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.
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.
> Did you know that car mechanics have to buy their own tools?
A good set of Snap On wrenches are practically family heirlooms. My dad has a set from the 60s that he bought from a family friend, and they’re still going strong.
I personally wouldn’t mind doing BYOD, because I like investing in my own tools for my own purposes as well as employment. All the ceremony and corpware around “company data” is why I use company equipment.
These days you don't buy snap on for the quality, but for their ability to quickly service a warranty issue. Their tools have the same problems as everyone else's these days, and long gone are the times when they handily outperformed everyone else on durability, tolerances to spec, etc.
Just another reason to cherish those old tools, they literally don't make them like they used to.
The tools were significantly more expensive even as recently as the 90's, inflation adjusted, probably about 3x as much for hand tools on average. I couldn't say for power tools, as you are getting a lot of innovation that's hard to put a price on in that time frame, whereas with hand tools you are basically getting some decent alternatives in the realm of materials engineering with things like fiberglass, various coatigngs like cerakote, etc.
One other thing to mention is that there are companies that make hand tools that outperform snap-on handily these days, even if they struggle against some aged tools. If you are interested in an empirical look at this sort of analysis, side by side, Project Farm on Youtube has covered most hand tools by major brands at this point.
Also worth noting that while the ceiling on quality has lowered, the floor for most major manufacturers seems to have raised as well. A random modern hand tool is usually more likely to break the thing you are working against than to break itself, and I can't even remember the last time I've seen a hammer lose its head, a screwdriver tip get stripped out by a steel screw, a wrench snap at the neck, etc.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Snap-On, like most other tool manufacturers, and manufacturers of all kinds, has worked on reducing costs considerably over time. Part of that means manufacturing under contract, rather than in-house, as well as using techniques which reduce materials required to meet specifications.
One of the things about mechanics hand tools where this is a challenge is that mechanics regularly use tools for purposes outside the specifications, because you need to get the job done, regardless of what happens to currently be in your toolbox. In the past, because tools were overbuilt, this wasn't an issue. For modern tools, they are much tighter in tolerance to their specifications, both in good and bad ways. A simple way to tell is simply weigh the tools, due to techniques like CAD modeling with FEA, you can reduce the materials needed to achieve the same targeted strength specification. Tool from 1960 and Tool from 2022 with the same SKU likely have the same specifications, but are built in /very/ different ways.
That's great for mechanics, but what about software developers who need new hardware every year? What about graphic designers who need to pay subscriptions to Adobe? These are recurring costs that don't materially improve the workers ability to do their work, but are nonetheless required.
I'm confused. Why wouldn't an Adobe subscription materially improve the ability of a graphic designer to do their work? I've also never felt the need for new hardware every year as a software developer.
Before Creative Cloud became subscription only, you could budget the software as a one-time fee; $2500 for their entire suite of software, $600 or so for just Photoshop, iirc.
With the subscriptions, you're paying $600+ a year, every year, in perpetuity, and you're subjected to invasive DRM that'll do shit like delete fonts you haven't used recently.
Before subscriptions, upgrades were often cheaper than buying new, and you might only buy an upgrade every four or five years (the core requirements of a graphics app don't change majorly, so new versions are more about stability, optimizations, and the occasional niche feature).
... thankfully, there's enough competition in this space that I've managed to completely remove Adobe from my toolset, but it still sucks that I can't even activate my 2013 version of Adobe's Creative Suite (CS6) because the licensing servers no longer function.
Sounds like you're saying graphic designers no longer need Adobe and if they do need it then they probably gain a materially benefit from it. I never suggested Adobe products were cheap, or a good deal.
> Can you imagine developing software and having to bring your own computer and devices?
I prefer this, as a lot of companies provide crappy equipment. However, this doesn't work beyond the tiniest of companies because any COO worth their salt would flip their lid at having uncontrolled, outside equipment on their network. You really can't be sure about BYOC, especially with tech-savvy workers.
> Did you know that car mechanics have to buy their own tools?
The dealership also provides them with the expensive equipment they need to do their job. Yeah, mechanics have their own tool boxes with the basics, but they don't provide their own lifts, alignment racks, diagnostic software, etc.
It's pretty similar to the system I'm in, I provide my own monitors, keyboards, desk, chair, etc, while my company provides my laptop, software and cloud platform.
"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?"
There are BYOD companies. They would probably be more common if licensing and security didn't matter.
Yes and no the the own tools thing. It depends on the shop and the type of tools. Their own wrenches, sockets, and other small tools might make sense (especially if they avoid Snap-On). The air tool infrastructure, lifts, alignment rack, tire mounting/balancing machine, etc are all shop supplied.
If a company makes you BYOD, you should be able to bill them for wear, just like how you bill them for gas and wear to your personal vehicle when they make you drive to a conference or something else like that.
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.
> the motion of celestial bodies under the force of greed
This is pretty much his Aristotle thought the planets moved … by angels/demons motivated by greed.
I loved studying Aristotle, but the man could think himself into a hole.
Edit: the intelligences move the celestial spheres “as ends” - that is, their being desired (not their desiring) causes them to move the the celestial spheres. Sorry for the confusion on that.
Bringing your own tools can have massive benefits as long as the pay is in line with owning those tools. The biggest issue is starting capital, as is the true for the status quo unless your educational institute provides free devices. Of course there are limits (you probably shouldn't be expected to own your own mocap lab), but most individuals will already have a device given the relatively low price even with company-provided materials.
The issue being more, these things are removed without giving anything else in return.
> Having to own the latest iPhone just to test on, because the company won't provide it but expects iOS compatibility?
The previous company I was in did mostly require bringing in a personal smartphone to function. As I didn't own one, that caused all kinds of amusing (to me) commotion. Eventually some workarounds were set up.
But that should be non-negotiable. If company needs me to have $FOO to work, company must pay and give me said $FOO.
> 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?
IANAL at all, but from my own research a few years back, part of the contractor test in North America and other countries is “who is providing and paying for the tools”. And when the answer is “not me”, it’s a strong indicator you’re an employee. Ergo if you’re an employee, the employer must pay for the tools to do the job (as in legally must)
The contractor tests differ between fields though. The laws were written specifically to go after the big software consulting industry that appears a few decades ago to force them to become employees. They grandfathered in other job roles that were historically operating over the line one way or another.
The “who provides the tools?” is just one test among several, which is not enough to conclude the employer legally must provide tools to employees under all circumstances.
> 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.
I think it is better characterized as demand for labor falling relative to supply of labor. Obviously everyone wants to cut all costs all the time, but whether or not they can depends on supply and demand.
> Obviously everyone wants to cut all costs all the time
Why would this be obvious? I've worked in companies whose revenue grew so quickly that no one could be bothered to cut existing costs. It literally wouldn't be cost effective to do anything but grow revenue.
Outside of VC pump and dump markets, business owners are incentivized to increase net income = revenue - expenses for their own utility and because they have competitors who are working to lure their customers by offering lowering prices.
