13 ms·

It's no more than indentured servitude - the prices they claim the training cost are often in the thousands of dollars, when the training is worth hardly a frac

It's no more than indentured servitude - the prices they claim the training cost are often in the thousands of dollars, when the training is worth hardly a fraction of that on the open market. Employees have no choice but to stay to avoid the usurious repayment penalty.

ugh123 4y ago
Apparently some of the training is specific to the shop. Not even a certification or license. I'd say thats pretty useless on the open market. Sounds scummy
gjsman-1000 4y ago
There are rare cases, it is worth remembering, where the training is extremely expensive (both in cost and in time before the employee is a contributing productive worker) and not available in the public market. To spend $10K or more on those early unproductive phases and then have them leave sucks.
- maxehmookau 4y ago
  Yeah, it does suck. Sometimes doing business sucks. Holding on to your employees against their will in return for money also sucks for everyone involved.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    I would argue a little bit contrary. Expensive training by the business is an investment in you. If you sign up for the training, you are telling the business that you will return their investment and benefit them. Thus, there is a degree to which leaving immediately after expensive training can be seen as theft. This might not gain much sympathy when talking of mega corporations, but consider 48% of US Jobs are for small businesses, where the theft of your training can be much more real. Edit: If I am a small business, imagine I had 10 employees. Training for a niche industry may be much more expensive because I can’t afford to have a standardized training program, and some employees have to be unproductive to teach the new employee how to be productive. Imagine this costs $8K, and then the employee leaves. Sucks. Now imagine 8 people in a row did this.
    - frumper 4y ago
      There is a reason they’re quitting. Could be the pay is low, or they don’t like the job. Maybe they aren’t very good at it after all. Throw in some sick parents they need to take care of and top it off with a manager that is awful to work for. Holding a financial gun to someone’s head isn’t a good way to handle this for anyone. What if someone gets fired, do they have to repay it?
      - gjsman-1000 4y ago
        If they knew the terms of the deal, knew the cost of their training, and agreed, it is exactly like if you joined college and changed your major in my eyes. You don’t get off the hook for those bills because you changed your mind, and you knew what you were getting into.
        PuppyTailWags 4y ago
        Changing a major doesn't occur financial penalties, and colleges also allow you to take extremely extended leaves (3+ months, aka a semester/quarter) for emergencies as a normal point of cause and your education credits don't expire for several years (I think a decade?) so if an emergency happens you can step away and return even years later with fairly minimal penalty academically. Credits aren't even charged if you quit early enough IIRC.
        stonemetal12 4y ago
        If you took out a loan to pay tuition, the loans don't disappear. Isn't this basically the same thing? The employer is loaning you the money to cover training with loan forgiveness for time worked.
        frumper 4y ago
        Schools are highly regulated. Loans are highly regulated. Education from colleges is accredited and held accountable to third party institutions. Employers training you then charging you isn't regulated at all. It's ripe for abuse and clearly abuse is taking place to the woman in the article.
  - leeroyjenkins11 4y ago
    You mean when the employee voluntarily agrees to the terms of the contract? I have seen when employees take advantage of job training and then immediately bounce when their contract expires for that. They used 6months of code camp training while being paid, and as soon as they could they left. If those contracts were not allowed, there wouldn't be a company willing to pay for that. When you sign a lease you usually can't break the lease without penalty.yes, if a company makes up the training costs for in house training, making it astronomical, then that seems like it'd be up for litigation.
    - deadbunny 4y ago
      I'm assuming* they all bounced as soon as they could because with their newly acquired skills they could go get vastly more money. I'm also assuming the employer refused to up their pay to "market rates" because, hey they invested in them, they should stick around (for below market rate) because we're all a big family and we invest in our family. * Assumption based on the exact scenario happening every fucking time
