I expected this to be bad, full of things like "forced to buy own equipment" and "only paid for time on phone," but it's so much worse. Days of training you need to pay for? Two different companies charging you monthly fees to work for them? Just absurd.
Sure, but how much more than they penalize for quitting? Their limit is pretty much how much they can dishonestly withhold from the last paycheck, and considering the shitty pay, probably minimal.
But true, the key is to read the contracts in detail and find the least costly way out.
Or, better yet, to read it before starting and realize that the only winning move is to not play the game.
I thought one of the most interesting parts of this article was the section discussing the tests used to determine if a person is considered an employee. Quoting from the story:
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To determine if a worker, no matter how labeled, is actually an independent contractor or an employee, courts have fashioned an “economic realities test.”
In Pendergraft’s case, the arbitrator, Deborah Hankinson, a former justice on the Supreme Court of Texas, weighed the test’s six factors, checking off those that suggested Pendergraft had been an Arise employee. Did Arise exercise significant control over Pendergraft? Check. “Arise closely monitored all aspects of her work,” Hankinson wrote. Were agents like Pendergraft vital to Arise’s business? Check. “Without CSPs, Arise would have no service to sell,” the arbitrator wrote. Was Pendergraft’s work the kind that required no specialized skill? Check. In the end, Hankinson checked five of the six factors — and the sixth, she determined, could go either way. “Ms. Pendergraft was an employee of Arise,” the arbitrator concluded.
In her ruling issued in February 2015, Hankinson found that Arise, as Pendergraft’s employer, had been required by federal law to pay her the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. The company also had to pay for her training time and equipment expenses.
Added up, that came to $5,841.82.
But that wasn’t all. Employers who violate the Fair Labor Standards Act face lower damages if they can show they had reason to believe they were in the right. An employer, for example, could present evidence that it had consulted labor law experts and followed their advice. Since Arise made no such showing, Hankinson doubled the damages, ordering Arise to pay Pendergraft $11,683.64.
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On the customer end Rogers attempts to maximize ARPU (average revenue per user) by being as cheap to upgrade, and charge the most they can for their often sub-par service.
I had a corporate Rogers cell phone, near-zero coverage where i live and where i spent a lot of my time and had to move to Telus.
On the Customer service side, we see them doing everything they possibly can to get people as cheaply as possible.
I'm sure rogers execs were "excited" at the idea the CSR's would pay for the training costs.
The current customer service is so bad that people who call get traumatized so next time they call they put up their defenses and sound more of an asshole than they typically are. The customer service reps then assume (as you have done) that people who call in are absolute assholes and therefore give less of a fuck when answering calls next time. The cycle repeats.
Perhaps, but I think a greater cause of this is people feeling more free to be their "true self" to a voice on the phone, behaving in a way they never would if confronting someone face-to-face.
I used to do business negotiations as an attorney. COVID shifted those negotiations to video chat/phone. People are much more entrenched, much less willing to compromise, and they generally act like even wider gaping assholes on those platforms than they do in person. Hence the "used to."
"After paying about $1,500 for home office equipment: a computer, two headsets and a phone line dedicated to Arise; after paying Arise to run a check on her background; after passing Arise’s voice-assessment test and signing Arise’s nondisclosure form; after paying for and passing Arise’s introductory training, to which she devoted three days, unpaid; after paying for and passing a certification course to provide customer service for Arise client AT&T, to which she devoted 44 unpaid days; after then being informed she had to get more training yet — an additional 10 days, for which she was told she would be paid, but wasn’t; and then, after finally getting a chance to sign up for hours and do work for which she would be paid (except for her time spent waiting for technical support, or researching customer issues, or huddling with supervisors), Tami Pendergraft spent three weeks fielding telephone calls from AT&T customers, after which she received a single paycheck for $96.12"
That may not be illegal, but it sure as heck should be.
This article is kind of a mess, but if you get to the end you learn yes these cases were found to be illegal in arbitration hearings. Unfortunately they were not allowed to proceed with a class action lawsuit because of arbitration rules, so they would need to fight it one at a time.
