More US Employers Are Trapping Workers in a New Form of Indentured Servitude

When you have no connections, no resources, no work history in the field, dependents to support.... Shit $42k was still more than I was making in the career I came from. I took it then and people are still taking that stuff now. They aren't wrong to do so either, but the ones exploiting them in this way are wrong to do it.

Can you argue that I was vulnerable and my original company took advantage of the situation? Perhaps. But nobody else was hiring me so in my eyes they were the company that treated me the best at the time.

The visa says who you’re allowed to work for. Leave the company (or get fired or laid off) and you have 10 days to leave the country or find another job that will sponsor your visa. As you can imagine few people choose to leave the company under these conditions.

Best part is that companies can also appeal to the employee’s sense of fairness: “We paid $10,000 for your visa. You value that favor from us don’t you? Imagine if you had to pay that yourself”

I guess you don't mean www.thebodyshop.com ???

Several bodyshops popped up that specialize in international recruitment, sponsor healthcare workers internationally who expect significantly lower comp, and work out the logistics of getting them licensed, sponsored, and moved where demand exists (note that I say logistics, the person often pays some or all of these fees). They offer a low rate to these international workers (which is high to them) by your typical position advertising gymnastics then rent them out to healthcare providers in set contracts. The worker signs a contract that typically includes a fee for breach of contract. For nurses and physical therapists, I've seen it at $20-$40k which doesn't seem significant until you consider the person likely has nothing of that magnitude in savings because they came from a poorer area.

You then may think, well healthcare workers can make $100+k so with strict savings one could limit their indentured servitude and breach before, then realize they're actually paying closer to $40-60k to their workers, benefiting of economies of scale to manage the logistics (like managing visas) and pocketing the rest of the margins. The workers are often locked into these areas for several years before they're financially stable enough to leave while bodyshops dangle greencard sponsorship over their heads which is a long process in and of itself but is even longer when it's a carrot held for 3-5 years of servitude first.

Once your workers have their greencards they have more leverage in negotiation and typically move on to make truly competitive salaries. Meanwhile, the bodyshops basically pocket high margins, manage a little bit of risk, and just leech off those in desperate situations (hospitals, their patients, and international workers looking to better themselves).

Some may say this is just the cost of admission to immigrate to the US. I think it's more a failure of neoliberal principles. I imagine IT isn't much different. The work visa program is largely used as just a leveraged global labor recruitment position for businesses to exploit. It wasn't designed this way and isn't always used this way, but it is done far far too often.

Isn't this the scheme at most places?

Seriously, there is a difference between a college and upfront knowledge about fees and someone trying to trick you into an indentured servant "job".

If the "higher taxes" argument is what's implied, the return on an educated populace would show in GDP, likely reflect in lower crime rates, improvements in quality of life, among other things.

Some HN readers do live in countries where higher education is free ish.

I passed on a job opportunity early on in my career because there was a clawback provision in my employment agreement that was very transparent and yet very brutal. I couldn't imagine taking that job and being entrapped by that clawback provision after I'd started.

Not to mention that having enough well-rested folks with a CDL means that everyone is a little more secure, and we are more likely to have enough people to drive busses and transport goods in emergencies. (Yes, I know it'll take more than lowering the schooling costs to fix all this, but it is a start)

You can even enter into agreements with them, that if they pass you must employ them.

There's no need for an agreement tying someone to an employer. Such things are very dangerous, since it has the potential to give the employer very great power.

- Pilot training comes with a certification for the person that applies to any pilot job.

- Pilot training is usually provided by a certified training organization and follows an industry-established curriculum.

- The price of the training is discoverable in advance and there is a competitive market for providing the training.

Whereas the PetSmart program comes with no certification, doesn't follow a published industry curriculum, and the price is fixed directly by PetSmart with no ability to obtain the training elsewhere.

The pilot training situation may not be ideal, but it's clear to me the PetSmart program exists primarily to lock employees into jobs at PetSmart.

If some scumbag company is trying to squeeze employees for training costs, you really think they'll pay tens of thousands for a lawyer to sue over this?

It's empty threats.

Are these legal?

Does anyone have experiences with blacklists from the hiring side? I have never seen such a thing. How are they shared? How does one know if someone is on the list for a good reason? How does it scale?

But also, given the rest of the post I suspect it was a typo and prottog meant to say "it's likely that most employees in this kind of circumstance can't tell their employers to stuff it without any adverse consequence"

Pursuing a graduate degree is optional (outside of select professionals - lawyers, doctors, prof engineers). You can attend graduate school outside the scope of employment (on your own dime). The market for graduate programs is competitive. And the degree retains its value beyond the immediate job placement.

PetSmart should be required to prove that its training program provides actual, long-term value to the employee if they want to claw back the money spent on training. In my mind, the program would need to result in a legitimate industry certification for that to be true...

As is the case for some skilled trades, where you complete an apprenticeship or other training and earn membership in the trade union. Or trucking, railway engineering, or commercial pilots.