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Employees voluntarily agreeing to contracts means very little without a lot of context. Generally speaking the power differential between companies and employees is too great for any meaningful "voluntary" action on the part of employees.
      - zo1 4y ago
        Let's all not forget the most "voluntary" contract of all: the "social contract" between the lowly individual and the all-powerful state. Apparently there wasn't a power differential there, right? Purely consensual and I had full choice in not signing it.
        SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        Okay, but the social contract defends you from the violence of everyone else starting a few months before you're actually born. Sure, it might not be a great contract even given that, and I agree it should be easier to shop around the social contract you want (or that there should be the option not to have one a la seasteading). But given how much it provides before someone is able to understand the terms of a contract like that, it makes sense for it to be opt-in.
  - refurb 4y ago
    It's a contract. Don't sign it if you don't like the terms.
    - nucleogenesis 4y ago
      Of course - if you want to eat and have a house and make money and your options are limited due to the lack of any societal norm that people should be cared for and you weren’t privileged to have opportunities to or the the ability to develop skills that are worth money — then you should just be homeless instead of signing yourself into 10s of thousands of dollars of debt to a corporation. Or you should be grateful for the opportunity to be contractually enslaved?
      - refurb 4y ago
        Are you saying semi-skilled jobs are hard to come by? That the woman in the article that was a hairdresser couldn't possibly find another hairdressing job? The other example from the article was nursing. Nursing is in huge demand. That woman most certainly had other options. I worked in Europe. My contract said my company had to give me 3 months notice before quitting. And I had to give 3 months notice before quitting. If I didn't, I had to pay the company the equivalent of 1 months salary for each month of notice I didn't give. So if I just up and quit, I'd have to pay 3 months salary. Was I a "indentured servant" too?
        Buttons840 4y ago
        > Nursing is in huge demand. That woman most certainly had other options. Part of the problem is the people creating the contracts are perfectly willing to place the burden on existing nurses and allow patients to suffer. Even when already short staffed, hospitals are not under much pressure to renegotiate a contract.
        AlexandrB 4y ago
        > And I had to give 3 months notice before quitting. That's pretty crazy. So if you apply to a new job you have to tell them: "I can start 3 months from now, no sooner"? Edit: This kind of clause seems so counter-productive to the employer. If I was forced to give 3 months notice, I'd be checked out for 2/3+ of that time. What are they going to do? Fire me?
- karpierz 4y ago
  It does suck. It's also the nature of business, speculative investment. Sometimes you invest capital in something and don't see returns. If you want the employee to own the capital costs, then they better see capital returns as well.
  - noir_lord 4y ago
    But what is capitalism for if I'm not guaranteed a profit (says every large corporation)? You are right though in that's its just another way to socialise the costs and privatise the profits.
  - gruez 4y ago
    > It does suck. It's also the nature of business, speculative investment. Sometimes you invest capital in something and don't see returns. By this logic, should the government also stop helping banks collect debts (eg. garnishing wages or seizing property)? After all, lending is also a "speculative investment" and "Sometimes you invest capital in something and don't see returns".
    - nonameiguess 4y ago
      Failing to pay a debt is illegal. Quitting a job is a fundamental requirement of freely competitive labor markets that the social benefits of capitalism are predicated on.
      - gruez 4y ago
        >Failing to pay a debt is illegal. okay but how is that relevant to this discussion? if the state refuses to assist in debt collection, it effectively makes failing to pay debts legal, which seems to be what you want?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - picsao 4y ago