It is possible that in an explosive growth business area with little to zero marginal costs, focusing solely on revenue and ignoring costs in the short term makes sense, but it is not sustainable. Even then, there is never a blank check for labor costs so someone somewhere will notice a number being too high.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
To be clear, I mean if your employer incurs $20k in costs for relocation for you. Not if you get a '$20k' relocation allocation and you only spend, say, $5k.
The tax rules changed in 2018, any relocation-related expenses are considered taxable as income with no exceptions (unless you're in the military).
They do "gross ups" now that pay your tax in addition to your relocation expenses. Or at least they can, definitely for more senior roles and very-expensive (i.e. house) relocations.
And during the red-hot job market and shipping expenses spiking during covid, relocations were sometimes running way more than $20k.
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).
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.
Yes, I'm referring to US federal income. No idea how state income tax rules work, as there's so many different rules and I'm sure they vary (e.g., one state may allow relo deductions, one state may not).
I doubt states would be concerned about taxing relocation benefits specifically because it might dissuade people from moving to the state. It would be a tiny tax liability relative to other tax liabilities that already vary such as income tax, property tax, and sales taxes. If those differences do not dissuade people from moving, then a one time ~5% income tax on $5k to $20k of moving expenses is not going to move the needle.
For the US, any relocation expenses are not tax deductible for the employee, period. I think there's some tax deductions you get as a business, but for the employee any money spent on the employee for relocation is considered taxable without exception.
Interesting to learn of the US rule. In the UK, up to £8000 of relocation expenses can be provided tax-free, for "qualifying expenses" (mainly costs of buying/selling home and moving -https://www.gov.uk/expenses-and-benefits-relocation/whats-ex...) although there is some allowance for a flat-rate payment if it is reasonable (https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-income-m...). I'm reasonably confident any payment would be tax-deductible for the employer, it's just a question of how much is taxable as income in the hands of the employee.
It used to be that way that any amount (I think?) was considered tax exempt/tax-free if it was used for the purposes of a qualifying list of expenses (similar to what you have in the UK). There was a tax law passed that came into effect in 2018 that removed that rule, however. I believe it'll go back to 'normal' in 2025 for moving expenses.
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.
> 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".
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.
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?
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.
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?
A type rating allows you to fly a specific type of jet.
So, if you know how to fly Cessna Citations and Hawkers--- and you move to an employer with Gulfstreams, you're going to need expensive, type-specific training.
If you have $100k in type-specific training for what's now a popular jet, your employability and value to new employers grows.
Also, bad for the employer that trained you, they may be employers willing to immediately pay you more because you have already been trained and so they don't have to bear that cost.
It is zero-sum when the employee burdens the cost of the training when they leave and makes up the difference in that higher wage in the new job, but that's what is considered a problem here. The suggestion is that a zero-sum situation isn't fair to workers; that the employer should both burden the cost of training and pay a higher wage to those already trained. That is not zero-sum.
I mean some people will sell themselves into slavery in desperate situations. That doesn’t mean it should be allowed.
There are other ways to get around this problem either through deferred compensation or through the company being able to retain the certification lisence for a period of time as property that another company or the employee can buy out.
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.
Sure but the DoD with probably ~1.5M* Tier 5 employees doesn't have this requirement of having to stay for your job or pay back the cost of a security clearance (~5.5k). That's a collective 5 billion fronted by employers.
I have no problems with a business making a job offer contingent on the candidate doing something (i.e. acquiring a rating or finishing a college degree). Presumably the salary you offer would reflect the skills that they have as well (Plus this is way better than student loans since you actually have a legitimate job lined up). But if you want a current employee to have a set of skills or certificates that they don't already, it's on you to do that.
* Google has ~170k employees [1] with ~2.5k job openings [2] (~70x multiplier). clearancejobs.com has 20.5k job openings so with 70x multiplier is roughly 1.5M.
I don't think security clearance is a good analogy as they are administered by the government itself. You may be sponsored by a private company, but I believe that work has to trace back to a government contract. (Maybe I'm wrong here and someone can correct me).
However, the DoD often does give these types of contracts for other training. A friend had to sign a contract for university training where they agreed to stay on for 3x the training length or reimburse the expenses.
> I don't think security clearance is a good analogy as they are administered by the government itself. You may be sponsored by a private company, but I believe that work has to trace back to a government contract.
To be clear, "sponsored by a private company" involves that private company paying either the government or some other private company money for you to get your clearance (not too sure how the money exactly moves about).
Sure you need to be working a job that actually requires a clearance to have one (but effectively there is a grace period if you get fired/quit). But if Company A and Company B both have a job that requires Tier 5 then you can move from A->B no problem. IIUC, the Jet example is even worse (for job mobility) because it's a rating for a plane so you'd need to go from a pilot at A to a pilot of that plane at B while for the DoD you could go from a programmer to a manager or janitor and it's all Tier 5.
The vast majority of security investigations are done by the govt Office of Personnel Management and paid for by other government agencies with appropriated funds. What contractors may often pay for is hiring someone and then paying their salary while they wait for the clearance to go through (i.e., they pay for them to do something else while they wait for the clearance to do the job they were actually hired for). But that's more about their hiring pipeline than the cost of clearance.
Do you have a source for the Gulfstream type rating cost? Most type ratings cost around $10-15k, and the most expensive I’ve seen is around $35k. Very few pilots pay out of pocket for type ratings, but the vast majority who do only need to take a low 5-figure hit. An aspiring airline pilot could self-fund all the formal training they ever need for under $100k.
$100k is probably from zero to Gulfstream-rated ATP, not including opportunity cost. But yeah $100k for a single type rating is unlikely to say the least.
I don't understand why the employer merits protection from the employee in this case.
The employers could, offer bonus payments for the employees tenure, top of market salaries, equity in the business, or secure private insurance to cover losses if the employee leaves.
Asking an employee, to pay you money so that you can make money from their labor shouldn't be legal.
My best attempt to steelman this argument is that training is a transferrable asset that the employer can't recoup.
Consider if you are an aircraft mechanic who is given a set of tools by the employer. Most people don't think it's unreasonable for the employer to ask for those tools back when you quit. In contrast, they can't ask for the training back.
Imagine if you agreed to work as a doctor for a charity if they agreed to pay for your training. Then upon completion of years of training, you quit to go work in the private sector to get more money. That seems like an extreme example, but it illustrates the point.
It would be interesting to see if employers give the equivalent funds as a bonus to an employee who comes onboard pre-trained. My guess is they don't, which would undermine their point somewhat.
It seems like an overall bad policy. If you hold someone against their will, you're bound to risk sub-standard work for the duration of the contract.
Exactly, but the tool analogy hinges on the skills actually being portable to a new job.
I can see the case for repayment agreements if the employer is (say) sending someone to a local university to get an MBA. That training transfers directly to other jobs and its price is set on the open market: you’d pay the same if you self-funded the MBA instead.
