Today I opened my mailbox to find this letter:
To all Current or Former Sun Microsystems and SeeBeyond Technology Technical Writers:
A lawsuit entitled Dani Hoenemier v. Sun Microsystems has been brought in California Superior Court, Santa Clara Counta on behalf of a proposed class of current and former Technical Writers (“TWs”) employed by Sun (and/or SeeBeyond Technology Corporation) since September 21, 2002. The lawsuit alleges that TWs, such as yourself, were misclassified as exempt employees, and should instead have been treated as “non-exempt” employees subject to all the regulations that govern non-exempt employees, including the obligation to track hours worked, the right to premium pay for overtime worked, and the right to mandatory unpaid meal breaks or additional compensation for missed meal breaks. Sun alleges that it correctly classified its TWs as salaried exempt employees, that it is not obligated to classify and treat them as hourly employees, and that it therefore should not be required to do so.
This letter is to advise you of the pendency [EG — “pendency”?] of the lawsuit and that Plaintiff’s lawyers wish to obtain your name, address, and telephone number for the purpose of contacting you to obtain information regarding Plaintiff’s case against Sun. The Court has not yet determined whether this action shall actually proceed as a class action. You have no obligation to talk to Plaintiff’s counsel, but you also have the right to do so if you wish to do so. Sun is prohibited by its policies and by law from retaliating against you for speaking to Plaintiff’s counsel.
You do have the right to refuse disclosure of your contact information to third parties. If you do not wish to have your name, home address, and home telephone disclosed to Plaintiff’s counsel to enable them to contact you, you must return the enclosed postage pre-paid, self-addressed postcard by July 17, 2007. Unless you exercise your right to privacy in this manner, you will be deemed to have waived that right and your contact information will be disclosed to Plaintiff’s counsel.
If you have any questions regarding the release of your private contact information, you may call Rosenthal & company LLC at 1-800-xxx-xxxx.
Please do not contact the court.
Thank you.
To which I had these thoughts:
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I have great sympathy for class action lawsuits against corporations in general. Often people who have been wronged simply have no other recourse.
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I do not know Dani Hoenemier personally, but I have met technical writers who are like Dani Hoenemier. Technical writers like Dani Hoenemier make life more difficult for those of us who prefer to make our living doing honest work.
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As someone who still has affection for his ex-colleagues at Sun, and more importantly as a current SUNW shareholder, I hope this suit fails catastrophically.
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If Plaintiff’s lawyers thought I might view this suit with even a shred of sympathy, that hope was lost when Plaintiff’s lawyers chose to include that asinine opt-out disclosure refusal form.
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We were all salaried exempt employees, you numbskull.
Oh, and if any Sun Microsystems attorneys happen to stumble across this post, please note that I would be happy to assist you in any way I can.
Best regards,
Evan Goer
Yeah I’ve gotten a few of these types of things in the mail before, and have tossed every single one of them (after rolling my eyes). I still haven’t found one to be a useful lawsuit (on top of that, most are impossible to read due to the over-the-top legal language).
Yeah. Unfortunately I couldn’t just toss out the thing. I had to sign and return their postcard, or they would have granted themselves the right to continue to pester me.
From reading it, it looks like it was Sun’s lawyers who sent it to you. The Plaintiff’s lawyers WANT to communicate to you, but Sun is asking if you would like to communicate with the Olaintiffs. They will only give Plaintiffs your contact info if you impliedly approve by not opting out.
I’m not defending the merits of the law suit, but it seems that it isn’t fair to blame them for the opt-out letter that Sun sent you.
Back to studying for the Bar…
The letter isn’t from Sun’s lawyers, it’s from Rosenthal & Company LLC, a firm of “Class Action Settlement Administrators.”
So perhaps these guys were appointed to administer the case. If so, I agree it’s not fair to blame Plaintiff’s Counsel for the rudeness and incompetence of Rosenthal & Company LLC.
If the plaintiff’s counsel hired the administrators, and the administrators suck, it is entirely fair to blame the counsel. You are responsible for the actions of your paid agents.
If you hired a contractor to build a house, and then he hired a subcontractor to build the garage, and the garage collapsed on your car the first time you parked in it, it would not be OK for the primary contractor to say, “Oops, but it’s not my fault, it was just that lousy subcontractor!”
I just assumed the administrator was neutral. I don’t anything about how these cases typically proceed, but it doesn’t make sense for the administrator to be hired directly by one party, does it?
And therefore, because it does not make sense, it cannot possibly be true. We’re talking about the American legal system, after all!
I just had my bar review class on federal civil procedure. It seems that the opt-out thing and even the word “pendency” are actually part of the law itself. Any proper class action is going to have the same language. (I didn’t remember this because it was not covered in depth in my Civ Pro class over 3 1/2 years ago.)
Don’t be so down on the lawyers. 🙂
Speaking of lawyers, do you know any good lawyer jokes?
Yeah, after making this post I looked up “pendency” in the dictionary, and lo and behold it was there.
Anyway, I’m not totally down on the lawyers. Hey, some of my best friends are lawyers!