- michael_miller 4y ago
  To give a specific example in this case.. a type rating to fly a Gulfstream business jet is on the order of $100,000. If a pilot works for a few months and quits, the employer is out a pretty significant chunk of change. An alternative arrangement to direct employment is that the pilot could pay for his/her own type rating, and work as a contract pilot. But that requires having $100k to plunk down, and taking the risk that the job market will be strong after the type rating. In this case, the employee may prefer the "indentured servitude" route versus having to front 6 figures to get their own type rating.
  - kritiko 4y ago
    Where would the pilot be going in this example? Presumably to fly other planes, so even if the employer eats the cost of training, they're supporting the overall job market for pilots. If the pilot is unable to work because of disability, conviction, etc., they're 6 figures in the hole and unable to use the training to get out. Seems like a pretty bad deal.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      Tell me about it. My wife attended ERAU to get this training and got a permanent medical disqualification about a year after graduating.
  - scrapcode 4y ago
    Contracts that include the employer footing the bill for professional (transferable) licensure are an entirely different thing than discussed in this article, and I think it's reasonable to have some kind of agreement. Even then, I'm not sure I feel sorry for the employer if something like this were to happen as the requirement to even provide this training would be due to market requirements. Many pilots spend a large chunk of their lives paying for their own training and working underpaid jobs (banner tow, instructing) just because it allows them seat time without it deducting from their bank account. Of course many other factors would sway my opinion of the matter into different directions. Who made the decision to change the fleet to Gulfstream multi-engine jets versus single-engine, or from flying cargo to adding the option to carry passengers, etc. Was the pilot already part of the company when these new qualification requirements were added, etc?
- PaywallBuster 4y ago
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Yeah it sucks. For corporations. How about for the actual human employees? Does it not suck to have to stay at a job because paying for training would be too much? Rules should help humans not corporations .
- rdtwo 4y ago
  I mean training employees is always expensive. If you create an environment where they quit after 2 months then you probably need to fix that. While indentured servitude is a solution it’s not one we should have to entertain
  - ticviking 4y ago
    Paying market wages for those skills and having predictable schedules goes a long way to improving retention.
- picsao 4y ago
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  Sure. But employees pay the costs of these sorts of inconveniences all the time too. Especially in fire-at-will US states.
sidewndr46 4y ago
I took a cash payment for relocation once that I'd have to pay back if I left in a year. The total value was around $3000. It paid my relocation expenses and then a little bit, so that was good. A bunch of other new hires at that time took a "relocation package" where the company managed everything, including paying the moving company. The total cost to relocate just one individual was supposedly something like $20000. They were liable for that amount if they quit in the first year. This was the point in my career I decided I would never sign anything that left me liable for a bill I can't negotiate.
- Kirby64 4y ago
  Depending on the individual and how much stuff they have, full service relocation can be $20k or even more. Usually that means a full move-and-pack of a multi-person household (say, a 3br house with 3 kids), moving of vehicles, and marketing/sales of a house. Plus temporary housing at new location, and assistance buying a house. For context, I had a full move-and-pack for a one bedroom apartment (no temp housing, nothing extra, just the moving service) between two cities ~300mi away and total cost was $6k. Now, it was totally worth it, since I literally did not do any packing what-so-ever. They showed up to a fully furnished apartment with stuff in cabinets/bookshelves, and ~24 hours later they dropped off boxes of stuff and all my furniture in my new location. This type of relo is much less common these days though, due to rules changes regarding reimbursement for relocation expenses. I think most companies prefer lump sum payments now, since you can't deduct ANYTHING for moving expenses. If a company does provide you $20k in relocation coverage (even if you never see the money), you're now on the hook for an extra $20k in 'income' which you have to pay taxes on.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Are there companies that offer those sorts of “all included” services to people? I’ve been trying to convince my wife to move because our house is too big, and we have tons of value in it, but she doesn’t want the work (understandably).
