Dell faces class action lawsuit from workers

Computer maker Dell is now facing a class action lawsuit that alleges the company underpaid 5,000 call center employees.

A federal judge in the Oregon-filed case gave the lawsuit class-action status last week, according to an article in the Austin American Statesman. Any of the U.S. Dell call center employees who worked from February 8, 2004 to the present can now join the lawsuit to sue Dell as a group, according to the story.

The lawsuit was filed in February 2007 by two employees claiming they were not properly paid for overtime, training, or work preparation time, the story said. The employees are asking the company to pay back their missing wages, including interest, and to fund their attorneys fees. Spherion Corp., a staffing agency that works closely with Dell, is also named as a defendant, according to The Statesman.

Since the case was granted class-action status, 80 more employees have signed on as plaintiffs. A lawyer for the employees said the suit applies to as many as 5,000 former and current call center workers from offices in Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Idaho, and Oregon.

The Statesman also said a similar suit has been filed in Austin by customer service representatives who deal with Dell's corporate customers.

A Dell representative declined to comment to CNET News on the specifics of the pending litigation, but confirmed that the company disputes claims in the case filings.

In May, Dell lost a lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general that claimed the company had been engaging in fraud and deceptive business practices.

[kkohnen]

This doesn't surprise me - every time I've dealt with someone in Dell's call center, they clearly weren't highly paid employees. They certainly weren't competent.

(I get a big kick when I call Dell and talk with a guy named "Bob" who sounds like Apu Nahasapeemapetilon)

[humanssssss]

Dell pioneer just-in-time computer manufacturing but when it comes to employees payment, they miss a few. That's just wrong. People who work deserve payment. They are the low of the low in society, yet Dell likes to cheat the poor people. I hope the judge takes this into consideration and levy a higher fine.

[wbcsr]

I was enployed at Dell for a year. back in 2006. As a Dell employee you were encourage to work overtime and you were paid what employees call chinese pay. Also you were given your monthly goal 3 weeks into the month making it hard to make it thus reducing your bonus for that month. Dell was able raise your goal so high that only the few emplopyees willing to work from bell to bell 12 to 14 hour days could make the goals. Another way is if you were cute and the manager liked you, you may be given additional sales. I was so discusted with the way dell cheated me out of my money. I use to tell everyone I see about what Dell did to me. I quit my teaching job which I was promised of making much more than I would as a teacher which was a big LIE. I make more as a teacher and Dell tells you all of what you are going to make and you dont get the truth until you get out of training and fine out for yourself. I want to be part of the Dell class action suit and I bet many more will have simular stories as I have. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

[jaggedpath]

"...I was so discusted with the way..."

"...and fine out for yourself ..."

I hope you weren't teaching English, otherwise you were probably overpaid as a teacher.

[sanenazok]

Oh no, Dell made you do work. Welcome to the service sector. How could you expect a sales/tech support job ever compete with unionized 8-3 teaching gig? Other than not teaching English, I hope you're not teaching anything that requires a grasp of reality. Hopefully you're in political science or womyn's history.

[phantomreg]

I'm glad you quit teaching.. you can't spell worth a $ hit!

[lkt102]

When I saw this news, I found a very bad facts, There always has companys that arrears of wages, Nomater it is large company or small company. (Editors' note: An ad link has been removed.)

[Tsee-1968031069905097881578618]

Well, if you think these workers have it bad then imagine the Indian ones.

[Tsee-1968031069905097881578618]

I'm not saying they don't deserve OT pay etc, of course.

[lilzim05]

I used to work at Dell in this Oregon location. I was just made aware of this lawsuit this morning (7/17/08). And I can agree with this entirely! I can't even begin to tell you how much money I was cheated out of when I worked there. We worked 8 hour shifts for part time, and only had one 15 minute break, and one 30 minute lunch. It was ridiculous! Then there would also be mandatory Saturdays when the team I was on was only supposed to (and scheduled) work Monday-Friday. Where can I sign up?? This is outrageous!

[c_dufer]

You can sign up at WWW.SSHWLAW.COM or you can call the attorneys involved at be eligible to join this lawsuit.

If you have other questions or would like additional information, please contact George Hanson, Matt Dameron, or Carla Broadnax at 1-866-668-9241

[gggg sssss]

sure - sue away. And Dell will move another 1000 jobs to india - where 12 hour days are the norm.

You will;learn what GM truck plant workers are learning - there is no free lunch any more

[chonnom]

I worked there for 3 months; just long enough to figure out that the crap they were shoveling was just that. From start of employment to when I left, no one ever gave me a straight answer on how we were being paid. A person had to have a degree in chaos-theory to calculate the convoluted pay system.

[phantomreg]

I totally agree, it seems the way we were paid changed evey 3 weeks, it was rediculous!!!!!

[c_dufer]

I am already signed up.

[austx08]

All of you really dont know the half of it. Dell has been doing that for years. (I only work there for personal reasons only). Dell works harder and not paying its employees more than any company I have ever worked for. If the job market ever picks up or employees find another company that will hire them for the same pay. People would leave out of spite. You can do the job of someone in a paygrade levels above you. As in, like 8-10$ more an hour and Dell wont give you a dime more. And if you complain, they are more than happy to blacklist you from any sort of promotion.
Discrimination is also a huge problem there that Dell refuses to address. If you took a job in tech support in manuf...you can forget about getting promoted into another department. Dell openly denies tech support promotions just based on the fact that you are tech support. Employee morale is low and people are unhappy but they are just waiting for the time to leave Dell behind.