On the other hand, niche or employer-specific training doesn’t have either of those properties. Knowing the SOPs at Sally’s Beauty may not help much at other salons, let alone other industries. The price is also arbitrary and the employer has every incentive to inflate it.
I tend to agree with your point, but the focus of the article was on trucking and nursing. Those aren't niche skillsets and would be highly transportable.
The last example in the article, where the employee got a CDL, seems reasonably fair.
The first one though, where a licensed esthetician was charged $1,900 for pro-forma on-site training that she already had, seems like it should be legislated out of existence.
The esthetician skills are also transferable. That one seems to just reek of bad management. It’s hard to come up with a scenario where I’d want to send an employee to training they already have, unless it’s a currency/continuing education issue. Absent those, it’s “training” that adds zero value to neither the employer or employee.
Even so, I’m not sure how legislation would work. It’s once thing if you can point to a license and say the training is unnecessary but I would venture a guess that the majority of training isn’t of that type.
FTA: "She argued that the trainings were specific to the shop and low quality."
It depends on what the skills are. At one extreme, the employee might pick up actual skills, like how to dye hair. I can also imagine some stuff that's much closer to "onboarding": how to use the in-house booking system, workplace safety training, etc. That doesn't really transfer, either practically or legally. The line is really thin and a cynic might be tempted to blur it to retain employees.
As for legislation, one really bright line might be whether similar training is available to the general public (and at what costs). People enroll in Javascript bootcamps all the time, so an internal one is probably fine--and the repayment should be similar to their costs. If it's MUMPS instead, tough break for the employer.
>"She argued that the trainings were specific to the shop and low quality."
Then I think this undermines the employees stance that the trainings were unnecessary. The employer is essentially saying licensure isn't enough to ensure their quality standard, so additional training is necessary. (Granted, there's probably a likelihood of legal gamesmanship going on with both sides). To me, it would really depend on how "specific to the shop" it was. Since the lawsuit was dismissed, I'm assuming it was specific enough to be what you classify as "onboarding."
I get your point on the legislation, but just to illustrate my point about the lines being blurry: you brought up MUMPS and that being niche training. However, it's also the program that underlies the Veterans Affairs VISTA platform. Meaning, if you're trained in MUMPS you could foreseeably transfer those skills to one of the largest healthcare networks in the nation, as well as the companies that have gotten billions of dollars to upgrade that system. So even a "niche" program has plenty of wiggle room to determine if it's really transferable. Not only that, they've now trained you on a system that has billions of dollars in demand and little supply of programmers. That seems pretty valuable.
Then they can claim it on their taxes. Otherwise, losses shouldn't be offset by taxes and they should eat the entirety of their bad investments like the adults they claim they are.
Why is the type rating so expensive? I assume someone getting this rating already has all of the pre-req ratings. Do they need X hours in the jet and sims, and each of those hours is expensive?
Assuming you are being sarcastic... if not, well, there's a HUGE shortage of pilots. Regionals are requesting FAA exceptions to lower the requirements for PIC (pilot in command) time so they can broaden their applicant pool.
Being forced to participate in society doesn’t mean that’s what people prefer.
Your last line is like the mocked meme of “if you hate capitalism so much why did you buy a shirt”. The logic doesn’t work. Of course many anti-capitalists are going to consume capitalism because they live here and not everyone can leave.
The same logic would hold for pilots. Regardless of the numbers.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
No, because the employer isn't loaning you money. In fact it would make much more sense if the employer gave the employee money as a lump sum in exchange for some agreement, much like a relocation or signing bonus. Instead this is the employer pretending its training is worth real money on the real market. In the Reuters article, an esthecian was charged nearly 2k for leaving a shitty job because of "training", despite already independently having the license necessary to do the job and no one reasonably paying that beauty parlor 2k to be educated.
Additionally, certain education-related loans do in fact disappear! Loan forgiveness is a real thing.
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.
It's a little more complicated than that. It could be that the place is offering training as a carrot and overpricing it as a means of suppressing pay to their employees.
So you get a junior developer for half the cost for whatever the length of the payback period is OR you get the cost of a couple of junior developers paid to you by that person.
Not to mention, you could only learn that they're severely underpaying you once you get into the industry.
And when you absolutely need a job, you'll get desperate enough to take some bad deals. Because the alternative is destitution.
1. People who are desperate do what needs to be done. Unlike corporations, humans feel pain.
2. People aren’t perfect. Does everyone know what they’re getting into? Do they know beforehand what kind of salary they’ll get from the company before training? Do they also know how competitive that salary is? Or how good the company is? Maybe it’s the most toxic company ever but is able to hide its negative footprints online.
If a company is willing to pay to train an employee, but not willing to pay a higher salary to retain that [now more valuable] employee, that's a decision totally on the company. It seems silly for a company to invest the large initial cost and then fail to pay the ongoing costs.
> It's not cool to take free training if you know you will be out shortly.
It's also not cool to hire people when you know layoffs are coming, but employers do this all the time. But, as you say "just be a better company" is fantasy world belief.
My ex- had this, applied for a job. "We want someone who is going to be here for the long haul, five years plus." She had aspirations for vet school in the next year or two.
To you, that's a commitment from an employee that is fair to expect.
"Is the company committed to giving me a job for the next five years?" ... well, why not?
You're very much in the mindset of "an employee should be happy to have a job".
My point is, corporations can be just as corrupt as the employees and vice versa. Also, you can have a perfect working place, but people will still leave your company. It would suck if people would leave after you've invested in them and I understand companies want some sort of insurance.
It does suck. Companies should buy an insurance plan from a company that sells insurance if they want insurance. If the company is good at keeping trainees then that'll reflect in their premiums. If they're bad, they should figure out why they're bad.
I find it hard to imagine people being more corrupt than corporations the vast majority of the time. Especially pilots vs corporations. The insane power imbalance and the capitalist society we live in makes it highly unlikely individual middle class people are close to as corrupt as corps.
Also, the companies should get some sort of insurance. Not screw over individual powerless people.
The fundamental trade businesses make with employees is that they remove risk from the employee's life in return for removing the potential rewards that come from having a successful business.
If you add back a component of risk, you are making the trade a lot less attractive.
Your point is understood, but at the same time, if it's not a recognized certification that is applicable to other jobs and positions, then it's a preference of the business, not a business need. The employer decided to make this a requirement for their employees, that is their decision and they should accept the cost.
More simply put, if it's not something that is readily verifiable and accepted by any other business in the same category, then I understand this as the employers' _choice_ to give their employees this business.
Would we consider the same reimbursement scheme for coffee/snacks and restroom breaks? These also are on paid time which costs the employer, but I don't think (yet) employers are trying to recoup such costs.
If we were talking about professional certifications, I would maybe understand some commitment agreement from the employees, but the trainings described are shop specific as per the article. I would not agree that this should require repayment, and seems the courts agree as well.
