Training repayment agreement provisions (TRAPs),are a new form of “stay-or-pay” contract that indebts employees to their bosses. Often inserted into contracts without workers’ knowledge, these restrictive labor covenants turn employer-sponsored job training and education programs into conditional loans that must be paid back — sometimes at a premium — if employees leave before a set date.
Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees who decide to leave the company prematurely. But these contracts have come under fire from labor groups and regulators. Oftentimes, the amount of debt demanded under TRAP contracts — which can be upward of $50,000 — is far higher than the employer’s training costs.
SLAVERY, WITH EXTRA STEPS.
Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees
Uhhh, don’t the employers get to keep all the profit from the employee’s productivity because their role is to take financial risks to reap the rewards?
And the employees just get their paycheck because they are just selling their time to the employer and not participating in the risk vs reward?
This is just the 37th consecutive flavor of socialize the losses, privatize the profits.
Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees who decide to leave the company prematurely.
Employers can go fuck themselves. You’re recouped on those training costs when the people that receive that training become better at their jobs and make the stupid number go up. If employers want to treat people like fucking investments, they need to learn the risk of losing money on their investments.
If employers want to treat people like fucking investments
They might say they want to do that, but it’s been pretty clear for a long time that what they (at least the conservatively-minded ones) want is to treat people like property.
It’s also become very clear for a long time that they’ve considered the idea of losing money or making less than they imagined on an investment to be an unacceptable failure of the system
Back when I was first trying to get a job in the programming world (in the mid-90s), I submitted my resume to a supposed job-finding company named SearchMasters. When I went to interview with them, I learned that their fee was 33% of your salary for your first six months on the job. This was clearly insane, but it got even worse: if you quit the job or were fired before the six months was up, you were immediately liable to pay SearchMasters the remainder of what their fee would have been in its entirety. I told the dude (an obvious steroid user squeezed into a garish tight suit) “I thought indentured servitude was illegal” and at one point I found myself trying to extract my resume from under his arm while he was alpha-male glowering at me while leaning on it with his full weight.
I dealt with a lot of headhunting firms in my first few years of working and it’s a scummy industry, but SearchMasters put them all to absolute shame. And this was a big room with like 30 agents working in it, so there must have been thousands of poor bastards that had fallen for their bullshit, just in my city alone.
Edit: I mis-remembered this. The fee was 33% for the first year, but you were only on the hook for six months of that if you quit before the six months was up.
Classic indentured servitude.
Yeah like thats literally the method that was used for indentured servitude. Like the Irish still make it their whole point of how they were also slaves by that metric.
Holy crap at the things we are bringing back to appease rich people.
Shit. They used to do this a lot in my industry. You’d not get paid during training, or you’d sign a contract that if you succeeded training you’d be required to work for that employer usually for two years. If you left before the time was up, you owed the employer whatever pro-rated time you had remaining vs the stated cost of your training. Was still happening with signing bonuses recently.
I used to live in Tucson Arizona which for a time was like the call center capital of the US. there were SO MANY call centers there that they would hire literally anyone with a pulse. if you quit one you could quite literally go back a few months later and get your job back because the turn over was just so massive. And they all had paid like 2 week training.
So you can see where this is going and how exploitable it was. This was the early 00’s and me and a friend of mine being broke 20 year olds decided to do just that. We wanted to get paid to literally just sit there, not answer phones, nothing. just get paid for doing nothing. So we’d both go to one call center, get hired, do the 2 week training, get paid, quit, go to the next call center, repeat. Eventually once you made the first round of all the call centers you could literally just start the chain over again because by that point enough time had passed that the first call center would hire you again. We did this for like a solid year. Just get paid to sit there and listen to a dude talk.
The only reason we stopped doing it was because it was SO boring.
Hah, at that point you could’ve gotten hired on as a trainer, a better pay, and never had to answer a phone.
Just in case anyone missed this gem from a few months ago: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/dont-tell-me-this-is-a-functional-country Case example for emts getting the same treatment.
When I was working as an EMT for a private company, we spent 30 minutes getting a patient to the ER following a stroke. This was one of the very rare times when that short window kept that dude alive (The overwhelming majority of people going to the hospital are not actually dying. Not even all stroke patients, or even most stroke patients.). I have no idea what that guy paid us, but I was making $9.50/hour, so I banked $4.75.
Two patients later I had offset the cost of my fast-food dinner. /s
how do we keep people working for us? Shall we pay them better? Nah we will just coerce them.
I’m certain that hiring managers would view reading the entire employment contract a major red flag.
This is called indentured servitude
Ah so slavery, the wonders of capitalism
Fuck. That. Noise.
Until they reach a certain age anyway
When I first watched the show “Continuum” 2012-2015 I thought yeah, this is a good message to get us back on the right track. However the life debt part of it is a little over the top. No way that kind of shit can happen in real life. For fucks sake.
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