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. …

IBM has come up with a novel response to

“In one swoop, everything I’ve worked for the last seven years is gone,” one employee wrote on a job board maintained by an IBM workers’ group called Alliance at IBM. “All the extra time and hours … have done nothing but give me a 15% pay cut.”

What an astonishingly cold move. More so, because it forces the employees IBM allegedly deprived of overtime pay to work overtime to compensate for their reduced salaries. And that’s assuming they can actually get overtime, which–as one employee told the Associated Press–IBM generally tries to keep to a minimum. “Anybody who’s been in IBM knows that when they look to cut costs, that’s where they’re going to cut it,” said the employee. “I was so angry I could hardly speak, and it takes a lot to make me angry. I just don’t know how IBM expects us to take this and just run with it.”