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The Work Number: credit score but for your employment history – by Equifax
- cultofmetatron 1mo agoI see no way this could go wrong at all.
- eru 1mo agoSeems like a souped up credit score? With pretty much all the pros and cons of that existing system.
- ventana 1mo agoExcept in the credit report they only list your lenders and how much money you owe, and your payment history, and it's technically possible to not get any credit and have no information, or at least no recent information, in your credit report. In The Work Number, they not only list your employers, but also all your paychecks, and it's hardly possible to opt out.
- JohnMakin 1mo agoMany credit reports contain work history.
- ventana 1mo agoOut of my 3 big tech employers, only one reported just a fact of my employment with them to the credit report, but all three reported everything to The Work Number.
- HPsquared 1mo agoOnly fair if they also tell the candidate what the company pays other workers in similar roles. Transparency shouldn't go only one way.
- eru 1mo agoI think in the US workers' rights to talk about salaries is already protected by law.
- smolder 1mo agoYou can't mention that there are pros and cons and not mention that the cons vastly outweigh the pros, with any credibility.
- throwawayqqq11 1mo agoThere are pros for employers, they can hire based on whether a candidate has been punished by other employers before and keep punishing them based on an objective social credit system. And there are cons.
- eru 1mo agoI already don't like what I hear about standard American credit scores (but I don't live in the US anyway.) This seems mostly like more of the same.
- charlieyu1 1mo agoShould not be legal.
- rustcleaner 1mo agoNo, it shouldn't be. I agree with you.
- ventana 1mo agoWhen you apply for a software job in the US and go through a background check, most of your former employments are verified through The Work Number. As an employee, I'm not aware of a way to opt out of this data collection, and I assume if there is a way, it will surely make the future background check harder. Now that they allow to look at your personal report, I went ahead, registered and requested a copy. This is just wow. First of all, I noticed that American Express casually requests my report a few times per year. Well, I guess, if I lose my job, they will know soon! Besides Amex, the only other requests were the background checks when I actually applied for jobs, so everything else is fine. But you know what else is there? All my fucking paychecks for all companies I used to work for here in the US. Nowhere in my employment agreements I did explicitly agree to my paycheck information to be transferred to Equifax, and yet, here we go. Looking forward for the moment when all this data is leaked, because, you know, Equifax has some history [1]. [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-settlement https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-...
- lotsofpulp 1mo ago>Nowhere in my employment agreements I did explicitly agree to my paycheck information to be transferred to Equifax, and yet, here we go. Nowhere in US law does it say your employer has to keep any of that information private.
- ventana 1mo agoSure, not all good laws are given. Must take a good public campaign or maybe a big leak for the law like that to appear. I would think California will be one of the first states to adopt a law like that, similar to how they now forbid to ask about your current salary when interviewing you for a job [1]. [1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB168 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
- lotsofpulp 1mo agoI am a fan of Norways laws to make all tax returns public. Transparency is the best disinfectant. Plus, now that job listings have to show pay range in many states (including California), it’s not too difficult to now figure out a likely annual payrate for someone.
- sschueller 1mo agoI guess you don't need to be an authoritarian country. Just capitalist with no regulation...
- alansaber 1mo agoState consolidates power or a few megacorps. Unfortunately the middle ground (approximate balance of power) is always tenuous
- rustcleaner 1mo agoBig banks growing up around a central bank is not capitalism, it's financialism. Mandate that any fresh new currency be apportioned and distributed to only living citizens, and a capitalism becomes possible again. As it stands now it's the money printers, and those adjacent, who hold the power. Giving everyone fresh currency, and taxing those of significant wealth to sop up inflation (corporations and individuals), is how business entities get forced into serving the people again. As it stands now they serve those who have the ability to leverage the printing press, and that's not you or I. Addendum: finance is not capital. Capital is the structures used to produce goods. Finance in our system is contractual trickery used to represent capital. To pull from Baudrillard: if capital is the land, finance is the map.
- squigz 1mo ago> Mandate that any fresh new currency be apportioned and distributed to only living citizens > Giving everyone fresh currency, and taxing those of significant wealth to sop up inflation (corporations and individuals), is how business entities get forced into serving the people again. This doesn't really sound like capitalism, mate.
- eru 1mo agoI don't agree with the mate's weird ideas, but capitalism is fairly adaptable and works reasonable well even in fairly weird systems. Have a look at eg Germany's social market economy.
- northernsausage 1mo agoWhat is your S̶o̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ C̶r̶e̶d̶i̶t̶ Work Number score?
- Liftyee 1mo agoThe US is rapidly catching up with China in the field of authoritarianism.
- alex_duf 1mo agoI'd call it dystopianism, this page reads like an episode of Black Mirror
- deadfoxygrandpa 1mo agochina doesnt have anything like this
- jmclnx 1mo agoChina has something I think is called "Social Credit Score". This seems to be another step towards that direction.