It’s always interesting to hear people’s thoughts and viewpoints. My cause in this lawsuit has from the beginning been simple: to change the landscape for future technical writers. The case is fairly simple in that labor law has long since defined that technical writers should be paid overtime. Corporations tend to ignore the law until someone sets them straight. It is my hope, that once corporations have to pay technical writers what they are due, they’ll have to think twice about adding those last minute features and wanting them to be documented. And that’s all this is about. For me there’s not any money in it, and actually the suit has required quite a bit of time commitment (Sun has insisted on three days of deposition going through the most irrelevant questions you can imagine). The only reason I’m enduring it is so that technical writers will be paid what they are owed.
Be that as it may, I do appreciate other people’s viewpoints, however disappointing and detremental it may be to the effort I am trying to make. But such is life, and I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.
Hello Dani,
Thank you for your very polite response. I wish you the best in your personal endeavors as well.
I’ll admit that don’t understand how labor law could have long since defined that happily salaried, exempt tech writers should actually transformed into non-exempt employees. I had always assumed U.S. labor law was pretty clear about “exempt” versus “non-exempt”. But that’s for your lawyers and Sun’s lawyers to hash out. Note that I completely agree with you that corporations ignore the law until someone sets them straight. Lawsuits are often our only recourse against bad actors.
The main reason I oppose this particular lawsuit is because it is so destructive to the tech writing profession, at Sun Microsystems and elsewhere. I can’t understand why any technical writer would consciously want to separate themselves from their engineering colleagues. “Sorry, I can’t chat with you about the new API, I’m on my lunch break.” Or worse, “Sorry, I can’t work on this sprint with you, my boss hasn’t approved the overtime. Good luck, kiddo!” Ugh.
Everything we do depends on engineers liking us and trusting us to *be there* for them as part of the team. It always startles me when I see it, but time and time again I run into tech writers who don’t understand that your social karma is just as important as your raw writing and technical capabilities. These writers are certainly free to be miserable, wondering why the engineers never remember to tell them anything, never get reviews back on time, and so on. That’s a personal choice. But it’s unconscionable to force that kind of dysfunction onto one’s fellow writers. What did we ever do to deserve that?
Hi Evan,
Thank you for your equally polite response, and your explanation. I agree with you that yes, certainly we have to function as a team. Imagine my surprise when I found out that even programmers who make less than 100k should be paid overtime as well per California labor laws. So should support personnel (per a recent IBM lawsuit), and in my personal opinion of reviewing the law, QA personnel.
Personally, I do not agree that being paid overtime would exclude anyone working for free; it’s not much different than being a contractor. You can always manage your hours the way you’d like. The difference is that I’d like for corporations to pay technical writers if the company itself forces writers to work long hours, weekends, and holidays. At Sun, our team was forced to come into the office on weekends regardless of whether we still have work to complete; it was simply to occupy a chair and be seen by management. Granted, that is probably the extreme, but it happens. And when it does, and it affects your personnel life, the time you can spend with your family and children, having to commute home in the middle of the night and falling asleep at the wheel, it’s not fun. That is what some technical writing teams go through, and that is what I’d like to prevent.
Just FYI – exempt and non-exempt does not necessarily equate to salaried and hourly. You can be salaried and non-exempt. What determines your exempt status is the type of work you do. Technical documentation for endusers (versus inhouse) is non-exempt type work in California.
If anyone is interested in a more detailed explanation I’d be happy to post it.
Hi Dani,
This is all very interesting about California labor law — it could very well be the case that the entire industry is violating California labor law, for tech writers, engineers, project managers, everybody. I really have no idea. Presumably the lawyers are busy working this out as we speak.
I *am* sorry you had the experience at Sun of being called in to work on weekends even when you didn’t have work to complete. That certainly wasn’t my experience at Sun. I knew engineers who worked long hours, but they really were geuninely busy. 🙂 And when they complained to their management about the long hours, management responded by staffing up the group. That’s what competent managers do. Anyway, if your managers were as dysfunctional and incompetent as you describe, that’s an unfortunate situation. But as hardbitten Silicon Valley professionals, we all know how to deal with that problem, surely?
Mr. Goer:
You stated right up front that you have never met this Hoenemier woman, but then you proceed to gratuitously malign her character by classifying her as someone who does not do honest work. With absolutely no evidence to go by you flippantly and carelessly insult here for no reason. Your action is extremely ill mannered and you should be deeply ashamed of yourself. But you probably won’t. Your last passage indicates an attitude that could be explained only by your being a sellout, a soulless and corporate tool. I hope your attempt to solicit 30 pieces of silver brings you everything you deserve.
“Walter”,
If you had bothered to read the comments to this post, you would have discovered that Dani (aka “this Hoenemier woman”) is not only quite pleasant and well-reasoned, but also someone who is *far* less histrionic or trollish than you. Feel free to take your self-righteous bed-wetting *cri de coeur* elsewhere, thanks.
Also, fewer adverbs, please.
Apparently this is now a class action suit. There are copies of court records on
http://www.docstoc.com/search/hoenemier/
Interesting. Thank you for the update, Marla.