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Current, Former Workers Sue IBM for Back Wages

Posted on: Wednesday, 25 January 2006, 00:00 CST

By Rachel Osterman, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

Jan. 25--Saying they were never paid overtime for working 12-hour days and on weekends, three current and former employees of IBM sued the giant computer company for back wages Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco.

The workers are seeking class-action status for as many as tens of thousands of IBM technical staffers nationwide who, they contend, were wrongly classified as exempt from state and federal overtime laws.

The lawsuit against International Business Machines Corp. is the latest in a wave of lawsuits that challenge how employers pay overtime, particularly in California.

The cases have put pressure on numerous companies, ranging from low-wage retailers to white-collar insurance and banking firms.

"We believe tens of thousands of workers have worked hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of unpaid overtime hours," said Steven Zieff, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers. "We want to make sure that IBM does not put itself above the law. -- The overtime laws are there to protect workers."

An IBM spokeswoman said the company does not comment on pending litigation.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, plaintiff Exaldo Topacio said demands by supervisors to stay late and come to work on weekends caused him to miss family dinners, as well as his daughter's softball games.

"I was not compensated fairly," said Topacio, a computer network support technician who worked for IBM in New York between March 2003 and March 2004. Topacio said he asked his supervisor about overtime compensation and was told he wasn't entitled to premium pay because he was a management employee.

But in a press conference Thursday, lawyer Zieff said that Topacio and others should have been classified as hourly, nonexempt workers because they carry out routine, day-to-day activities and don't have managerial responsibilities.

Under federal and state overtime laws, employees generally must be eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay, unless their job duties are professional or administrative.

Federal law requires overtime pay after 40 hours on the job per week; California requires overtime pay for more than eight hours of work a day.

To be exempt from overtime in California, which has stricter standards than federal guidelines, employees must spend more than half their time on administrative work.

Overtime lawsuits took off in the late 1990s and gradually expanded from the retail and restaurant sectors to white-collar industries.

"There were a lot of (retail) employees who were reclassified" from exempt to nonexempt positions as a result of the litigation, said D. Gregory Valenza, a managing partner with the Jackson Lewis law firm, which represents employers.

"As people who worked hard in the late '90s got laid off and were looking to get even, the plaintiffs' bar was looking for new opportunities for class actions," he said.

Labor groups attribute the wave of overtime allegations to employees' unwillingness to spend late nights and weekends at the office.

"The high-tech industry is well known for the idea of long work hours with uncompensated overtime. As the finance and rewards have declined after the recession and companies are getting leaner and meaner, workers are less willing to be putting in the long hours without getting compensated," said Marcus Courtney, president of WashTech, a Seattle-based affiliate of the Communication Workers of America, which represents tech workers.

In Silicon Valley, Electronic Arts and Sony Computer Entertainment America have been sued by employees demanding overtime pay.

In the insurance and banking sectors, Bank of America, Farmers Insurance Exchange, Allstate Corp. and State Farm Insurance also have faced overtime lawsuits.

Perhaps the case most similar to the IBM lawsuit is one against Computer Sciences Corp., which was filed by some of the same law firms on behalf of tech support workers. That case was settled in July 2005 for $24 million.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

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IBM, 6680, CSC, BAC, ZURN, ALL, ERTS, SNE, 6758,

Source: The Sacramento Bee

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