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.
Fuck. That. Noise.
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
Until they reach a certain age anyway
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.
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.
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.
how do we keep people working for us? Shall we pay them better? Nah we will just coerce them.
They can’t take what you don’t have.
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
I’m certain that hiring managers would view reading the entire employment contract a major red flag.
Me, before I read the article: this is nothing unusual, and I don’t see what the problem is. My employers have paid for some pretty advanced training over the years. In return, they asked me to agree to stay for six months. NBD…
Me, after the article: HOLY FUCKING SHIT!
This shift has also opened the door to a new industrial complex of employer-run, for-profit training sites and academies, which many workers are steered into when they’re hired for a job. Critics say employers now use these job training programs to force workers into debt and suppress wages, courtesy of TRAP contracts.
This is heading into Company Town territory. Seriously predatory shit.
This is heading into Company Town territory. Seriously predatory shit.
More like indentured servitude, or semi-voluntary slavery, as 1990s school books liked to sell it.
All they have left is rent seeking, even hiring an employee has to be part of some ponzi scheme
Because number must always go up. Must find new means of extraction.
Maybe if you have good deals in the company store it could be nice, right?
The gross part is that company scrip is still technically legal, as long as they pay at least minimum wage in USD. Like they can advertise a $700 per hour job… And only $7.25 is in USD, the remaining $692.75 is in company scrip. And they’ll claim that their scrip is valuable (and more convenient) to the employees, but a loaf of bread in the company store costs $1400.
I hope the company store sells cheap rent!
The only thing cheap at a company store are the laborers.
Like maybe raise all prices of the largest brick and mortar store and then offer employee discounts…
Yep. “New” is propagandist phrasing.
Ah so slavery, the wonders of capitalism
Here’s a few tricks that will ensure your employees can NEVER leave, you will save a ton on turnover.
- Pay above market
- Treat employees with respect, engrain this culture in your management
- Offer good benefits options
- Ensure there are long-term opportunities for career growth at all levels
- Communicate routinely from the upper management to the whole organization. Create opportunities for people to provide feedback in small groups
- Never even consider making employees liable for training you encouraged them to do. Fire anyone who suggests you write something so insane into a contract immediately
There are still companies out there where the primary way people leave is via retirement. They are profitable and productive companies. Employees want to leave immediately after getting trainings because turnover has become the dominant culture in large companies.
Can confirm high pay works.
My job is shit, most of the stuff is broken, but on weekends I get $45 AUD an hour so I bitch about it instead of quitting. I’m not getting that pay elsewhere, especially not locally.
Same, I routinely get called out to fuck around on rooftops working on HVAC equipment either when it is -20F at midnight in the dead of winter or 100F with 80% humidity in the middle of summer (those are the only times HVAC equipment goes down). But if its an emergency call out then I make $50 USD per hour drive time included which is damn good for my low cost of living area so I am more than happy to do it.
If you pay well enough then you will find people willing to put up with the absolute worst work conditions. If companies want to keep people then they either need to make the work conditions better or pay more. It’s that simple. If you can’t make the conditions better then you need to increase the pay to account for that.
People don’t quit bad jobs; They quit bad pay and bad management. There are people whose job is to pump shit. Literally roll a shit-sucker truck up to a site, pump a bunch of shit out of a hole, (porta-potty, septic tank, outhouse, etc), drive the shit truck all the way across town, and reverse the shit-sucking process to blow all of the shit out of the truck at a waste treatment plant.
It’s a really fucking bad job… You need to have a strong stomach, and you’ll go home smelling like literal shit every single day. But people still wake up and choose to do it every day, because it pays well and management typically stays out of their hair.
Smelling like shit is a perk if it keeps middle management away.
No. Indentured servitude, slavery, debt and a police state is what you get.
Some C-suite asshole really thought they were clever shoehorning that “TRAP” acronym in there. These people are just sociopathic children with too much money and power.
They make good fertilizer, though, and there is that whole pesky “world hunger” things still going on. 🤷🏼♂️
sociopaths are very effective at capturing positions of power, but pretty terrible at actually doing anything productive with it