- bestouff 1mo agoTheir social credit score is the same thing as the US credit rating individuals are scored with.
- deadfoxygrandpa 1mo agothe social credit score is a score that businesses and business owners have/will have that unites different systems for rating how trustworthy their businesses are to work with
- handle584 1mo agoThey don't have private companies like Equifax collecting those because it is built into the government. At the minimum, new employee background check involved providing bank statement + social security contribution + income tax history.
- deadfoxygrandpa 1mo agothe us government has both. they have a record of your pay and employment history as well. i bet most governments do
- beardyw 1mo agoDystopian
- helpfulmandrill 1mo agoA vent: why is it any of your business why I had X months without work? Maybe I had enough money not to work for a bit and felt like doing something different. Why am I obligated to continuous labour even when I don't need it. Why am I subject to your judgement for not renting out my life at every possible moment?
- w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 1mo agoCorporations want obedient wage slaves, so if they find out that you may have some "Fuck you" money that you can use to stop working for them at your whim, they will avoid you.
- xnickb 1mo agoI understand what you're saying, but corporation is made of people. How is this communicated to my hiring manager and why do they agree to play this stupid game?
- ljm 1mo agoBecause hiring managers and HR have different incentives and it's therefore in their interest to play the game. See: every manager and CEO that gets a bonus from cutting down head count or keeping the hiring budget as low as possible.
- unified101 1mo agoIn complex systems, no one sits down and does this. It's the revealed preferences and aggregate outcome when budgeting decisions, or hiring decisions are made. It's the equivalent of stereotypes in organization behavior.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- HPsquared 1mo agoSimilarly, having a mortgage and dependants is seen as a "reliability plus point" let's say. Skin in the game.
- johnshades 1mo agoSome more background on this here… Equifax gets the data directly from America’s biggest companies https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and-the-work-number-database https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and...
- jacknews 1mo agoLike a slavery index? What if you spent 10 years building a business abroad? I remember early in my career being send by my employer on 'contract' assignments to other companies for 3 or 6 months. When I left that company and went interviewing, everyone was extremely concerned that I had been an independent contractor, some even saying they never employed such people. As though, once you've broken the chains, you're no longer employable.
- thomascountz 1mo agoBeing an American is so undignified—humiliating, even. I lived in what's known as a food desert. It was a place which required a car to get food. We drove on roads which crumbled and destroyed our car. The insurance (which we paid a pretty premium for) covered the fix. Lucky us! We found a garage, which took some time, but they scammed us. While we waited for the insurance to believe us, and we had no car, we tried to walk to get food. Technically, it was a 10 minute walk there, but the trucks (which were very large) made the 8-lane road impassible. We only realized this after trying. Our neighbors doorbell informed the police of this, and we were briefly detained for questions. It wasn't lost on me that the police's main suspicion was that we were homeless. Though not technically a crime, it is very incriminating. After our release, we asked an app to bring us food. It was a weekend, so there was an additional convenience fee. We also left a tip which "went directly to" pay for the human. We didn't hear them or see them, but the app told us the food had arrived and showed a picture of bags on a porch which wasn't ours. It was our neighbor's, whose doorbell had—once again—dispatched police for the intrusion. On Monday, we had no car to drive to the industrial park for work. The bus, which incidentally stopped on the other side of the 8-lane road, arrived once every 50 minutes, but must have had issues since it simply never arrived—though the app had no explanation for this. Nevermind, we called in "sick," which was laughable because being "sick" and taking a personal day were one in the same, but at least being "sick" avoided the shame of being desperate. We did eventually get our car back, not entirely the same, but we could at least move beyond the house again. The insurance app insists our case is settled, but we had to pay out of pocket (a credit card) and we needed reimbursed. We received a letter from the police not long after. A 300 USD fine for disorderly conduct in crossing the road. The date and time were wrong, but the social security number wasn't. We will take a sick day and go to court at 8:20AM next Thursday to appeal.
- ventana 1mo agoSuch places definitely exist, but it's a choice to live in a food desert vs live in a city with public transportation and walkability. There definitely exist cities in the US where you can live without a car. It's mostly a question of choosing how many square feet of personal space you want to have; it's not really technically possible to have a big house with a backyard, with all neighbors having the same, and being served by a good public transport at the same time.
- jwally 1mo agoI get the concept and use case - but equifax has a reputation on par with klan members and pedos...at least be self aware enough to know to conceal your true form! Phillip Morris became Altria or whatever. Plus, I can verify for employers that I am a real human with a real employment history snd I can prove it...by giving them my SSN and Mother's Maiden name? What stops a bad guy from speed rushing the dark web, registering these things en masse and selling access to DPRK?
- OptionOfT 1mo agoSeems like Gusto automatically publishes data to Equifax. It is also insane how much information the require for me to freeze MY information.