I have watched personally multiple household name companies go on hiring sprees when layoffs, that those line and department managers were aware of, were imminent.
Tacoma FD for one locally high visibility action: Advertised for the hiring of 30-44 firefighters. Had a few thousand applicants. Rented the Tacoma Dome for several days for testing applicants. Went through the selection process, got their candidates, put them through nearly six months of full-time training. They all graduate from Academy...
... and come to their station the next morning to get a pink slip. They literally trained these people and let them go the moment they finished training, before they could do one day of actual work.
Because there was no budget to pay them. A budget that had been signed off by the City nearly six months -before- the hiring process began.
What, what? Intention doesn't mean things can't go wrong. A lot can go wrong as time marches forward and your expectations turn out to be incorrect. Tacoma FD no doubt intended to keep those firefighters on staff, even if it didn't work out that way in the end.
A business won't necessarily realize benefit from training, but they do offer a similar guarantee to the workers that they may also not realize a benefit. If things turn out as planned, both will benefit. Benefit is not without risk. Those who can't handle the risk seek shelter elsewhere. Such is life.
>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.
I vehemently disagree with this. If your training is so niche as to not be standardized (and thus, have value in the marketplace), you absolutely should not get to go after the employee. If they leave? Tough. Work on retainment if you wish your company to be successful.
With this line of reasoning, every business down to restaurants with fry cooks could argue they are imparting valuable wisdom and thus hold their employees indentured. This is not some hypothetical to me. My ancestors were indentured servants to the Jamestown colony.
There could be room for that. But the article cites several
examples not like that, particularly training that employees consider rudimentary or already covering what they already know.
It sounds like bullshit because it is - employers are trying to get employees to stay, and some use a stick to do so.
IF. In many of these cases, employees show up, are told that they are "required" to undergo training that the company has now enrolled them in and that they will be required to repay.
Do these small companies want employees who feign incompetence and "quiet quit"? Because paying for training is no guarantee the employee will be a profitable one, contract or not.
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.
> They used 6months of code camp training while being paid, and as soon as they could they left.
Frankly, then be a better employer. Pay more, foster a better culture, provide better working circumstances. Plenty of people stay at economically shitty places because of a sense of duty, a love for their co workers, a 4 day work week or excellent benefits, etc. Welcome to a competitive market.
Otherwise you'll end up with people who only barely work to not get fined, training new people (and you have to get new people because people leave asap, fine or not, some people might even pay the fine to leave) who are immediately entering a workplace culture where no one wants to be there. Smart enough people to google the company beforehand and see the shitshow in glassdoor reviews et al. will avoid the company, potentially even years after whatever management gets its head out of its ass and rights the ship. A total disaster.
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.
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.
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.
Whatever. I signed an agreement to repay (prorated) before five years over twenty years ago when these things were also quite common, and happily did so. It was clearly an inducement to not cut and run, there’s no way the repayment balances out the terribly high cost of the turnover event for the company. All this was obvious back then too. But I was quite grateful for what I was getting because it helped move my career forward and was totally worth it.
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
In the article, a lot is made about much of this training being "discovered on day 2", not "voluntarily agreed upon as part of the employment contract". Certainly that also happens, but there are problems with the first scenario.
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?
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.
> 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?
> 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.
Are there any abusive relationships that can't be made acceptable with a contract? If so, under what conditions is a contract not enough to excuse exploitation?
But repaying training fees aren't one of them unless they don't make sense.
If you're a cashier and after 2 hours know how to do your job, your employer can't write a contract that says "Training costs $500,000 and you must repay if you quit before 5 years".
Contracts law is well developed and you can't sign a contract where you don't receive consideration. And I assume if such consideration is small, but the obligation is huge, the courts won't enforce it.
not a lawyer but there are some things a contract can't do no matter how signed, dated, and notarized. I think things like liability waivers for theme parks is an example. If a theme park roller coaster kills 50 people the signed liability waivers aren't a get of consequence free card for the theme park.
Yes. You're right. I meant those as hypothetical questions to the person saying "they signed a contract". That excuse has been used to excuse a lot. I hoped that thinking about what is and insert excitable because of a contract might change some minds.
Legally speaking it is as you say, but I was asking from a moral perspective.
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 .
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
Why are employers increasingly being so hostile with their workforces? Truly this is becoming a them-vs-us situation with management and board vs their own employees. I can't see how any of this is healthy or helpful. I put a lot of the blame on finance-centric growth-at-all-costs customer and employees be damned thinking. I think it's toxic.
I have a mild but potentially wild speculation that it might be the internet. The internet allows workers to communicate not just within the company but within the broader ecosystem of work. People are more and more aware of what a raw deal they're getting by executives and companies, and are becoming more and more hostile because they're aware of how hostile companies are to them. Additionally, companies are picking up eye-tracking technology and other hyper-controlling tech that was never feasible a generation ago, leaving employees feeling increasingly taken advantage of.
Doesn't seem that wild to me, tbh. It's always been the case that the employers are centralized vs. the employees are decentralized, so when it comes to negotiations the centralized party has enjoyed major benefits due to informational assymetry as well as possible coordinated bargaining. Open sharing of information between employees _should_ make it more balanced, which the employers may not be used to.
I don't think this is the case anymore, not with the internet at least. Yes an employer will know what they are paying others at the company versus you, but unlike before, it's exceedingly easy for an employee to come up with the "market number" of what they should be paid.
And often times that "market number" dominates whatever numbers an employer might have that they keep to themselves,
Its marginally better, but reddit threads or glass door are no subsititute for an actual union negotiating on your behalf. Employers can just fire you or let you leave if you get cocky like this. A union otoh can threaten to strike and effectively shut down an entire company.
Don't forget that, at least in the US, employers also implement key loggers, mitm, silent webcam activation, push notifications triggered by power events/playing media/browser activity, etc on their network and worker machines
I have a different take that most of the other comments here. I think what we are seeing is a direct reaction to what happened in 2020/2021 with many non-skilled positions.
We had the "great resignation" where employees were the ones holding the cards. Many places like McDonalds and other low-wage jobs had essentially bidding wars for employees and if you weren't keeping your wages at the current market rate, folks would quickly bounce to greener pastures.
Some employers rightly saw this as them just needing to pay more, offer greater benefits, and attract employees in a "positive" way. But for every business that did it in the "positive" way, you had many more that did it in a "negative" way by coercing their existing workforce to stay.
If you're running a McDonalds and you're paying your employees $12/hr while all your competitors are going to $15/hr, your only option for retention is to either raise your wages or to coerce your employees from leaving. Some places did it the right way by offering more money because that what the market demands, others did it in a coercive way of making employees pay for training and other BS.
This is my answer and I see it in the board room. Management feeling a lack of control as the leverage has shifted to workers is a major point of contention right now. Management is responsible for controlling costs and they have basically no control. They're also rich enough they are tone deaf to what inflation does to people at the lowest income levels. Generally they're also old enough to be tone deaf of all of the economic problems that younger generations have faced (student loans, underemployment, gig economy, etc). They also usually like to control productivity, so this is where the production of salaried employees comes into question - especially around WFH where the company/management is not bought in on that construct.