These arbitration rules superceding class action is a fairly new phenomenon, and stems from an att v concepcion. A guy I met clerked for a judge that decided that case, and wrote most of the decision and he said that he regretted it enormously. Despite just being the mouthpiece of his pos judge, he sees his words quoted over and over denying exploitation. The whole premise is insane, and guts class actions.
isn't that good for employees and bad for the employer? Each employee can do the same exact arbitration, and win. The employer, rather than wasting lawyers for 1 class action, now must pay for each individual arbitration
Most people in this situation are struggling to feed their family, they don't have time for arbitration. And the only way they'd get representation is from someone doing a class action for a cut of the winnings. So they either need litigation with teeth (big class actions with massive punitive damages) or regulatory oversight with similar strength, to make employers unwilling to risk it. Or strong unions that can negotiate and effectively with hold labor as a group.
It depends a lot on the wording of the arbitration agreement.
Many of these people are struggling to make ends meet and it’s a lot of effort and lost work to risk for a small payout, but if enough individual claims are won it doesn’t take much effort for some lawyers to start automating the process and file tens of thousands of claims like those against Uber.
Oh no - you're facing millions of dollars in mandatory fees to defend against thousands of nearly identical cases in arbitration? My goodness, who forced you to adopt that arbitration clause? How terrible of them.
That depends on (1) whether future arbitration cases are guaranteed the same outcome as those already settled, and (2) whether this outcome becomes as generally known amongst victims as a class action lawsuit would be.
Lastly: I'm not a corporate lawyer, so I don't know what legal reasons a company has to prefer arbitration over legal procedures. But they must have some. And those reasons are unlikely to lead to worse outcomes for the company.
Arbitration is a contentious legal issue, despite being present in many types of contracts.
It is contentious because legal research has repeatedly demonstrated that there are legal fields in which for an undetermined reason the plaintiff faces far longer odds than they would have in court.
This concerns arbitrations that in 90% of cases are in favor of the defendant. While in 'normal' case law you see rates closer to 60%. (Yes the research also accounted for cost differences by comparing similar classes of cases, no-cure-no-pay etc..)
It is also suspected that the plaintif usually gets less compensation for damages through arbitration.
Another issue is that arbitrators sometimes earn a lot money and are obviously incentivised to attract 'customers'. The problem is that there are and will always be many more plaintiffs than there are defendants. So the selection of arbitrators depends on decisions by the future-defendants. (Unless a specific organisation is legally mandated, but I've not encountered this before)
How do they measure the number of cases that go either way? I assume this excludes settlements? If so it would explain the discrepancy. Arbitration is so much cheaper than going to trial that it would make sense to try a weaker case just based on risk vs reward.
Employer often selects the arbitrator and is therefore a repeat player. This sets incentives for the arbitrator, no matter how fair they intend to be.
Also, pretrial discovery is much broader in a class action, so much more expensive. The procedures available to a plaintiff in an arbitration are much more limited.
But big picture, it’s better to have more options rather than fewer.
Arbitration does not have precedent, so each case has to be argued separately and can have different outcomes. On top of that burden and can have fee-shifting provisions that set a significant hurdle to pay upfront costs on the employee. Class action waivers are bullshit.
Yeah not a lawyer and not sure if it’s a good for employees not, but I think companies started recently removing arbitration clauses because of this reason?
Cars are often more convenient than public transit, but many people can’t afford a car payment, insurance, maintenance, fuel, parking, tolls, etc. For these people, if there’s no bus/train, they walk or bike, even if it’s not safe or is not time-efficient to do so.
To me, there's a world of difference between "lost at arbitration" and "is illegal." I'm saying that the rules should be clear-cut up front. To draw a comparison with another company that skirts this line: if Uber required drivers to take customer service classes before allowing them to drive people around, and especially if the drivers had to pay for those classes, that, to me, should be illegal.
When you hire a gardener to mow your lawn, you don't get to specify whether they use a Greenworks or Black & Decker mower. Or require that they pay you to train them how to trim your junipers.
In this situation, the law should be clear up front that this sort of relationship is disallowed, such that the circumstance never occurs to go to arbitration.
It might be illegal. Some US states (and my province in Canada) have labour laws where your employer generally cannot require you to pay expenses for equipment necessary to do the job. (Someone who brings their equipment to do the job is a contractor, not an employee.) Many jurisdictions also require that required job-specific training be paid.
This issue came up a lot with work from home during the pandemic. Did your power bill go up from running your employer-provided hardware at home? In some jurisdictions, they have to compensate you even for that.
> Some US states (and my province in Canada) have labour laws where your employer generally cannot require you to pay expenses for equipment necessary to do the job. (Someone who brings their equipment to do the job is a contractor, not an employee.)
I think you would be shocked at how often this happens.
I once had a major Canadian bank try to make me buy a cell phone so they could avoid a minimal monthly charge for one??