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    Is that Federal income you're referring to? I'd assume individual states would not count that as income, otherwise they'd be concerned that employers could not relocate employees to their state.
toss1 4y ago
Yup, attempting to re-implement indentured servitude is accurate. And then managers wonder why phenomena arise like "Quiet Quitting" and "Let It Rot". Evidently, very few people think past the intended results of their actions to the secondary or knock-on effects, which can be far more significant.
samatman 4y ago
If the contract is reasonably symmetric, which it generally is not for this kind of scam, there isn't a problem. Example: a company hires someone, expecting at least a year of labor, two weeks of training. Training cost is amortized across the year if the employee leaves early, the company is obliged to employ the employee for that full year unless terminated with cause. The scam is to pretend the training has some absurd value relative to the wage, then hold it over the employee to retain their labor, while reserving the right to lay them off whenever it's convenient. Hey, training is on us, you're welcome! That such arrangements constitute indentured servitude was decided by the Supreme Court in the 19th century. It's no different from the company store.
routerl 4y ago
This is due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. When efficiency gains mean that a business's main costs are labor, then attempts to increase profit will be focused on cutting labor costs. It would be hard to get away with actually decreasing wages and salaries, so they get effectively frozen against rising efficiency and inflation (which we've seen happening for the last 40 years). But soon this becomes the new ceiling, and labor costs must keep getting cut, otherwise profits don't increase (at the expected rate). That's when we start seeing the laborer take on the costs of working: transportation, uniforms, training, etc. Did you know that car mechanics have to buy their own tools? Can you imagine developing software and having to bring your own computer and devices? Having to own the latest iPhone just to test on, because the company won't provide it but expects iOS compatibility? This is why labor rights organizations matter. Employers are guided by a very simple algorithm, whose total application to all job markets leads to the immiseration of all people who have to work for a living. This is also why solidarity matters: when we are in a position to make demands of employers, we are morally obligated to make demands also in the name of those employees who are powerless. First they came for the blue-collars, but I didn't care because my collar was white. Next they came for the wage workers, but I didn't care because I had a salary. When they finally came for me, there was no one else left to care.
- akomtu 4y ago
  My simplistic mental model of our society is the motion of celestial bodies under the force of greed. The upside is that greed keeps things in motion. The downside is that eventually those thing tend to form big clumps that pull the surrounding matter at the rate proportional to the size of the clump. The anti-trust laws are supposed to be intelligent forces that break up such clumps. There is, probably, an equivalent of the black hole: an indestructible organisation with such force of greed that nothing can escape it; in practice it would be some unholy union of state and business, a corporation that writes laws for itself, has an army and doesn't answer to anyone.
  - routerl 4y ago
    > it would be some unholy union of state and business, a corporation that writes laws for itself, has an army and doesn't answer to anyone. William Gibson liked the term "Zaibatsu"[0]. See also the textbook definitions of "neoliberalism", and "fascism". [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
heh, I'd be completely ok supplying my own equipment, but they'd have to accept that they have no say in what goes on it. They pay for the privilege of being able to run antivirus on my workstation.