A recent example that almost made me laugh in the meeting, some of our senior living businesses have had major staffing issues (the industry pays nothing to do what is a difficult and disgusting job). Employees basically gave up working overtime or picking up extra shifts, etc. When asked why we don't leverage them more, the operations guys gave a couple politically correct answers but they kept getting drilled by some members of senior management (basically telling him to do what ever is needed to force these people to work and do it with no extra budget! ) so the guy said something like "look, we pay these people $12/hr to wipe old people's asses. They all have second and third jobs and we're almost certainly not even their #1 employer if given a choice. They literally can not get called in or pick up extra shifts when it's needed by us. They're already working a shift somewhere else. We need to pay them enough to give a damn or overstaff so there's always someone available. Both costs money but our businesses problems are not theirs so you choose"
Well, in the early 1900s employers were literally hiring thugs to kill their uncooperative employees, in full view of the public. So I'm not sure it's a new or increasing thing.
It's wild that they did not hire some image consultants and change their name in the last 100 years. Though perhaps their notoriety is a net positive in the industry they operate in.
Reminded me of something that happened 3 weeks ago. Had been meaning to share here in HN.
I am an h1b from India. Was talking to a colleague about the 100 year wait period for greencards through employer's MS teams. I shared him some twitter links (where people say they would be 115 when they get greencard and such) through whatsapp. While I was talking about it, Teams got disconnected. Didn't think anything about it, just thought its just a network issue.
Same day, while talking to another colleague, mentioned same thing, and shared the twitter links over whatsapp. Again, MS teams got disconnected. I thought it was an odd coincidence that it got disconnected twice when I talked about this subject.
Same day, at around 9.30 pm, I get an email from Twitter saying they have blocked a suspicious login from a city in US. So, someone knew my user name & password. I am guessing my employer was monitoring the conversation, and had my social media passwords.
Just rewatched The Century of the Self and restarted Can't Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis/BBC, which seem very much aligned to this. Highly recommend if you haven't seen either yet. Free to watch on youtube
Perhaps some (ill-advised) attempt to claw back control they've lost over the last couple of years where hiring had become ultra competitive, low-end wages rose to somewhat reasonable levels, etc. Seems like the slide into a recession is some signal to them that they can swing the pendulum back the other way.
It's not accepted as fact, but an interesting theory on "WTF happened in 1971" was the "Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970" and how it made many actions, votes, etc, of the US congress more transparent.
The idea being that lobbyists were paying for certain types of votes when they were private, but that politicians could then vote their conscience anyway...because there was no way for a lobbyist to verify they got the vote they paid for.
But, once the specific vote by named representative became public record, the lobbyists could now see if they got the vote they paid for.
I think there's a fair amount that do so in their freshman run. But it's a road that probably leads to getting voted out after the opposition gets money from the big groups you piss off by doing so.
I don't think you'd get the money together necessary to get your freshman run even off the ground without at least some kowtowing of the line of the major donors for your party. The nature of campaigning imo makes pretty much all politicians more beholden to money than to their constituents. Its expensive business, and if you decide not to play the game, you just end up smacked.
Nixon also took the dollar off the gold standard "temporarily", and government proceeded to debase the currency continuously since then, hand in hand with the financial sector.
Probably best to be a bit wary of pushing narratives from a group that say the problem is there's too gosh darned much public control over things and we need to deregulate and transfer more power to the financial sector without a caveat then.
Actually a lot of today's realities can be traced curiously back to 1971 or the year before or after that. Consider the following:
* End of Bretton Woods System - "On 15 August 1971, the United States terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency" [0]
* The Global War on Drugs - "The initiative includes a set of drug policies that are intended to discourage the production, distribution, and consumption of psychoactive drugs that the participating governments and the United Nations have made illegal. The term was popularized by the media shortly after a press conference given on June 18, 1971" [1]
* Nixon's Southern Strategy that shifted the Republican base to the South 1970-1971 [2]
* Nixon' Visit to China and the Chinese economic reform, which resulted in China being the major economic power it is today, visit planned on July 15, 1971, visit in early 1972 [3]
* The Defunding of the Apollo program - "In August 1971, just after conclusion of the Apollo 15 mission, President Richard Nixon proposed canceling the two remaining lunar landing missions, Apollo 16 and 17." The two remaining already planned missions were completed, but the program ended in 1972 thereafter. [4]
Now you might say, correctly, that every presidential term has major, world-shifting elements that are consequential. However, something happened specifically in 1971 and 1972 across a very broad set of circumstances to global economics, trade policy, criminalization, space race, politics, and more, not to mention the Watergate affair which was during the 1972 campaign. These years were absolutely pivotal to where we are today.
Further follow-on actions to the above included the devaluing of the dollar in 1972, vetoing of US National Child-care (1972), continuation of the Vietnam war, Phase I and Phase II price freezes for wages and costs (1971, 1972), Economic Stablization Act of 1971[5], Revenue Act of 1971 [6], and more. 1971 was a hot year indeed.
>One theory I subscribe to is that 1971 is when the US hit peak oil production
except now thanks to shale oil/fracking, we're actually producing more oil today than in 1971[1]. Why haven't we seen a reversion back to the good ol days?
>If the GP has the correct answer, it would be because the cost of producing the current US oil is much higher than the cost of the 1971 oil.
Inflation adjusted oil prices were actually pretty close to pre-1971 oil prices between 1986 up until 2004. If the oil price theory was true, shouldn't we have seen a reversal in the trend during that time period?
By "pretty close" you mean with a clear and very significant increase on the average (more than doubled, if you discard all the high points), higher peaks, and more volatility?
> Truly this is becoming a them-vs-us situation with management and board vs their own employees.
It has always been a them-vs-us situation. It's just that 'them' (management/ownership) have been in a hugely advantageous position for a while and so were able to exercise their power discretely. Now that economic circumstances have tipped slightly in favor of laborers, 'they' have to exercise their power in ways that are more obvious.
When have employers ever been anything other than hostile with their workforces? America in particular doesnt have a good track record with "employment". Anytime something positive is done its because a company is forced to do it or compelled to do it because their competitors are.
I've been at my current employer for 12 years and I have a very narrow tolerance for bullshit so please believe me when I say there are decent employers out there. They are not easy to find, but they exist. I have friends who are in the same boat. And sometimes they are happy enough with their companies that they invite me to apply as well.
In my experience, the people who say that all companies are evil are just too lazy to do the work required to find a decent one. Or are projecting their own insecurities or lack of trustworthiness outward.
I'm pretty happy in my job now. I've had at least one job in the past that I was pretty happy with as well. The issue is that the companies that are nice to work for are typically not the companies that pay all that well. At least not well when compared to companies that are less nice to work for.
