberately created numerous job levels and a multitude of job titles to create the superficial appearance of hundreds of unique jobs, when in fact, these jobs are substantially similar and can be easily grouped together for the purpose of determining whether they are exempt from overtime wages.”
During his on-call hours, Walsh “was required to remain on stand-by for the entire night, every night of the week, for the entire week without compensation,” contends the suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for Southern California.
Walsh’s attorneys are asking the court to grant class status to all of Apple’s California IT workers, including those who are dispatched to perform support functions at Apple retail stores.
Apple has yet to make a formal response to the suit.
Via TUAW
Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie’s photos on Flickr.
8 responses to “Former Apple Engineer Sues for Overtime, Better Working Conditions”
You sorta misrepresented this. It’s not Engineers it’s Engineer (singular). He is not the “lead plaintiff in a class action suit,” he is the only plaintiff in a civil suit. You correctly say that his lawyer asked for class action status on this, but it has not yet been granted. Please correct the article.
Oh, I see why. You quoted TUAW which also had it wrong. Let me dig up a copy of the filing I saw and share it with you.
Here it is Walsh v. Apple, Inc.. As you can see, he is listed as the only plaintiff. If you go to case document #1 you’ll see he is suing on behalf of others, but they’re unnamed. That’s part of his attempt at a class action lawsuit. But at this point it’s one plaintiff (Walsh) and is not class action. Hope this clarifies since TUAW obviously didn’t do due diligence in their reporting (and neither did you!)
@nak – thanks for the clarification. I’ve adjusted the headline and the lead sentence for accuracy.