Posted on 10/21/2022 4:47:31 AM PDT by EBH
Workers quit in high numbers over the past few years — sometimes after being at the job under a year.
Some employers are demanding that quitting workers reimburse them for their training costs.
These agreements have generally been upheld in court, but are beginning to come under more scrutiny.
Companies have grappled with labor shortages over the last few years as workers have quit at near-record rates. Now some businesses are trying to make it more costly for employees to join the Great Resignation.
Nearly 10% of US workers are covered by training repayment agreement provisions, according to a study from the Cornell Survey Research Institute, first reported on by Reuters. These provisions, or "TRAPS" as critics calls them, require workers to reimburse their employer for some of their job training costs if they quit too soon.
Most prevalent in the healthcare, trucking, and retail industries, these agreements can cost quitting workers thousands of dollars. The Student Borrower Protection Center estimated in July that these agreements are prevalent in industries that collectively employ over one-third of US private-sector workers.
"Employers are looking for ways to keep their workers from quitting without raising wages or improving working conditions," Jonathan Harris, an associate law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, told Reuters.
Over the last several years, there's been an increase in not just quitting, but "quick quitting" — leaving one's job after less than 12 months, according to LinkedIn data. This was up nearly 10% versus the prior year as of March and remains elevated today.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
The business niche is infamous for what I call the 'churn and burn' on the staffing side. This means staff turn over can happen in less than 6 months as people realize the job is not what they imagined it to be. (not our fault as much of the downside is covered during interviewing) all they see are puppy dogs and kittens!
In fact, many people start in this business niche and go out of business in less than 5 years due to burn-out.
An interesting concept to add a clause to the employment contract of repaying for the training costs.
“Employers are looking for ways to keep their workers from quitting without raising wages or improving working conditions” ...
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i.e. indentured servitude
These idiots are only providing the incentive to eliminate their jobs completely.
Bet they’ll include DEI training as part of it.
And if you refuse to pay? Collecting that reimbursement will be impossible.
Which group of idiots are you referring to?
Competitive pay scales would solve the problem.
The employees who are quitting.
It will give incentive to try and automate things more.
What the employer will do is take $20 off each paycheque until he is reimbursed. If you quit before than, he will take it out of your final pay and then write off the remaining.
I have news for you, that has been the trend since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This is just one more attempt by corporations to own us.
If the employer wants a lawsuit. It is a stupid idea and will not stop employees from quitting to better their lives. Maybe you will recommend that corporations force workers onto “campus dormitories” AKA slave pens like China.
You comment like a slave-holding ass.
They could consider formal employment contracts: “I promise I won’t quit for 3 years, and you promise that I am guaranteed a job for 3 years.”
There is a downside for each party in such a contract, but I believe much of world operates that way. It’s just rare in the US.
I still don’t understand how people just quit and make ends meet especially with prices out of control.
I wonder if the employer can legally dock the payment from your last paycheck.
Instead of quitting, just pull a Peter Gibbons from Office Space.
Or show up in a t-shirt, board shorts, and Crocs while drunk and high…
I worked for a shipyard that had a very involved welder/shipfitter training program. The students were paid $10 an hour, and got better instruction than in any vocational program. They signed a contract agreeing to work a year. There was a pretty high drop out rate because this training program was like boot camp. You had to be on time, be there every day, and maintain a grade point average. My boss got the bright idea of trying to recover the costs of people who quit and assigned it to me. I sued 3 of them and won in small claims court before my boss realized we were never going to recover a penny and gave up. These students were young and did not have a penny their name.
Not hardly. Training is expensive. IT training for a week on a platform like Windows Server, RHEL, VMWare, etc. can cost upwards of 6000, plus whatever travel expenses are necessary to get to the training. So if you really think about it- 6000 for training, 50-100 a day for a rental car, 100-200 a day for a hotel, anywhere from 300-1500 for a flight, and then an entire week’s worth of lost productivity while the person is out of the office. It becomes very expensive very fast.
Over my entire career there has always been a form that needed to be signed off on at every employer for every training agreeing that if you leave the company within 2 years of getting the training you will be charged a pro-rated fee that correlates with the training expense.
In other industries, its pretty common to give people onboarding training and if they stay beyond however many days, 90-180 days, then they get a bonus, too.
Basically, this article is a bunch of typical media crap. This is a business practice that makes sense but also one that has been going on forever.
If I’m the employer and I pay out $20,000 over the course of several years to help an employee get an advanced degree in my STEM field, it’s ludicrous for anyone to suggest that I can’t recover that cost if the employee leaves and puts that degree to work for one of my competitors.
There was a time when the tech world went by the old standard that found less than 3 years at each employer to be a red flag of sorts.
But 3 years of existence can be a milestone for many tech startups and it now has become common and accepted for employees to skip from job to job at a once-a-year pace. Even a couple of shorter-stint hiccups are overlooked. Many especially junior positions are dumbed down enough for a year to be plenty for learning in the role and new and growing companies are eager to poach lightly experienced staff.
But it can also easily take an employer a year to spit out an incapable or underperforming employee and new employers can’t really tell the difference in a world where past employers don’t risk the liability of giving legit references.
So the cycle is now fairly complete. From grade school to college to employment, many Americans’ performance is woefully dumbed down to a level that has primed us for slipping out of first-world status, even discounting the now at least halfway-complete plan to import 100 million from the “developing” world.
“And if you refuse to pay? Collecting that reimbursement will be impossible.”
My company provides both paid and unpaid training. In other words, all internal trainings that are free are really just sunken costs the company will never get back. External training programs, unless you are let go for whatever reason, the expectation is you will give back at least one year after completing paid trainings.
Someone who worked for me took a $22,000 data analytics certification program which took me a month to justify for him, and once he completed it, a month later resigned to take a job at another company. The Company hadn’t yet paid for it and told the person they won’t pay for it, and he was on the hook for the full 22k.
He chose to pull his resignation. It didn’t matter. I wound up doing a deeper dive into his performance for his annual review and based on very poor performance ranked him very low. Two months later he was put on work force reduction. The Company then paid for his certification.
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