ugh123 4y ago

Apparently some of the training is specific to the shop. Not even a certification or license. I'd say thats pretty useless on the open market. Sounds scummy

gjsman-1000 4y ago

There are rare cases, it is worth remembering, where the training is extremely expensive (both in cost and in time before the employee is a contributing productive worker) and not available in the public market. To spend $10K or more on those early unproductive phases and then have them leave sucks.

maxehmookau 4y ago
Yeah, it does suck. Sometimes doing business sucks. Holding on to your employees against their will in return for money also sucks for everyone involved.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I would argue a little bit contrary. Expensive training by the business is an investment in you. If you sign up for the training, you are telling the business that you will return their investment and benefit them. Thus, there is a degree to which leaving immediately after expensive training can be seen as theft. This might not gain much sympathy when talking of mega corporations, but consider 48% of US Jobs are for small businesses, where the theft of your training can be much more real. Edit: If I am a small business, imagine I had 10 employees. Training for a niche industry may be much more expensive because I can’t afford to have a standardized training program, and some employees have to be unproductive to teach the new employee how to be productive. Imagine this costs $8K, and then the employee leaves. Sucks. Now imagine 8 people in a row did this.
  - frumper 4y ago
    There is a reason they’re quitting. Could be the pay is low, or they don’t like the job. Maybe they aren’t very good at it after all. Throw in some sick parents they need to take care of and top it off with a manager that is awful to work for. Holding a financial gun to someone’s head isn’t a good way to handle this for anyone. What if someone gets fired, do they have to repay it?
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      If they knew the terms of the deal, knew the cost of their training, and agreed, it is exactly like if you joined college and changed your major in my eyes. You don’t get off the hook for those bills because you changed your mind, and you knew what you were getting into.
      - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
        Changing a major doesn't occur financial penalties, and colleges also allow you to take extremely extended leaves (3+ months, aka a semester/quarter) for emergencies as a normal point of cause and your education credits don't expire for several years (I think a decade?) so if an emergency happens you can step away and return even years later with fairly minimal penalty academically. Credits aren't even charged if you quit early enough IIRC.
        stonemetal12 4y ago
        If you took out a loan to pay tuition, the loans don't disappear. Isn't this basically the same thing? The employer is loaning you the money to cover training with loan forgiveness for time worked.
        frumper 4y ago
        Schools are highly regulated. Loans are highly regulated. Education from colleges is accredited and held accountable to third party institutions. Employers training you then charging you isn't regulated at all. It's ripe for abuse and clearly abuse is taking place to the woman in the article.
- leeroyjenkins11 4y ago
  You mean when the employee voluntarily agrees to the terms of the contract? I have seen when employees take advantage of job training and then immediately bounce when their contract expires for that. They used 6months of code camp training while being paid, and as soon as they could they left. If those contracts were not allowed, there wouldn't be a company willing to pay for that. When you sign a lease you usually can't break the lease without penalty.yes, if a company makes up the training costs for in house training, making it astronomical, then that seems like it'd be up for litigation.
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    I'm assuming* they all bounced as soon as they could because with their newly acquired skills they could go get vastly more money. I'm also assuming the employer refused to up their pay to "market rates" because, hey they invested in them, they should stick around (for below market rate) because we're all a big family and we invest in our family. * Assumption based on the exact scenario happening every fucking time
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Employees voluntarily agreeing to contracts means very little without a lot of context. Generally speaking the power differential between companies and employees is too great for any meaningful "voluntary" action on the part of employees.
    - zo1 4y ago
      Let's all not forget the most "voluntary" contract of all: the "social contract" between the lowly individual and the all-powerful state. Apparently there wasn't a power differential there, right? Purely consensual and I had full choice in not signing it.
      - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        Okay, but the social contract defends you from the violence of everyone else starting a few months before you're actually born. Sure, it might not be a great contract even given that, and I agree it should be easier to shop around the social contract you want (or that there should be the option not to have one a la seasteading). But given how much it provides before someone is able to understand the terms of a contract like that, it makes sense for it to be opt-in.
- refurb 4y ago
  It's a contract. Don't sign it if you don't like the terms.
  - nucleogenesis 4y ago
    Of course - if you want to eat and have a house and make money and your options are limited due to the lack of any societal norm that people should be cared for and you weren’t privileged to have opportunities to or the the ability to develop skills that are worth money — then you should just be homeless instead of signing yourself into 10s of thousands of dollars of debt to a corporation. Or you should be grateful for the opportunity to be contractually enslaved?
