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Comment by prottog | Hacker News Reader

The absurdity of the name aside, this is unconscionable on the part of the employers, and it's likely that most employees in this kind of circumstance can tell their employers to stuff it without any adverse consequence.

One thing worth keeping in mind for prospective entrants to the workplace: if any employer says you owe them money (for acts other than intentional or gross negligence, which for the most part employees are nevertheless legally not liable, but may feel ethically responsible), then it is no longer an employee-employer relationship. Put another way: if you're not an equity partner in a business or a strictly independent contractor who signed an agreement saying otherwise, you should never have to pay an employer for anything.

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"it's likely that most employees in this kind of circumstance can tell their employers to stuff it without any adverse consequence."

wrong.

you can be fired for no reason

you can be put on a blacklist and become unhirable

you can have your unemployment denied

you can lose your healthcare

if you have some kind of court situation where you have to have a job to stay out of prison, you can lose your freedom

now put that up against being homeless , being sick, being in prison, then you do whatever the man says.

this is how bad things are, and how completely irrelevant the legal system is to the working class

> you can be put on a blacklist and become unhirable

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?

Yeah, in my experience with bad workers managers just want to be rid of them. The last thing they want is to be saddled with making sure he is punished after leaving the job. Maybe I just have not experienced the true psychopathic boss yet.

Most likely it’s field-specific. There’s been things like this in the U.K. where construction workers were blacklisted if they joined a union.

Not legal for sure. But there are things that are done informally that are similar. Like at one company where I was a hiring manager we used head hunters heavily. Most head hunter companies are bad (in my experience) but the better ones try to match good candidates with good companies. They have extensive networks with other head hunters and often see the same candidates repeatedly. When they see red flags they cull those candidates or maybe present them to the "bad" companies (the ones they aren't concerned about damaging their relationship with).

Another method is that hiring managers at different companies may have good relationships with each other. Not competitor companies, but adjacent. They may call around and ask about a candidate. You can never say anything negative about a candidate; that's just asking to be sued. I think many (most?) companies have a strict policy that you can only say if a candidate is eligible for rehire or not, nothing else. So you talk in vague generalities, never about the candidate, only about the general hiring process. Something like "Company policy prevents me from giving any recommendation whatsoever, so my advice is that you should always be very careful in your hiring process" versus "Company policy prevents me from giving any recommendation whatsoever, but an effective hiring process can yield great employees." You might argue that a judge would see right through that and say it is obvious which candidate you are recommending and which you are panning. But it's so nonspecific that your lawyer can strongly push back, should it come to that.

Not paying the minimum wage is illegal, as well. Doesn't stop employers from cheating ~20% of eligible workers in US on that.

> Are these legal?

Would that change anything ? Of course those lists wouldn't be broadcasted publicly.

> Does anyone have experiences with blacklists from the hiring side?

There's that "over 40" list I have seen once when I was on the hiring side. There's also that "good gender" list which benefited me when I was on the hired side once.

Well you read about them in the Great Depression, the workers who lead the rest to strike would in fact end up on blacklists. Get blackballed, never get a job anywhere no matter how small a wage they were willing to work for (before minimum wage, well irrelevant), they were known by face (photographs, happened to me) but in the employment situation in America today, it's not to that point of there being blacklists, and besides strikes and unions are not the answer they were then.

Also if you aren't a citizen and your immigration status is dependent on your employment (or you are an illegal immigrant), you can be deported.

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"

How hard would it be for a random person to fight back successfully though? If it requires hiring a lawyer that might be enough barrier itself. All they have to do is ensure they don’t pay the worker enough to hire a lawyer.

The companies might find it difficult to actually get legal enforcement against poorly compensated employees. It seems like more of a scare tactic.

To me, it’s just slavery. Don’t care about any seeming mitigating factors.

An entity doesn't need 'legal enforcement' for a supposed debt when they can threaten to or send someone to collections and ruin their credit/drain their time to fighting it, though.

See sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32906450

See what? An irrelevant comment that doesn't address the fact that one doesn't get to magically wish away a corporation's claim (unjust or not) of debt against an individual? Because that's not how debt works ("just ignore it") and directly ignores the article:

"Although critics question the legality of TRAPs, a legal analysis published last year found that courts generally uphold the agreements in challenges brought under anti-kickback provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the law establishing a federal minimum wage. However, the author of the study, Loyola Marymount associate law professor Jonathan F. Harris, said another type of legal challenge might prove more successful: courts could refuse to enforce TRAP contract language under the so-called unconscionability doctrine, a legal principle that allows judges to void agreements containing unreasonable terms dictated by a party “with superior bargaining power.” In 2000, the study noted, a federal judge in Manhattan nullified one employment agreement in the financial services industry, ruling that the language of the contract “approaches indentured servitude.”"