HR in Canada is rife with abuse, because they are under no obligation to tell you what the laws actually are. Your ignorance of the laws works to their advantage.
See "non disclosure agreements" in Canada for a prime example.
Such machinations often do not hold up, legally. If the employer simply declaring that the employee is a contractor made them a contractor, all minimum wage employees would be contractors, probably.
There's usually a definition or test, either in statute or case law. In my jurisdiction, whether you have a boss or supervisor is a major factor. Contractors are given a specific task to complete and then they go do it. If you're getting daily monitoring or tasks assigned throughout the day, you're probably an employee.
Like with not paying minimum wage or illegal deductions, employers often get away with it. The power imbalance is very large for such workers, and even when enforced the fines are often just a cost of doing business. In Ontario, Canada there's a couple billion dollars in unpaid wages every year, and hundreds of investigations for wilful wage nonpayment by managers, yet there has been exactly one jail sentence for it, in the last twenty years. With odds like that, I might steal too!
Very unethical for companies to not disclose this information as well. I would pay extra for customer support if I was sure that it was going to the company's actual employees than some for-hire disposable contract workers.
So long as the workers are paid fairly and treated reasonably (which of course these Arise employees were not), why does it matter if they are actual employees? Actual employees can be treated poorly too.
It’s over 50% so on average this is not true. But it nearly became true in 2008; turns out the Great Recession was bad. The trend after that is somewhat positive.
Though a problem with “exploited” is it’s zero sum thinking and doesn’t include customer surplus. If you get life saving surgery, you could say it has infinite value to you. If the surgeon asks for an infinite price, they’re exploiting you. If they don't, since you are therefore getting infinite unpaid value, are you exploiting them?
nb the people in this article are certainly being exploited, this is covered in theory under “monopsony”…
Who said that the exploited labor had to be in your country?
Does everyone have collective amnesia about Nike’s SE Asian sweatshops, or the hazardous working conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories that manufacture the most of our cheap fashion (the most glaring example being the Tazreen Fashion factory fire [0]).
Someone, somewhere is getting screwed out of fair wages for the corporation to make its profits.
> There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
You will find many more citations with a search like this:
I personally know executives in food manufacturing/preparation companies, both public and private, who gladly pay close attention to worker safety, food safety, and all the things you say a company would do only if forced by law.
They do it because they know it's the right thing to do. And it helps them recruit and retain employees, and keep their customers happy and coming back for more. Their shareholders support them in this and would complain very loudly if the company ever put pure profit above all other goals.
And they definitely don't view the line workers as resources to be exploited. They view them as their colleagues.
Corporations do not have to maximize profits. They don’t even have to do what shareholders want most of the time, insofar as shareholders don’t care enough to enforce it.
Indeed. The actual fiduciary duty of company directors is to serve the interests of the company, not shareholders/profits.
This allows plenty of scope to make considerations like long-term reputation and employee satisfaction/loyalty/welfare high priorities, even at the expense of profits.
Certain types of companies in Sweden are actually legally obligated to put profits before shareholders (Sweden considers co-ops and commandites not-for-profits though). Even in those, there is a lot of freedom of movement in how to conduct the business (assuming they do not codify that too in their charter).
Not really. The law is clear that the duty is to the company. I know "shareholder primacy" is a talking point around Milton Friedman's philosophy, but as contemporary tech companies demonstrate, it's a false argument. Almost all the major tech companies of the past 20+ years have focused on long-term growth, not short-term profits/returns to shareholders. Amazon doesn't record profits and ploughs all surpluses back into the company for long-term growth. Steve Jobs ignored profits/shareholder returns for many years in order to focus on long-term health/growth of Apple. Reputation/welfare issues for employees (and now "ESG", for better or worse) has been a huge issue that all the top companies have had to make a priority (though as this article demonstrates, there are areas where the issue of employee welfare/fairness has not been heeded).
There's plenty of scope for further discussion about these points, but the key point remains: shareholder primacy is not law and not the focus of company directors' fiduciary duty, regardless of what people claim in self-serving arguments from various points of the ideological spectrum.
still, "more growth for company" and "more money for shareholders" can look identical from the perspective of the public or even an employee of the company, where all they see is "your interests are not important".
Uncapped growth is just as evil as unfettered greed - both charge forth without a second thought to externalities, while motivated to externalize as many costs as possible. So we end up with boiling oceans and rampant homelessness, because those are all "not our problem".