    - refurb 4y ago
      Are you saying semi-skilled jobs are hard to come by? That the woman in the article that was a hairdresser couldn't possibly find another hairdressing job? The other example from the article was nursing. Nursing is in huge demand. That woman most certainly had other options. I worked in Europe. My contract said my company had to give me 3 months notice before quitting. And I had to give 3 months notice before quitting. If I didn't, I had to pay the company the equivalent of 1 months salary for each month of notice I didn't give. So if I just up and quit, I'd have to pay 3 months salary. Was I a "indentured servant" too?
      - Buttons840 4y ago
        > Nursing is in huge demand. That woman most certainly had other options. Part of the problem is the people creating the contracts are perfectly willing to place the burden on existing nurses and allow patients to suffer. Even when already short staffed, hospitals are not under much pressure to renegotiate a contract.
      - AlexandrB 4y ago
        > And I had to give 3 months notice before quitting. That's pretty crazy. So if you apply to a new job you have to tell them: "I can start 3 months from now, no sooner"? Edit: This kind of clause seems so counter-productive to the employer. If I was forced to give 3 months notice, I'd be checked out for 2/3+ of that time. What are they going to do? Fire me?
karpierz 4y ago
It does suck. It's also the nature of business, speculative investment. Sometimes you invest capital in something and don't see returns. If you want the employee to own the capital costs, then they better see capital returns as well.
- noir_lord 4y ago
  But what is capitalism for if I'm not guaranteed a profit (says every large corporation)? You are right though in that's its just another way to socialise the costs and privatise the profits.
- gruez 4y ago
  > It does suck. It's also the nature of business, speculative investment. Sometimes you invest capital in something and don't see returns. By this logic, should the government also stop helping banks collect debts (eg. garnishing wages or seizing property)? After all, lending is also a "speculative investment" and "Sometimes you invest capital in something and don't see returns".
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    Failing to pay a debt is illegal. Quitting a job is a fundamental requirement of freely competitive labor markets that the social benefits of capitalism are predicated on.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >Failing to pay a debt is illegal. okay but how is that relevant to this discussion? if the state refuses to assist in debt collection, it effectively makes failing to pay debts legal, which seems to be what you want?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - picsao 4y ago
michael_miller 4y ago
To give a specific example in this case.. a type rating to fly a Gulfstream business jet is on the order of $100,000. If a pilot works for a few months and quits, the employer is out a pretty significant chunk of change. An alternative arrangement to direct employment is that the pilot could pay for his/her own type rating, and work as a contract pilot. But that requires having $100k to plunk down, and taking the risk that the job market will be strong after the type rating. In this case, the employee may prefer the "indentured servitude" route versus having to front 6 figures to get their own type rating.
- kritiko 4y ago
  Where would the pilot be going in this example? Presumably to fly other planes, so even if the employer eats the cost of training, they're supporting the overall job market for pilots. If the pilot is unable to work because of disability, conviction, etc., they're 6 figures in the hole and unable to use the training to get out. Seems like a pretty bad deal.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    Tell me about it. My wife attended ERAU to get this training and got a permanent medical disqualification about a year after graduating.
- scrapcode 4y ago
  Contracts that include the employer footing the bill for professional (transferable) licensure are an entirely different thing than discussed in this article, and I think it's reasonable to have some kind of agreement. Even then, I'm not sure I feel sorry for the employer if something like this were to happen as the requirement to even provide this training would be due to market requirements. Many pilots spend a large chunk of their lives paying for their own training and working underpaid jobs (banner tow, instructing) just because it allows them seat time without it deducting from their bank account. Of course many other factors would sway my opinion of the matter into different directions. Who made the decision to change the fleet to Gulfstream multi-engine jets versus single-engine, or from flying cargo to adding the option to carry passengers, etc. Was the pilot already part of the company when these new qualification requirements were added, etc?
PaywallBuster 4y ago
skinnymuch 4y ago
Yeah it sucks. For corporations. How about for the actual human employees? Does it not suck to have to stay at a job because paying for training would be too much? Rules should help humans not corporations .
rdtwo 4y ago
I mean training employees is always expensive. If you create an environment where they quit after 2 months then you probably need to fix that. While indentured servitude is a solution it’s not one we should have to entertain
- ticviking 4y ago
  Paying market wages for those skills and having predictable schedules goes a long way to improving retention.
picsao 4y ago
jonnycomputer 4y ago
Sure. But employees pay the costs of these sorts of inconveniences all the time too. Especially in fire-at-will US states.