I think humans actually get treated worse than actual resources. I've never heard of charging a vehicle for its past oil changes when it inevitably fails beyond repair, for example.
>Why are employers increasingly being so hostile with their workforces?
Because the threat of unemployment isn't so severe right now, so they have to do things the older way by just scamming people into indentured servitude.
> Truly this is becoming a them-vs-us situation with management and board vs their own employees.
Always has been.
They've never thought of you as anything other than a resource to be exploited as much as possible then discarded. Capital just gets more brazen when it has more power.
If you don't like it, stop voting for open fascists.
I personally suspect that their minds were broken by the great recession spoiling them. They already got in the habit of unreasonable demands in employees, this seems like an extension of that dysfunction to me.
The unions that won us the 40 hour workweek and weekends, among many other significant worker protections, lost political power in the 90s when the democrats transitioned to neoliberalism.
It's so sad how unions were demonized in recent history. Even on HN I see a lot of commenters making that tired old "lazy union worker" argument come out of the woodwork with any unionization thread.
Like, why the hell would you not want to collectively bargain? You really think you have more leverage with your employer as an individual? What negotiation book taught you that strategy, the one called "what not to do"? Its always ironic seeing threads about how software engineers are fed up with stupid corporate stuff, like the interview song and dance or whatever else, then fail to see that by unionizing, software engineers could dramatically change how the entire industry works, and by continuing to just jump ship in hopes of finding better pastures they perpetuate this broken system that just finds another worker to exploit.
An employer is just the employee of next the customer up the chain, and for various reasons, rising interest rates being a big one, that next customer is putting the squeeze on its employees so each link down the chain also starts to feel the squeeze.
I am not understanding your sentiment here. Are you forgiving any employer excesses because they have to respond to someone else? Is there really no limit or accountability? How about the buck stops with the bad employer.
I think you misunderstood what he said. We are all links on a chain where employers pay us, customers pay our employer, and someone pays our customers. When the source of all the money starts to dry up because of rising interest rates and supply shocks across the world, customers and employees will respond naturally by tightening their purse strings, which ultimately affects how much money we get paid in cash and benefits. You would do the same too if your salary was suddenly slashed by 20%.
Does that excuse employers from treating you like shit? No, but it also doesn't excuse you from staying there if they do. You can always communicate with your employers about your grievances, and if they are not addressed your ultimate power is to leave that job. You should not underestimate what employers will do to retain someone...
>An employer is just the employee of next the customer up the chain
Well that customer must be a real moron to pay so much money for a CEO, which apparently they pay more money than they spend on whatever the actual product is.
The CEO is the employee of the board, so the board may be moronic, but they also need someone they can trust deeply. That is why they aren't afraid to spend a lot to secure the one they do trust. Almost nobody on earth has established that kind of trust with the board, so the pickings are slim. Basic supply and demand, as always.
The board works for the shareholders. The shareholders are the employee of the next customer in line.
I've also seen employees fighting to avoid paying back optional signing bonus that were given under the condition of staying for a couple of years...not attached to training at all.
It's difficult to separate "I don't think I should have to pay back anything, period" from "I don't think I should have to pay for training".
The training case can be made sure, but when somebody accepts some form of benefit with the explicit terms: if you leave before X you have to pay it back, I don't see the issue if the terms were clear.
EDIT: Now I'm curious about the down votes? Where is the issue with an expectation that people follow through with signed agreements?
The "issue with an expectation that people follow through with signed agreements" comes about when there is a power asymmetry between the two parties signing a contract. The reason we have tenant rights, and bans on indentured servitude, and employee rights is because when there is a power imbalance between the two parties the less powerful can often find themselves pushed into extremely unfavorable circumstances, to the point that it has societal-level negative effects. So we ban certain kinds of one-sided contractual clauses. And then corporations include them anyway, because they calculate that there's a non-zero chance that individuals will abide them regardless of their legality.
The number of completely unenforceable non-compete clauses I've seen in California is astonishing. Likewise, I've seen blatantly illegal lease agreements. The common factor? One party has far more negotiating power than the other.
If you’ve seen the workforce, I would argue that employers are dealing with some of the worst employees in US History. I’m not joking. Demotivated, constantly job to job, easily bored, poor health, poor “Work ethic,” drug use, alcoholism. Both employer and employee probably share blame for this.
This might not be apparent in Silicon Valley, but it is much more real for the rest of America.
Worker productivity is still some of the highest it has been in US history, caring about motivation or "work ethic" is frankly silly considering that isn't what companies are optimizing for. If companies still offered pensions and kept benefits and salary comparable to competitors they wouldn't be seeing job hopping at the rate they are now.
It's a free market, want better employees with a higher "work ethic" that will stick around? You will need to compete. This isn't new, my dad growing up worked in IB and would switch jobs, or use existing offers as leverage for salary benefits, once every 2-3 years, and he switched jobs multiple times in my childhood.
It's very hard to believe things are worse than they used to be. Go back to the "golden age" of manufacturing and boom times in the US post WWII.
Drugs were not illegal, drunk driving was not illegal. Drinking lots was totally normal. No one thought any of it was an issue, so they likely were a lot more messed up and just didn't really care. People were taking smoke breaks constantly during the day which was certainly a drag on productivity. All the bad behavior was so normalized they didn't even think it was a problem.
> Both employer and employee probably share blame for this.
Management sets the terms and tone of the workplace and employees provide the labor. If they can only hire drug users and alcoholics with poor work ethic maybe look into why that is the case and fix that. Chances are your best employees are getting recruited away with better pay.
Also because when the parent says "drug use" they probably mean people who smoke weed. Referring, obviously, to the US moral decline along with disrespecting your parents and "gangster rap."
No, I think the parent means meth and fentanyl. It's a major problem right now in general throughout the US. It's being under-reported due to COVID but is making a major surge right now.
When it affects white Americans it gets reported as a health issue, but is criminal vice when its infected black communities. But this isn't it. Workers with a clean record and can pass a drug screen have no problem finding work right now.
The generalization aside, if organizations are having such labor issues, what is the motivation for mistreating employees? Doesn't it just exacerbate and compound labor issues? How is any of this helpful? Just retaliatory?
In my opinion the pattern looks very similar to that of an abusive parent/partner. Only rarely do such a person correct their ways once pointed out that they are being abusive, and most only ramp up their abuse to try to "silence" the complaints.
Just to comment on this specifically, it was pretty obvious to me from a young (<18 in the late 90s) age that the era of companies taking care of their employees and maintaining benefits like pensions was over. I'm sure I'm not the only one. If you treat employees as interchangeable cogs don't be surprised when employees treat you as interchangeable in return.
> don't be surprised when employees treat you as interchangeable in return.
how could it be otherwise? The concepts of "company loyalty" from the employee and "being taken care of" by the company always baffled me. Why would you think a company is going to take care of you? Why would a company expect loyalty from an employee? A deal is a deal, if either side doesn't uphold their part of the agreement then the agreement is over. I don't see how it can be otherwise.