So, I don't get where you or the other person in this thread are getting the idea that this is a non issue because you can just ignore the contract terms. I too wish this was a non issue for those involved and ignorable, because it's despicable. It's obviously unconscionable and a problem that these companies are attempting to extort money from disadvantaged populations (not the supposedly previously narrower, highly paid technical applications of the agreements) even if said agreements existed in a counterfactual universe in which a corporation pursuing you for debt was a non issue. Debt is not expensive to draft continuous demand letters against or to transfer to a collections agency. Plus, you know, the above paragraph in the article.

If you're at all the target audience for this website, you and your entire social circle are soft targets for debt collectors. You have a high credit score and care about it, you have bank accounts and non-retirement investment accounts, you may have home equity in a state that doesn't protect the hell out of it like Texas, etc. If you get sued for $20k and a judgement gets entered, odds are your creditor ends up getting the full $20k. If this isn't you then I apologize for stereotyping, but this does describe a majority of the commentariat here.

A lot of the subjects of these articles are from very different socioeconomic backgrounds and will have a very different experience. Their bank account either doesn't exist or has like a week's pay in it. If they have investments, they're in an untouchable 401(k). They may live in a state that forbids wage garnishment, and even if you get that their wages may already be garnished and immune to further action. You might be able to grab their tax refunds, but those might already be spoken for by other creditors. And to top it all off, bankruptcy court can at any time issue a stay of proceedings and follow it up with a discharge of debts.

In short, there's a reason why most consumer debts are sold on for pennies on the dollar. That's what you actually get from it - maybe you talk some poor sod into paying $20/mo on a $20k debt that you bought for $200. Especially against an intransigent target that rightfully believes the debt to be morally invalid, you can find it extremely difficult to actually collect on a debt.

Anyhow, my point is that attempting to enforce these contract provisions invites PR/legal/political blowback that far outweighs maybe getting a thousand dollars out of the small cohort that actually calls the bluff and makes them make them pay.

Courts will enforce contracts for all kinds of things many would consider unconscionable, I wouldn’t want that to be my backup plan.

It's not hard, you just ignore it.

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.

Sure, why wouldn't they? They only need to make an example of one employee every now and then to deter the rest.

What example? How can they get any money out of someone that doesn't have anything? Eventually, the debt will go to collections and someone might get 10% of the money collected.

From the article:

" Although critics question the legality of TRAPs, a legal analysis published last year found that courts generally uphold the agreements in challenges brought under anti-kickback provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the law establishing a federal minimum wage. However, the author of the study, Loyola Marymount associate law professor Jonathan F. Harris, said another type of legal challenge might prove more successful: courts could refuse to enforce TRAP contract language under the so-called unconscionability doctrine, a legal principle that allows judges to void agreements containing unreasonable terms dictated by a party “with superior bargaining power.” In 2000, the study noted, a federal judge in Manhattan nullified one employment agreement in the financial services industry, ruling that the language of the contract “approaches indentured servitude.” "

Additionally, it does not cost tend of thousands of dollars to have a law firm draft demand letters for debt. Even if the debt is contestable, theoretically, it remains a huge problem and not something that can be ignored.

I've been in a similar situation before. Employers who put this sort of stuff in their contracts are like landlords who say "you have to repaint the place on your own dime after 10 years of living there". They think they are being cleaver.

These employers don't want to go to court, they don't want to collect the debt, they just like scary language.

My employer threatened me with similar language, so I shrugged my shoulders and said "ok?".

Never heard of it again. They won't spend $20 to buy pizza for their employees, you think they'll spend money on lawyers?

You’re rolling the dice there on corporate attitude. If they’ve got lawyers on their payroll already it will just be standard cost of business to sue yet another employee. Or just straight up vindictiveness.

You can't get blood from a stone, and there's no law that says you can't deliberately set up your finances to be maximally stone-like. IMO you should be doing this anyways so that the medical billing system can't decide to steal your life savings.

Pretty much. The older I get, the more I realize there are "rules" and then there is what people are actually willing to do.

Workers successfully sue their employers all the time.

Not enough of them to put off many employers from doing the things that they could be sued for, it would seem given how many companies behave.

If the cost of being successfully sued is significant but survivable, and the chance of someone bothering and succeeding is small, then they often feel that they can go right ahead and do what they want relatively safely. Note that “and succeeding” includes not being intimidated into backing down, or conned/cajoled/intimidated into taking a small hush payment instead – once someone sets out to sue the employer still have options to try significantly minimise the potential damage.

> Not enough of them to put off many employers from doing the things that they could be sued for, it would seem given how many companies behave.

I've talked to corporate lawyers about this. Larger companies have teams of lawyers dealing with an incessant stream of lawsuits by employees. A large percentage of them are completely without merit, and both parties know this. But it's cheaper to settle than go to court, which is why employees sue for the cash grab. It really doesn't matter how well a larger corp treats its employees, they'll get sued again and again anyway.

A larger corp is just a bigger, fatter, juicier target for lawsuits.

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