[austx08]

All of you really dont know the half of it. Dell has been doing that for years. (I only work there for personal reasons only). Dell works harder and not paying its employees more than any company I have ever worked for. If the job market ever picks up or employees find another company that will hire them for the same pay. People would leave out of spite. You can do the job of someone in a paygrade levels above you. As in, like 8-10$ more an hour and Dell wont give you a dime more. And if you complain, they are more than happy to blacklist you from any sort of promotion.
Discrimination is also a huge problem there that Dell refuses to address. If you took a job in tech support in manuf...you can forget about getting promoted into another department. Dell openly denies tech support promotions just based on the fact that you are tech support. Employee morale is low and people are unhappy but they are just waiting for the time to leave Dell behind.

[RamFan4u]

I worked at Dell in McGregor Texas from 2003-2005 as a sales rep it was a hellish job. It was a virtual sweatshop. Management had alot sorts of degrading tactics to humuliate sales reps who the felt were under par, for example if a sales rep was not hitting Dells goals that month he or she would find themselves elbow to elbow sitting back in the training room to take calls, with no space to deal with paperwork or the tasks at hand. We were always told that is where we would stay intil we got our numbers back up. We also had to stand up while taking orders and working the phones intil we hit our goals If you got the glorious Dell Badge you were told that you were a salaried employee and would make oodles in bonuses., but in reality even the top reps did not make much in bonuses and the salary was very low and then we had the mandatory 50-60 hours a week with no pay for the overtime. The clincher was that this GREEDY company expected thier sales reps to usually earn aproximately 200 thousand a month for them or the sales rep was threatened with termination.....Sign that class action lawsuite....YOU BETTCHA ASSSSSSSSSSSSS

[msmmeme1966]

I worked for Dell or should I say Hell.. The worst job ever..Like everybody says not able to log in when you first arrive... being penalized for calling back a customer and a whole lot of other horrible stuff. like trying to meet the monthly goal that was not reachable.. i could go on but I'll let the lawyers handle this for me

[bethanyrose78]

I worked for Dell at the McGregor, TX location. The way some are seemingly 'picking' at the comment from the "ex-teacher" is just terrible. The point she is making is valid. I left a well paying job to go to Dell with the promise of a fabulous hourly rate and commission. I was never given the opportunity to make commission because we seemed to always be doing damage control and I was assigned to different departments. When I was hired, I was hired for sales. When I got out of training, I was bounced around until I was layed off. I went to work one day and they had the doors locked. Unless you have walked a mile in our shoes, you don't understand. My job was taken shortly before Christmas in 2007 and it took a long time to get back on my feet with such an unexpected turn of events. The point is, Dell DID do good things for their employees, but not good enough. We would be given lunch, but demanded to work through our "unpaid" hour. We would continually be promised week after week, "don't worry, you will be heading to Sales soon, we just have an issue to resolve and we need you to answer calls from complaining customers right now because so many laptops are on back order and...", BLAH-BLAH-BLAH. Those are just some mild examples. When you leave a job for reasons that have been promised to you in a written contract, they are supposed to be for the better. Dell did not pull through for me or my family and I have sent in the response to the lawsuit information that was sent to me.

[AMG1120]

I worked for Dell for over two years. I knew they were violating numerous labor laws. First level management just enforced policies that executive level managers made. These were just kids straight out of college who usually had never worked anywhere else or just one other company for a very short time and had no clue how to run a business and what laws they were breaking.

If an employee had the audacity to question management on their illegal labor law actions you were accused of not being able to deal with ambiguity and told that you worked in a right-to-work state. So people shut up and did what they had to do to survive financially. Once someone had had enough abuse, they quit. That is why Dell has such an atrociously high turn-over rate.

Dell does not mind spending money on training new employees over and over and over again just as long as they do not pay their existing employees above a certain level. Maybe there is some kind of tax break for training that is better than paying compensation. If not, then there is no logic to their actions other than they don't want to see employees making more money than they are.

I would venture to say, on an average, Dell pays their sales people less than .04% in salary, overtime and commission of what is sold by those employees. Industry average runs around 10%. I actually did an analysis once of how Dell set quotas which was quite enlightening. I shared it with one employee and the next thing I knew, HR was having meetings with everyone about it.

Dell's whole sales compensation plan (which changes continually) is designed to force people to work overtime to achieve their quotas. Seven layers of management between the CEO and the employees require alot of capital to line those very deep pockets. So if they paid you less than the legal amount of overtime pay, this paid for their bonuses. OpEx was a big buzz word around there. You were constantly drilled on keeping the operating expense down.

Management also used quotas to discriminate against individuals who were making too much money. If increasing the quotas did not work, then Dell "promoted" the individual to another position with the intent of paying less overall compensation. Of course, these were the older and more tenured employees.

I watched Dell do away with a whole sales department once because the sales people were all making 200% of their quota (which is where Dell caps it). Dell said they did not need that department anymore. Within six months Dell had hired new people off of the streets to replace the individuals they said they did not need.

I am just glad to see people finally standing up for themselves. Dell is nothing without their employees. Too bad the good old boy network does not see that. SEC, FTC, NY AG, and two class action lawsuits; I guess those 2 X4's just aren't big enough to get their attention.