>Why would you think a company is going to take care of you?
You would think that because 50 years ago it was the norm. Companies had pensions. Companies used to have cost-of-living wage increases in addition to annual performance increases. The reward for working at a company for 20 years used to be a cushy management position, less work and more pay. Now it's a coupon for $10 off at a chain restaurant.
If you put yourself in that mindset, company loyalty is obvious. Find a job you like, and stick with it until retirement. But that isn't the case anymore.
Definitely feel that if the training is required for the job it's on the employeer to freely provide it.
If you want a forklift driver and you hire somebody that doesn't know how to then you're on the hook to train them. If you're worried they'll just turn around and quit either don't hire somebody without the training. If said forklift driver wants to go back to college and say learn electrical engineering I think the employeer could add stipulations on that.
---
Charging them for training you didn't actually provide is a bit ridiculous. Too bad the case only got dismissed and nothing punitive.
What is even worse is if the company has a requirement for 40 hours of training annually, and they provide it in-house (using bulk content CBTs) that don't really give you any skills. Then stipulate a "training fee payback" if you leave 2 years after a specific training. So you are constantly on the hook for paying back a training session seeing as they require a refresher every year.
It's a variation on giving part of your salary in rolling bonuses (so that no matter when you leave you lose some part of the bonus) - but it should be required to be backloaded instead of front loaded in the training case (i.e, at the end of the year they give you a bonus equivalent to the training cost (and a commensurately lower salary during the year) - mainly because people are just really bad at saving for known "rainy day issues".
It should also be something highly subject to review by the governmental legal board.
> but it should be required to be backloaded instead of front loaded in the training case (i.e, at the end of the year they give you a bonus equivalent to the training cost (and a commensurately lower salary during the year)
That would be quite unfair to the worker who misses out on opportunity throughout the year for not having access to the money. The business is actually incentivized to structure it this way since they can realize the opportunity themselves, but in practice workers would run away as fast as possible if a business tried this, more than negating the potential upside.
> mainly because people are just really bad at saving for known "rainy day issues".
One can always negotiate this if they are willing to trade opportunity for less risk in managing their personal finances. A business is unlikely to say no as it is to its benefit. It wouldn't be a sensible default for either party, however.
You need to look at this from a game theory perspective since there are more than two parties involved. If company A pays for forklift training but can’t pay as high salaries as a result, but company B does not offer training and offers the higher salary, what are people going to do? Go get trained at company A and immediately jump to company B. So if you’re company A what are you supposed to do that’s actually business-feasible and not a loss-creating fantasy?
This only holds if training such as huge expense, that the one time cost to train is such that A can never improve salaries. If B is paying so much more than A, there has to be more than the training differentiating them. If that's all there is, then A can say "You're Salary is X during training because training costs Y, once training is done your salary is X + Y". Then the employee wins by getting paid during training, and the employer wins by retaining the employee. You're suggesting that B's salary Z is > X + Y, which could be possible due to the training infrastructure setup to train to a degree, but it's not like salary is the only lever that can be pulled.
What seems more to be happening is that A is trying to say "Your salary is X during and after training" and then after training is done pocketing Y.
It would be best for employees if the training was suppled at employer cost and working conditions were such that they didn't need to quit.
There was a similar story linked a few weeks ago. My comment then still applies. If the value of the training accrues primarily to the employer then the employer should be footing the cost with no strings attached.
A common example is paying for a Masters degree or an industry certification. The value accrues primarily to the employee (or at least, the value is shared). The training is transferable. It's standardized. Etc. Requiring a pay-back period is reasonable here.
The counter-example are training courses as described in the article. The employee was already certified/licensed in the field. The training offered no value to the employee. The employer should be paying for it (but isn't, because this is just an end-run around debt peonage laws).
I am about two years removed from my last career where I spent just short of a decade in a strong union, so my mind naturally snaps towards finding ways that things are not in the employees best interest. In this case - I cannot even conjure up a single reason when this is a benefit to the individual. The argument could potentially be made if there were some world-class proprietary training to the likes of Xerox's old sales training, etc. - but even then, the quality of the training is kept in check by the quality of employees that it attracts. There's a mutual benefit there that is balanced by creating a kick-ass workplace.
The requirement of industry credentials is only slightly better in my opinion but at least they are transferable, e.g., Sec+, CCNA, etc.
I'm a bit conflicted on this. It seems to me that higher education is completely broken in the US. Every white collar job requires it, not because you'll learn skills that are needed for the job, but because they've found college grads are more likely to be competent. Apprenticeships are the most obvious solution to the "lemon worker" problem, since companies can decide after the training is done whether they want to keep them. But if the company is losing money during the training they'll just hire the educated prospect unless there's some way to get that money back.
Obviously forcing established employees to pay for unneeded training is just taking advantage of the power employers have in the relationship, but I can see where training that workers pay for can be useful.
I guess my issue is this: why is the burden on me, the employee, when you cannot figure out at what rate you're losing employees after training, what it is costing you, and why you're losing them?
Just like the marketing 'department' of a startup SaaS calculates a Cost Per Customer, figure out what your on-boarding process is costing the company and adjust your salaries across the board to be competitive in that arena. If you're not being competitive - figure out why. Maybe you'll save more money in the long run by providing better leadership training that motivates employees to stay longer, effectively making your cost of on-boarding training worth it. Or, here's a shocker, maybe that training just sucks and you shouldn't put your employees through it anyways.
And if you cannot find a way to be competitive whilst doing so, just like employers have learned to be with health, life, pension, and leave benefits, then your company will sink. There are many professions that many seek employment solely because they don't have the capital to invest into themselves and their training. Why should one open themselves to the burden of both, if there's an alternative?
> I guess my issue is this: why is the burden on me, the employee, when you cannot figure out at what rate you're losing employees after training, what it is costing you, and why you're losing them?
It is not - the choice is on you to pick this employer or another one.
> I cannot even conjure up a single reason when this is a benefit to the individual.
I find no individual value in meetings, but I still accept participation a lot of the time as it appears that others derive benefit from my contributions. Perhaps direct individual benefit misses the forest for the trees? Clearly there is some kind of benefit found else nobody would accept and we wouldn't be there to talk about it.
For a lot of workplace training I’ve had, the only beneficiary must be the HR department that can use this compliance data to get a better deal on corporate insurance having everyone reading certain laws. Or in theory they are reading those laws, everyone I know clicks through these HR slideshows at light speed.
HR may be the only direct beneficiary, but if you don't receive something out of the deal, why would you do it? You, of course, wouldn't.
The indirect benefits aren't always obvious, of course. Perhaps someone in HR is your friend and they being happy from having a less complicated job allows for you to gain a stronger friendship, and so you don't mind helping them out to your ultimate benefit.
Who knows what is specifically motiving people, but we do know that not even the greatest saint can successfully push himself to do something that is completely free of benefit.
