I'm shocked a company with such practices exists in the USA in 2021. I wish workers rights are brought up more often during presidential and mid term elections.
TL;DR: A scummy company that charges people money for training and equipment, and has people pay off this debt along with interest.
This is a shitty situation, and it should be illegal. But calling this slavery and throwing up a picture of galley rowing slaves is grossly inappropriate. People are not turned into property. This is coercion through debt. Also galleys rowers were a skilled or at least semi skilled occupation, a task rarely given to slaves and at least in the ancient world navies it commanded higher pay than infantry.
> Currently, debt bondage is the most common method of enslavement with an estimated 8.1 million people bonded to labour illegally as cited by the International Labour Organization in 2005. Debt bondage has been described by the United Nations as a form of "modern day slavery" and the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery seeks to abolish the practice.
>The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely.[2] Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.
Debt bondage is when people are enslaved on the pretext of debt. These people do not have the freedom leave their jobs, and this deprivation of liberty is enforced by society.
This is not the case with these jobs. "You have to pay to quit" is not correct, people can quit any time even if they don't have any money. What they mean is that people when they quit have to pay back the cost of equipment ans training, and if they can't pay it becomes a debt. This kind of scheme is common in trucking. A company gives training and a truck in exchange for working for the trucking company. But then they charge an interest and a truck rental fee, and the driver ultimately can't make enough money to pay off the loan [1]. The result is that the driver ends up filing for bankruptcy. This is a predatory loan wrapped up in an employment opportunity.
It is at best highly sensational to equate this with the slavery detailed in your wikipedia link. Let alone to invoke the Holocaust:
> The whole family goes into lockdown like Anne Frank in the attic as soon as Mom dials into her terrible job.
A prime minister of Sweden stated that "He, who is in debt, is not free". Sometimes nuances makes communicating concepts less efficient, and debt bondage is one such case.
Agreed, And the whole chicken farmer tangent only served to undermine the argument only served as a red herring for me. Should every small business with one customer be forced to merge?
Doctorow is a hopeless socialist who has lost it even in areas I once thought he had a clue about.
That behavior shouldn't be made illegal - it is already illegal (if what the outsouring company has been doing is illegal).
As for their contractors: before you sign a contract that makes you buy something, or take a loan, or generally anything you do not understand, spend 15 minutes checking what it is about and if you still don't understand your obligations, do not sign. Get another gig, or just stay unemployed if you think the risk is not worth it.
If you get screwed, seek other people who got screwed and figure out if you can sue the person or organization who scammed you. But don't blame capitalism - blame yourself or busybodies like Doctorow who helped make the regulations so complex. In a free market economy you'd get a simple one page contract you can understand. In fake capitalism you get 10 pages of fineprint.
> A rare option was "self-purchase" (the term itself revealing the base illogic of slavery). In 1839 almost half (42%) of the free blacks in Cincinnati, Ohio, had bought their freedom1 and were striving to create new lives while searching for and purchasing their own relatives.
Sounds like another instance of "complete imbecile retards don't understand the difference between slavery and contract work... or don't care".
The employment laws required businesses to do way too much for their employees for no benefit to them. So, they found ways to employ people with short term contracts. That works better if you can contract out to other countries where labor is cheaper.
As someone who started out the career as one of those contractors, I can say that it is definitely not "slavery". I voluntarily worked in such jobs because it paid far more than anything else that did in the local economy, even if I found a job there, that is.
> So even though these workers are more tightly supervised and managed than any regular employee, they have no rights.
Except that they have the right to quit. Any article that calls workers with the right to quit is hyperbolic and already made me doubt other "facts" that are written.
> The DoL was a known problem in 2010.
> One of Trump's last-minute regulations was a rollback that protected workers from being misclassified as contractors. The Biden admin could reverse that regulation.
Well that wouldn't fix the exact issue being described as happening in 2010.
