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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
No. Indentured servitude, slavery, debt and a police state is what you get.
Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees
Uhhh, don’t the employers get to keep all the profit from the employee’s productivity because their role is to take financial risks to reap the rewards?
And the employees just get their paycheck because they are just selling their time to the employer and not participating in the risk vs reward?
This is just the 37th consecutive flavor of socialize the losses, privatize the profits.
Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees who decide to leave the company prematurely.
Employers can go fuck themselves. You’re recouped on those training costs when the people that receive that training become better at their jobs and make the stupid number go up. If employers want to treat people like fucking investments, they need to learn the risk of losing money on their investments.
If employers want to treat people like fucking investments
They might say they want to do that, but it’s been pretty clear for a long time that what they (at least the conservatively-minded ones) want is to treat people like property.
It’s also become very clear for a long time that they’ve considered the idea of losing money or making less than they imagined on an investment to be an unacceptable failure of the system
Back when I was first trying to get a job in the programming world (in the mid-90s), I submitted my resume to a supposed job-finding company named SearchMasters. When I went to interview with them, I learned that their fee was 33% of your salary for your first six months on the job. This was clearly insane, but it got even worse: if you quit the job or were fired before the six months was up, you were immediately liable to pay SearchMasters the remainder of what their fee would have been in its entirety. I told the dude (an obvious steroid user squeezed into a garish tight suit) “I thought indentured servitude was illegal” and at one point I found myself trying to extract my resume from under his arm while he was alpha-male glowering at me while leaning on it with his full weight.
I dealt with a lot of headhunting firms in my first few years of working and it’s a scummy industry, but SearchMasters put them all to absolute shame. And this was a big room with like 30 agents working in it, so there must have been thousands of poor bastards that had fallen for their bullshit, just in my city alone.
Edit: I mis-remembered this. The fee was 33% for the first year, but you were only on the hook for six months of that if you quit before the six months was up.
Classic indentured servitude.
Yeah like thats literally the method that was used for indentured servitude. Like the Irish still make it their whole point of how they were also slaves by that metric.
Holy crap at the things we are bringing back to appease rich people.
Shit. They used to do this a lot in my industry. You’d not get paid during training, or you’d sign a contract that if you succeeded training you’d be required to work for that employer usually for two years. If you left before the time was up, you owed the employer whatever pro-rated time you had remaining vs the stated cost of your training. Was still happening with signing bonuses recently.
I used to live in Tucson Arizona which for a time was like the call center capital of the US. there were SO MANY call centers there that they would hire literally anyone with a pulse. if you quit one you could quite literally go back a few months later and get your job back because the turn over was just so massive. And they all had paid like 2 week training.
So you can see where this is going and how exploitable it was. This was the early 00’s and me and a friend of mine being broke 20 year olds decided to do just that. We wanted to get paid to literally just sit there, not answer phones, nothing. just get paid for doing nothing. So we’d both go to one call center, get hired, do the 2 week training, get paid, quit, go to the next call center, repeat. Eventually once you made the first round of all the call centers you could literally just start the chain over again because by that point enough time had passed that the first call center would hire you again. We did this for like a solid year. Just get paid to sit there and listen to a dude talk.
The only reason we stopped doing it was because it was SO boring.
Hah, at that point you could’ve gotten hired on as a trainer, a better pay, and never had to answer a phone.
The article is mixing two different concepts one sucks one doesn’t.
- The one that sucks is when an employer requires an employee to do training as a condition of the job, and then puts the threat of repaying that cost of that training back on the employee. This needs to change or be regulated for the fairness to the employee.
- The one that doesn’t suck is when the employer offers the option for employees to get training/college education paid for with not obligation to do so to keep the job. Even these usually only have 1 year or so of that repayment requirement if they leave early. The article is calling out Chipotle for offering free college tuition, as long as the employee continues to work there for 6 months after the last payment was made to the college. That is shorter than most employers which require 1 year. I used a benefit like this at a past employer to finish my Bachelors degree and which meant I never had to take out student loans.
Mixing both of these types of training/education paths in one article equating them as parts of the same thing is a bad thing. Employer reimbursed college tuition is one of the few ways that many students are able to obtain higher education without taking on burdensome student loans.
Aye, let’s add another good one in the mix, pensions! Good ol’ Golden Handcuffs. Its like companies have been trying for years to see what’s the bare minimum we’re willing to accept.