And let me address dropping out of Stanford in other ways: first that's what I always wanted was to drop out of Stanford; I was never ever going to graduate in a million years barely kept up; then I don't get asked for a GPA ("F as in fuck you", no clue what the GPA is); then further, I front-loaded my classes so put the cool classes first and the required classes never; then at any rate it was more of an impasse than a true act of dropping out, I was told I could enroll after paying a third successive fee, each fee immediately replaced by a new fee, well couldn't enroll fine, done, had to do it before 4 full years too. And most of all--if I did graduate Stanford would rescind my degree, which they have the legal right to do for any reason they see fit. Then not only would I not have a degree after all that sacrifice and submission the whole fifth year saying fifth year student being excluded from everything, like everything asks what year you are that's the reason, it's weird. No word for them, fifth year, not freshman sophomore junior senior, don't even get mentioned. But they can never take away my dropping out. Stanford dropout.

And get this, this is difficult to plagiarize so I'm going to share: I was in a club and was asked where I had gone to school, just blurted "Oh, I dropped out of Stanford!" It has to be real though, you actually have to drop out of Stanford for this line to work. That's what I mean difficult to plagiarize. But if you did great! Name a single other Stanford dropout. Can you? Sam Altman? Honorary degree from Waterloo. Evan Spiegel? Went back and graduated for his son's sake. Tiger Woods I would say yes, dropped out of undergrad plus in golf it's critical to drop out, Michelle Wie of my year did the same thing for the same reasons. Athlete. There's actresses--also makes perfect sense to drop out then, there's actresses who graduate and it kills their career, in one case she was too old especially to get her career started, Hollywood formally preferred that she drop out.

Elizabeth Holmes did it for real, like yes she's dealing with criminal charges but she's paying the price after all, and she played her cards right in so many ways, put a company together and could possibly have come up with the tech after the fact. Allowing for like crazy lies fine a bullshit artist but unrivaled bullshit artist, like Adam Neumann also. Master bullshitters. But masters all the same. So right morally legally strategically bad move, Holmes was first doing the company-building, like the sales the dealing with investors (some say that's the hardest part in business) the valuation, the image, the persona, the bravado, the connections, pulling it off without a female precedent solo founder, having no precedent is rough. Like yeah she lied and needed to stretch, and then keep stretching, but it was conceivable the company she formed could actually make the tech properly. And dude I in fact vouch that Stanford CS majors practically or literally all cheat. It wasn't pure bullshit, there were experiments carried out that actually worked, there was some merit, and in fact good that the Stanford profs said it couldn't be done dude ask me all about that, there's impossible problems it's legitimate to attempt them. It's a very good sign that it be considered impossible for reasons that can't be conveyed trivially. But it was still a full-time job (probably around the clock), and on top of all that--she actually remained a dropout to this day. An actual undergraduate techie dropout. It's not a failure by any means to be a dropout. Except from--in many cases--the first person point-of-view, feeling incomplete without a degree.

But dropouts are critical to the American economy, the majority of FAANG founders and co-founders were dropouts. The majority.

Look at GIAC certs for example, with training it costs close to 10k. Most people can't afford that without employers paying for it and it is transferable.

About being illegal, I am not talking about that either, legal or not if you agree to something having all the facts clearly portrayed to you, you are responsible for what happens if you agree to it.

I think the real root cause is you and others seem to think lack of alternate opportunities equates coercion, which I disagree with. I also disagree that improvement of people's lives can be more important than basic fairness,equality, accountability and justice. You are only formalizing fraud and corruption that way.

You make a good point about forced arbitration, but with that it isn't specific but general to cover all disputes which you don't know when you sign that agreement. It also circumvents legal procedure where even if you think it is in your best interest and agree to it, it isn't in the interest of justice. Oh and how is that not enforced but plea agreements are?? (Is there anything more slavery like than prison???)

My employer has paid for my IT certs stipulating a hefty debt if I leave in less than a year.

Assuming you are getting paid a living wage and the obligation is for a year or less I see no problem at all.

>>The fact that you pivot immediately into an irrelevant argument against income tax has no bearing on the companies using debt as a way to force employee retention.

Taxation is in fact how we solve the problem of trading liberty for security in the absence of indentured servitude. To elaborate: people need economic security, and many are willing to submit to tax obligations, or in the past, to indentured servitude, to get it.

So it's entirely relevant to the question of whether this kind of training for debt arrangement is consistent with accepted social mores, no matter how much you may want to over-simplify and wrap up the discussion.

In practice, the vast majority of people need to work. Whatever the income tax rate is, is the proportion of the labor that is being involuntarily done for the government.

The culture at GM was such that a lot of people were "lifers". The book "The Organization Man" [0] seemed to describe how many people lived/acted. EDS was founded by Ross Perot, who was a very charismatic person [1]. He was also a "love him or hate him - there's no in between" person. I admired his ability to stir up GM and I remember many of his antics that annoyed the pants off of the board at GM [2]. According to Perot, the culture at IBM was also full of "lifers" which led to his founding EDS.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Organization_Man

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot > Perot joined the Boy Scouts of America and made Eagle Scout in 1942, after 13 months in the program. After 2 years as a scout, I was still a tenderfoot. :)

2 - He annoyed the board so much that they ended up paying him over $100M to go away (his shares were promised to be between $X & $Y, so they payed the difference between market and $X). I thought that he had a chance to make changes at GM and turn the company around. The execs were terribly insulated from reality, but they chose to live in their bubble rather than do the (painful) things that GM needed to do to survive.