sidewndr46 4y ago

I took a cash payment for relocation once that I'd have to pay back if I left in a year. The total value was around $3000. It paid my relocation expenses and then a little bit, so that was good. A bunch of other new hires at that time took a "relocation package" where the company managed everything, including paying the moving company. The total cost to relocate just one individual was supposedly something like $20000. They were liable for that amount if they quit in the first year. This was the point in my career I decided I would never sign anything that left me liable for a bill I can't negotiate.

Kirby64 4y ago
Depending on the individual and how much stuff they have, full service relocation can be $20k or even more. Usually that means a full move-and-pack of a multi-person household (say, a 3br house with 3 kids), moving of vehicles, and marketing/sales of a house. Plus temporary housing at new location, and assistance buying a house. For context, I had a full move-and-pack for a one bedroom apartment (no temp housing, nothing extra, just the moving service) between two cities ~300mi away and total cost was $6k. Now, it was totally worth it, since I literally did not do any packing what-so-ever. They showed up to a fully furnished apartment with stuff in cabinets/bookshelves, and ~24 hours later they dropped off boxes of stuff and all my furniture in my new location. This type of relo is much less common these days though, due to rules changes regarding reimbursement for relocation expenses. I think most companies prefer lump sum payments now, since you can't deduct ANYTHING for moving expenses. If a company does provide you $20k in relocation coverage (even if you never see the money), you're now on the hook for an extra $20k in 'income' which you have to pay taxes on.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Are there companies that offer those sorts of “all included” services to people? I’ve been trying to convince my wife to move because our house is too big, and we have tons of value in it, but she doesn’t want the work (understandably).
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Is that Federal income you're referring to? I'd assume individual states would not count that as income, otherwise they'd be concerned that employers could not relocate employees to their state.

toss1 4y ago

Yup, attempting to re-implement indentured servitude is accurate. And then managers wonder why phenomena arise like "Quiet Quitting" and "Let It Rot". Evidently, very few people think past the intended results of their actions to the secondary or knock-on effects, which can be far more significant.

samatman 4y ago

If the contract is reasonably symmetric, which it generally is not for this kind of scam, there isn't a problem. Example: a company hires someone, expecting at least a year of labor, two weeks of training. Training cost is amortized across the year if the employee leaves early, the company is obliged to employ the employee for that full year unless terminated with cause. The scam is to pretend the training has some absurd value relative to the wage, then hold it over the employee to retain their labor, while reserving the right to lay them off whenever it's convenient. Hey, training is on us, you're welcome! That such arrangements constitute indentured servitude was decided by the Supreme Court in the 19th century. It's no different from the company store.

routerl 4y ago

This is due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. When efficiency gains mean that a business's main costs are labor, then attempts to increase profit will be focused on cutting labor costs. It would be hard to get away with actually decreasing wages and salaries, so they get effectively frozen against rising efficiency and inflation (which we've seen happening for the last 40 years). But soon this becomes the new ceiling, and labor costs must keep getting cut, otherwise profits don't increase (at the expected rate). That's when we start seeing the laborer take on the costs of working: transportation, uniforms, training, etc. Did you know that car mechanics have to buy their own tools? Can you imagine developing software and having to bring your own computer and devices? Having to own the latest iPhone just to test on, because the company won't provide it but expects iOS compatibility? This is why labor rights organizations matter. Employers are guided by a very simple algorithm, whose total application to all job markets leads to the immiseration of all people who have to work for a living. This is also why solidarity matters: when we are in a position to make demands of employers, we are morally obligated to make demands also in the name of those employees who are powerless. First they came for the blue-collars, but I didn't care because my collar was white. Next they came for the wage workers, but I didn't care because I had a salary. When they finally came for me, there was no one else left to care.

akomtu 4y ago
My simplistic mental model of our society is the motion of celestial bodies under the force of greed. The upside is that greed keeps things in motion. The downside is that eventually those thing tend to form big clumps that pull the surrounding matter at the rate proportional to the size of the clump. The anti-trust laws are supposed to be intelligent forces that break up such clumps. There is, probably, an equivalent of the black hole: an indestructible organisation with such force of greed that nothing can escape it; in practice it would be some unholy union of state and business, a corporation that writes laws for itself, has an army and doesn't answer to anyone.
- routerl 4y ago
  > it would be some unholy union of state and business, a corporation that writes laws for itself, has an army and doesn't answer to anyone. William Gibson liked the term "Zaibatsu"[0]. See also the textbook definitions of "neoliberalism", and "fascism". [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

heh, I'd be completely ok supplying my own equipment, but they'd have to accept that they have no say in what goes on it. They pay for the privilege of being able to run antivirus on my workstation.