This is one of the reasons why job hopping in this day and age is a thing, and people in
right to work statesat-will states bounce with no notice. A pension was something that gave an employee an incentive to be loyal to the company and have a vested interest in seeing the company succeed. Lately employers are barely matching 401K/Roth contributions if they even do it at all. Employer sponsored medical coverage is another form of golden handcuffs if the coverage is comprehensive and low cost for the employee.I know I can get paid 20K more doing what I do in private industry, but my state job gives me insurance without a deductible that I pay $12 a month for, plus eligibility for a pension after 5 years of work, plus 4 weeks of vacation in a year. (With the health insurance I trade back 8 days of vacation time for a $110 discount on the premium.) Every time I think about making more money, all of those other perks make me decide I would rather keep the lower paying job I have. When I crunch the numbers of what my vacation time would be worth, plus the full COBRA price for my insurance premium, those benefits are already worth more than 20K. I don’t feel trapped, because I like my work and boss, but I can see how other people might make the choice to keep a job they hate when the benefits are amazing or better than what the current job market offers.
You probably mean At-Will states, which is all but one of them. Right to Work is an anti union thing.
Thank you for the clarity on that. I forgot that right to work means you can’t be compelled to join a union when your workplace is unionized.
With how most companies treat pensions these days, I prefer a 401k. I’d love for them to be the pensions of 100 years ago with stable long-lived companies that could be depended upon, but we don’t have that anymore. A single PE firm buying out your employer could raid the pension fund, or sell off the valuable parts of the company, leaving the smoldering husk of a company unable to fulfill is pension obligations. You may only get a small fraction of your expected pension payout in these cases when the company or the pension becomes nonviable. Thats what pension can look like today.
For all its faults, a 401k is yours, and goes with you. If (and I know this is a big “if”) a 401k account holder doesn’t make some really poor choices, a 401k and its owner’s contributions over the years can provide some of the best retirement savings for workers in the USA today.
In the case with new graduate nurses their key training is done at their first job. It’s a bit more in line with apprentice to journeyman training than any other example I can think of. Training in which they have to make journeyman before they can work on their own.
The training is required, for everyone’s safety. Charging nurses for it via TRAP is new. Given the predatory nature of hospitals regarding employees it will likely become the status quo now, all the way to SCOTUS.
Nurses fresh out of school are are often massively underpaid, given shit hours, and unprepared for the realities of the job.
The turnover is mysteriously extremely high. This smells of some bullshit attempts at employee retention by force rather than fixing their broken system.
I agree with this point. My org has tuition reimbursement. The caveat are you have to have worked at least part time with the organization for a year before you are eligible, you pay for the class upfront with a max reimbursement of $1000 per semester, you take classes from an accredited college that confers degrees, you stay employed while you take the class, you pass the class with a C, and you are still employed with the org when you get reimbursed. We have lots of young people that already have an associates or bachelors degree working for us, and I like to show them this program as a path for slowly working towards a more advanced degree. Once you get the reimbursement each semester, there is no obligation to keep working for the organization. It’s a perk we give employees that can sometimes benefit the employer.
Employers should pay for training full stop and that used to be how it was. This idea that you need to learn what you are doing outside the company first or that you should be responsible for your training has only been a thing for about 35 years.
100% agree with you. That’s what college degrees were for, specialized education in a specific area of interest so you could enter the work force with minimal training, and we already pay out the nose for them in the USA. The article uses nursing jobs as an example. RNs in the USA get a bachelor’s which mandates on the job training to get the degree, and pass a licensing exam. The notion that a hospital has to do that much more additional training outside of the software they use for charting, pharmacy orders and communications is laughable.
Just in case anyone missed this gem from a few months ago: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/dont-tell-me-this-is-a-functional-country Case example for emts getting the same treatment.
When I was working as an EMT for a private company, we spent 30 minutes getting a patient to the ER following a stroke. This was one of the very rare times when that short window kept that dude alive (The overwhelming majority of people going to the hospital are not actually dying. Not even all stroke patients, or even most stroke patients.). I have no idea what that guy paid us, but I was making $9.50/hour, so I banked $4.75.
Two patients later I had offset the cost of my fast-food dinner. /s
how do we keep people working for us? Shall we pay them better? Nah we will just coerce them.
I’m certain that hiring managers would view reading the entire employment contract a major red flag.
This is called indentured servitude
Ah so slavery, the wonders of capitalism
