60 Hour Workweek? Luxury! When I Was an Apple Engineer, I Had to Start My Shift a Half-Hour Before I Ended it …

Slapped with a class-action lawsuit alleging it illegally deprived some 32,000 employees of overtime pay, IBM (IBM) conceived of a novel solution: It settled the suit for $65 million. And then it slashed the base pay of the employees who filed it by 15 percent.

Something to ponder in light of a lawsuit filed this week that claims Apple routinely requires some employees to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay. Brought by former Apple network engineer David Walsh, the suit accuses Apple (AAPL) of purposely misclassifying Walsh and others like him as “management” in order to exempt them from federal overtime pay and then working them into the ground. “After working an entire workday on the Friday of the rotation, [Walsh] was required to remain on call 24 hours a day from Friday evening until Monday morning when he would report to the employer’s work site for his ‘regular’ workday, without compensation,” the complaint alleges. “The technical support calls often came in past 11 o’clock at night.” And those calls, it seems, interfered with Walsh’s sleep. And for that he is seeking unspecified damages from Apple.

Lucky for him, Walsh doesn’t work in a Chinese iPod factory. …