Time has shown over and over again that an individual will not enter into an agreement without a perceived benefit.
You can ask to see if the benefit is a strong enough one for you to make the same agreement, but that doesn't mean a whole lot. No two people are the same. Everyone has different goals and desires.
Well yes of course. For example in the early middle ages millions of dirt farmers took oath of bondage after a bad harvest. Because otherwise his family would starve.
For sure. There is likely no greater benefit that one can derive than avoiding starvation.
Although there isn't much of a modern day parallel there given that citizenry of the US have already agreed to afford each other that benefit for an exchange in kind. Individuals need not worry about additional transactions deriving a hunger resolving benefit.
In my experience the benefit found through training is often so that the employer can check a box that reduces their liability. I have certainly worked for some pretty shoddy employers, but if the employer was interested in you getting something out of it, why not let you as an individual or a group decide what that training is?
There's a moral justification of wage labor which argues that the business takes an outsized chunk of the profits from an employee's labor because they are also bearing the risk of hiring and costs of business. I see this as an extension of the trend by companies to impose downside risk on employees but continue to monetize upsides (i.e. labor). The gig economy is the most obvious example of the wider trend. It's particularly offensive in concert with the history of falling real-world value of wages.
Reminds me of Kim Wexler from Better Call Saul. Her tuition was paid by the law firm she worked for. This comes up in the story later on.
I imagine that companies can't just be used for free education. There has to be some middle ground. If there is a middle ground found, then both sides (the employees and the employers) will both end up in a better place. If there is no protection for the employer, well then they will just not provide any as much education as the situation calls for. And if employees are given a fair deal, they will be more likely to apply for these jobs. Maybe let the free market solve this.
The free market is a joke and big companies will always win against individuals unless they get protected by law. They have more people, more time and more money.
If you want to be an employer, you're the one taking the risks. Don't want to take risks? Don't become an employer, or better yet, don't do business, because that comes with risks too.
And just in case people haven't thought about externalities or a more basic factor: people can be desperate, that doesn't mean you should therefore exploit them as an employer. We're not living in the 1400's anymore.
Well I think the problem is many companies might decide to not take on that risk like you said. And we all lose. The trick is to figure out the right amount of risk that the government will help or hurt the employer.
And I think not, because in countries with much stronger employee protections it works out pretty well. The biggest 'downside' is a smaller concentration of power and wealth because the risk/reward calculation is different. But being bigger serves nobody except a few sub-1% shareholders/owners.
There also is no "we all lose" scenario because of the same reason companies have been able to exploit desperate (or extremely poor) people; companies can be discarded and traded in for more respectful ones in the same fashion. Sure, a bunch of megacorps will not function any longer without a disposable workforce, but that's not really bad for society, or at the very least 'less-bad' when compared with disposable employees.
The same "we have to give them tax breaks or they will move away" logic fails here; if you give a company that sort of leverage, you're essentially blackmailing yourself because they can use that leverage for anything they want. As long as there are locations to move to, that is. If there are no more locations, be it because they have used them all up, or because it's made useless by law, that leverage ceases to exist.
Downside-wise there is only one thing I can consistently come up with, and that is the benefit of having a high concentration of resources and purpose (or vision perhaps) to develop something completely new (like re-usable rocket boosters fit for human flight). While I don't think we should trade that for disposable humans, there should probably some sort of avenue where we can have that benefit without having the human-downside factor. I'm not sure how such a thing would be implemented or work out in detail, but not having it (and in turn also not have people get discarded with great ease) might still be a net positive in the grand scheme.
Rolling over going all "welp I guess this is just how it is" gets everyone nowhere, so before someone comes along and suggest that a better way is a waste of time and energy to look for: you're wrong. (not aimed at you, jmartrican ;-) )
But loads of companies, dare I say every company, is already used for free education. Every single job I've been in taught me a set of skills which I used to find a significantly better job within a few years. They got me a little rough around the edges but otherwise productive for xx months and I got on the job training.
Now any of those companies in the past could have said, "Hey we recognize that you've been here xx months and that your skills have increased. You can likely go get a job at another firm doing x and earning y. We want to offer you that here." But none of them have. At least not until I've gotten an offer elsewhere and decided to make that move already.
I've done tuition reimbursement programs at two jobs (One for bachelors, one for Masters).
The businesses have two benefits to offering these programs:
1) The amount paid is a benefit to the employee but is not subject to payroll taxes.
2) The amount is also qualified as a business expense and can be calculated as such for tax purposes.
So companies have serious tax benefits from offering these programs and generally end up being no-cost due to offsetting tax burden. Even if an employee leaves after earning their degree (mine have always had a 12-month payback period) the company still comes out on top.
The difference is Kim chose to go to Lawschool so she could become a lawyer, and the firm that hired her was helping her pay off her debt as part of her compensation. That situation is a little dystopian, but pretty different from what's happeming in the article. They are required by their work to get this training (so, employees are not choosing to do it) and sticking them with the bill.
That situation is pretty distinguishable from what happened in the article. A law degree's benefits mostly fall on Kim, it's not specific training for her job, it's a legal requirement for an attorney role, and it is fully usable in other attorney jobs. Most importantly, it's a truly optional deal to get Kim a promotion--not a requirement to keep the job you were already hired for. And most people pay for the degree themselves.
That's not the same as a company specific trainings for people who are already licensed for the job.
There is definitely some sort of gray area between education and on-the-job training, but Kim's case isn't in that area IMO.
One of my employers gave every employee 5000 per year for education with no strings attached. Want to get a Masters in Basketweaving? No problem. They gave up to 10k with manager approval.
Typically places that will totally fund expensive degrees (JD, MBA, etc.) will have you sign a contract and you typically are required to stay on for X years after you finish the degree they paid for.
That wasn't her tuition being paid AFAIK she personally owed the money they were repaying for her while she worked there I though? Been a while since I watched that season though.
Yeah, she had essentially loaned the money from HHM. It was pretty much like this. They would pay for her law school, she agreed to work for them for X years, if she quit or would be fired before that, she'd owe an amount prorated to time worked.
At some point, there's some back and forth with her trying to pay it off and Hamlin refusing and choosing to forgive it instead. And in the end, Great Value Humperdink pays it off for her as a sort of signing bonus.
No, I would think HHM would be smarter than that. Student loans are pretty predatory, shit interest rates, deferment, capitalization, etc. all combine to make these loans cost way more than they should.
HHM could likely either get a more conventional loan or just use cash on hand to pay the tuition up front. With a conventional loan, they could get a more reasonable interest rate, start paying immediately, etc. And there are reason HHM would still take a loan for the amount even if they had cash on hand to pay it up front.
It's likely if HHM took any loans, they're technically paid off by now. Kim's debt is solely between her and HHM by this point. How they structured the deal could affect things. They could have charged her like a 3% interest and started the clock the day she graduated and counted every day worked as $X towards her loan. Or a portion of her billing.