This article (if true) has a lot of powerful things to right. Such as the cost for training and quiting or how businesses can decline to pay fees. As an article talking about misclassifying workers it does an awful job of misclassifying slavery.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] thread> Biden faces an immediate, urgent test of his willingness to tackle worker misclassification
I guess put down that covid hat and put on his misclassification hat, stat?
But on topic, welcome to the working from home world some people are rushing to create.
How does it help any corporation to do that?
If it doesn't, why would think-tanks pay for that to be discussed in major media?
If they don't, why would it ever be brought up in any political discussion?
This is a shitty situation, and it should be illegal. But calling this slavery and throwing up a picture of galley rowing slaves is grossly inappropriate. People are not turned into property. This is coercion through debt. Also galleys rowers were a skilled or at least semi skilled occupation, a task rarely given to slaves and at least in the ancient world navies it commanded higher pay than infantry.
It turns out there's a term for when people are coerced to work through debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage
> Currently, debt bondage is the most common method of enslavement with an estimated 8.1 million people bonded to labour illegally as cited by the International Labour Organization in 2005. Debt bondage has been described by the United Nations as a form of "modern day slavery" and the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery seeks to abolish the practice.
>The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely.[2] Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.
Debt bondage is when people are enslaved on the pretext of debt. These people do not have the freedom leave their jobs, and this deprivation of liberty is enforced by society.
This is not the case with these jobs. "You have to pay to quit" is not correct, people can quit any time even if they don't have any money. What they mean is that people when they quit have to pay back the cost of equipment ans training, and if they can't pay it becomes a debt. This kind of scheme is common in trucking. A company gives training and a truck in exchange for working for the trucking company. But then they charge an interest and a truck rental fee, and the driver ultimately can't make enough money to pay off the loan [1]. The result is that the driver ends up filing for bankruptcy. This is a predatory loan wrapped up in an employment opportunity.
It is at best highly sensational to equate this with the slavery detailed in your wikipedia link. Let alone to invoke the Holocaust:
> The whole family goes into lockdown like Anne Frank in the attic as soon as Mom dials into her terrible job.
1. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901110994/big-rigged
That behavior shouldn't be made illegal - it is already illegal (if what the outsouring company has been doing is illegal).
As for their contractors: before you sign a contract that makes you buy something, or take a loan, or generally anything you do not understand, spend 15 minutes checking what it is about and if you still don't understand your obligations, do not sign. Get another gig, or just stay unemployed if you think the risk is not worth it.
If you get screwed, seek other people who got screwed and figure out if you can sue the person or organization who scammed you. But don't blame capitalism - blame yourself or busybodies like Doctorow who helped make the regulations so complex. In a free market economy you'd get a simple one page contract you can understand. In fake capitalism you get 10 pages of fineprint.
> A rare option was "self-purchase" (the term itself revealing the base illogic of slavery). In 1839 almost half (42%) of the free blacks in Cincinnati, Ohio, had bought their freedom1 and were striving to create new lives while searching for and purchasing their own relatives.
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/emancipation/t...
The employment laws required businesses to do way too much for their employees for no benefit to them. So, they found ways to employ people with short term contracts. That works better if you can contract out to other countries where labor is cheaper.
As someone who started out the career as one of those contractors, I can say that it is definitely not "slavery". I voluntarily worked in such jobs because it paid far more than anything else that did in the local economy, even if I found a job there, that is.
But he should not have compared it to Anne Frank in the attic.
In nuanced conversation, it should be possible to believe both of the preceding two sentences at the same time.
Except that they have the right to quit. Any article that calls workers with the right to quit is hyperbolic and already made me doubt other "facts" that are written.
> The DoL was a known problem in 2010. > One of Trump's last-minute regulations was a rollback that protected workers from being misclassified as contractors. The Biden admin could reverse that regulation.
Well that wouldn't fix the exact issue being described as happening in 2010.
This article (if true) has a lot of powerful things to right. Such as the cost for training and quiting or how businesses can decline to pay fees. As an article talking about misclassifying workers it does an awful job of misclassifying slavery.