Sure, but the issue of discussion is whether company directors are required/expected to serve the interests of shareholders at the exclusion of all other considerations.
They are not. They are expected to serve the interests of the company, as distinct from the interests of shareholders, and matters like employee welfare/satisfaction and company reputation relating to externalities are very relevant to the interests of the company.
That some companies ignore these matters is separate from the principle: it’s not inconsistent with capitalism for companies to care about issues other than profits and shareholder returns. Though it’s obviously related, company welfare is distinct from shareholder benefit.
Companies have only one responsibility: to increase profits to the shareholders.
Yes, and those companies exist in a society, and long term planning is vital for long term profits, and that is 100% sensible and correct operating procedure.
Treating employees poorly can effect the ability to hire, and retain good people. It can effect consumers' desire to buy your products. It can result in unions, and the passing of laws, and therefore red tape.
So even if you have a dim view, re corporate responsibility, it matters not, for that role has larger scope than "profit this second".
And beyond this? All corporate decisions are made by people, and those people have every right to make moral decisions.
I think you're getting downvoted because you seem to endorse the most parasitic form of capitalism.
First off: it's not a company's responsibility to increase shareholder profit. It very much depends on the view of the people involved. But you're completely right when you think that greedy people can push in that direction and that a legal framework is the only way to keep that in check and make sure companies pay their dues to society. Social democracy still seems the only way to strike a proper balance between exploitation and lack of incentive.
One of my stock answers to this simplistic "capitalist absolutist" thesis is to repeat it...but from the PoV of, say, the Human Society.
Few absolutist capitalists want to hear that they, their companies, their wealth, their shareholders, etc. are mere tools - which Human Society can use in pursuit of its own responsibilities...or quietly "dispose of", if Society finds them to be more trouble than they are worth.
So this is why I’ve found even stateside cs to be so bad, I’ve been cursed at by local reps and now it makes sense I too would be furious at life itself if I was treated this way and then had to answer for the very company that was screwing me over.
Don't worry, the next time the agent's supervisor, excuse me, the Onshore Brand Advocate's Chat Performance Facilitator, reviews the call, they will be docked 100 points for being Confrontational and that will result in an Enhanced Deskilling.
Isn't Arise setting itself up for some enterprising lawyers to contact all employees on Facebook and start mass arbitration? They are forced on their side to respond to each and every arbitration and they are pretty sure to lose any time the 6 factors check is used to determine if the "contractor" is an employee or not.
So, unless I misunderstand something, that's a big existential threat for Arise.
Heck, forget Facebook. Just start calling up customer service! Bonus points for hiring former arise contractors to form a call center.
"good magical morning! thanks for calling Disney cruises"
"hi, this call is being recorded for quality assurance. am I speaking with a contractor for the arise corporation?"
"wait, this call is what? that's my line. I'm not at liberty to..."
"yes, we know you signed a non disclosure agreement. as a matter of fact, we all are former contractors for the 'mouse client'. we are calling to inform you of your legal rights pursuant to the binding arbitration agreement between you and the arise corporation..."
a fantasy, I know, but I can't resist dreaming of such poetic justice.
Having been poor and worked for these kinds of companies, they tell wonderful stories about how much money you can make. They don’t tell anyone that they structure the work so that almost nobody makes anything approaching what’s theoretically possible.
The companies don’t care, extracting cheap labor as they churn through their victims is part of the business model.
How does this company ever find people? Are they just all mathematically illiterate?
No. People are poor and a lot of jobs aren't willing to work around a second job. These companies (unsurprisingly) are not upfront about the way you'll be treated. This isn't just these companies: Low-wage jobs commonly misrepresent things like this. Having a right to a job contract (regardless of being 'employee' or 'contractor') would help with this a little - at least it would be upfront, theoretically. Or heck, simply being really strict about labor laws would help, alongside fines/punishments that make skirting labor laws unprofitable.
You would do better scavenging for refundable bottles.
Not in a lot of places. I lived in Indiana. There weren't a lot of places that accepted bottles at all. A few places accepted aluminum cans, but you really needed a large amount. Getting enough for transportation costs was an issue. Realistically, you might have been OK when I was a child in the 80s because you got a deposit: Otherwise, I didn't have refundable bottles available until I moved to Norway in my 30s.
I knew a woman who was paid to click ads, she earned less than 1 euro a day, on average, but it was better than begging - which seemed like her only viable alternative since her age ruled out prostitution. Factor in the cost of the laptop and internet connection and she was really getting a net negative sum.
