Maybe 5 or 10 years ago there was a lawsuit brought by technical staff at the 3M Company. If memory serves, it went like this: 3M advertised in its recruiting efforts that they value technical staff like they do business staff, and that therefore they paid them equally well. They would not put technologists at a financial disadvantage for choosing “molecules over meetings”, to use their phrase.
However, somebody discovered that 3M was doing the opposite. There were various slush funds and other somewhat hidden mechanisms for giving more money to people that chose the management career track relative to otherwise similar people who chose the technology track.
While this is true at most companies (and while I have accustomed myself to think that we technical people sacrifice alot of money for the privelege of doing technical work), most companies don’t put it in writing in their recruiting literature. As a result, 3M left themselves open to a lawsuit, which is what they got. Several of their senior technical staff sued them.
I last heard about this in the press when it was going on, and then the story disappeared. I wondered if the technologists sold out for some settlement, or what.
Does anybody know?
And if I remembered the story wrong, somebody please correct me!
The beef being that they were lied to when they were hired. Of course, since it is “hidden” (as the OP says), then perhaps there’s no legal leg to stand on.
“The Minnesota Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by two 3M scientists who claimed the Maplewood company reneged on its promise to compensate and promote technical staff in the same manner as it did managers. John Martens and Gerald Niles sued 3M in 1998, alleging the company underpaid them by at least $100,000 a year. The high court ruled that 3M documents referring to the pay plan in question do not constitute binding contracts that would entitle technical employees to the same pay and promotion opportunities as managers. The ruling, which reversed an earlier decision by the Minnesota Court of Appeals, effectively ended the suit. Martens and Niles continue to work at 3M.”
>“Sold out”? If you sue somebody to get money, and they give you money, that’s selling out?
>If you sue somebody to get a policy changed and also collect damages and then you only take the money, you have sold out.
Well. Actually, getting a policy changed is, in this case, getting them to give you some (more) money, or perhaps getting them to give the managers less (a pretty unlikely outcome).
>So what was the beef?
Weren’t they amply paid for their services?
The beef was that they chose to become 3M technologists under certain conditions including the advertised promise they’d be paid as much as the managers. Giving them less than they were promised might or might not be ample by various measures but it certainly disadvantages them relative to what both sides agreed earlier was fair. They might have switched to the management track and gotten more, or chosen another employer, but by lying about an agreement 3M denied them a meaningful choice. If someone hired you to do a job for $100, and you do it, and he acknowledges you did it per the agreement, and he then gives you only $80, do you have a valid complaint? Or should we all renegotiate your price now that you can’t take the work back?
>“3M documents referring to the pay plan in question do not constitute binding contracts”
Somehow it would be more comforting to hear that the court at least required 3M to note on its recruitment literature that they are lying about their pay plan in a way that disadvantages job applicants.