While Apple (News 
- Alert) has a number of legal battles on the patent front on its hands, it will soon have its hands full with another legal woe unrelated to patents. This time it's Apple's own home-based “virtual” call center agents causing the headaches.
A news release on PRWeb is reporting that the employment law firm Blumenthal, Nordrehaug & Bhowmik has filed a class action lawsuit against Apple on behalf of Apple's “virtual” contact center employees. The suit alleges that Apple put together an illegal scheme of classifying these at-home call center workers not as employees but as independent contractors. The goal, the suit alleges, was to dodge having to paying payroll taxes and other business related expenses for the employees through the use of what's called a “yellow dog” contract. The suit, Hilton v. Apple, was filed on December 8 is currently pending in Santa Clara Superior Court as Case No. 111-CV-214597.
A “yellow dog” contract is an umbrella term to describe a legal document that represents an agreement between an employer and an employee in which the employee agrees, as a condition of employment, not to be a member of a labor union. (These contracts have been illegal since 1932.) The term may also be used to describe an employment contract that contains non-compete clauses or non-disclosure agreements. It's not clear under what definition of the concept the Hilton v. Apple allegations fall... Read More