She was fortunate though, thanks to previous decent income, she owned an apartment complete with a lodger. Although he was barely earning much more as an online salesman for some kind of ponzi scheme that was, one day, going to make him rich. Last I heard he was owing months in rent since he wasn't even receiving the tiny amounts he was supposedly earning.
In both instances we're talking about reasonably intelligent people who were just caught in this trap of near zero earnings with no opportunity of escape that wouldn't involve a prolonged period of much worse.
I would imagine these parasitic companies have practiced their psychopathic techniques on a host of desperate people until they found the best ways to string people along through the whole process.
"Just set up this home office, it will pay for itself in a month!"
"This one week training, and then you'll be taking calls in no time!"
This and that, and also, sunk cost fallacy is helluva drug, and you don't need to be mathematically illiterate to fall for that.
The information is asymmetrical here in most cases; Arise knows exactly how it works while presenting it as something else. A quick search on Google for Arise Call Center and the first three pages are lacking of any critical articles on Arise and some Glassdoor/SEO-spam blogs fake-answering the "scam" question.
You could expect this on basically any tech job aggregator posting aggregator site or even most companies' own postings. The only big giveaway that something is off about it is the last line:
> *This is not an offer of employment. It is an opportunity to enter into a business-to-business relationship with Arise®.*
If a person is fortunate enough to see that and check the FAQ [0], hopefully they realize how much of a mess this is and that you're basically paying Arise to maybe get paid by someone else, but how you get paid is up to you and might as well be a mystery.
But for those who don't check that and are in desperate need, yeah, I can easily see how Arise at face value looks perfect and desperation goggles hide the flaws:
- Site looks very normal and legit
- The work it discusses is shit call-center work that no one wants to do so there's likely lots of openings for someone who really needs money
- No training needed, you will be trained so a bad job history/no job history isn't a problem
- Criminal records don't seem to matter so if you had issues in the past, it's no big deal
- Work at home so no need to worry about commute/office hours
- The site is "up front" about you needing to pursue opportunities, so that makes it more "honest" and trustworthy
It's a very nice blend of honesty mixed in with the misdirection that likely its enough to get many people to pay the initial fees, maybe for a training or two, and even do a few hours of work for basically free during a high volume period. Arise pays pennies for the work, gets $$$ from the companies for getting the workers, and ropes in tons of cash from the agents. It looks and feels like a normal employment offer to get enough money out of a person to justify the efforts, and then the person is saddled with reality that they don't have a job, they basically paid for the opportunity to pay to get a few $$$ at awful rates.
It's a gross and exploitative company. I think our ire should be focused on that part instead of people who don't realize it's a scam.
* Collective action is hard, seems like good work for a startup / law firm to simplify the experience of suing for backpay, winning arbitration, navigating NLRB paperwork, etc. In exchange for 10% of the proceeds.
In the article they called one such arbitration ruling "drips and drabs" compared to their revenue. But what if the spigot opens up?
* As usual follow the money, the "links in the chain" model described is ridiculous when you see all the work performance requirements and controls are governed by the company at the top. They should be named and shamed, but also some enterprising folks should be working to pierce that veil.
* Similarly, we need to support UBI and more social programs to raise the floor for these low margin fungible worker churn buckets.
This is where developers will end too, if Apple gets its way.
Because really, why wouldn't managers pursue this? They don't have dreams of making great hardware because they are not engineers. Their dreams are in the realm of squeezing money from people.
I don't really understand how this relates to the article or to Apple.
The article describes unfair labor practices that puts one side (the service rep) at a heavy legal disadvantage which leads to them getting exploited. Apple has a "sort of" similar setup, with them deciding what goes onto the app store but I really can't see how these two situations would be comparable just yet.
The gig economy is based on (digital) platforms, where the platform owner makes the rules. I used the example of Apple's platform, because this is a community of mostly developers. The theory of the platform economy has not been fully developed yet, but some patterns are quite clear. The power of a platform owner where the barrier of entry is very high is of course greater than when the barrier of entry is low. Airbnb is technically just a CRUD website that links supply and demand, while Apple holds much more power. We should be very careful in assuming that Apple will not abuse its power to a greater extent. In absence of competition, many of us might very well end up as low-pay gig workers.
Airbnb provides a commodity. This is not really applicable to most very successful app on the App Store. Developers have several magnitudes more leverage than any host on Airbnb, or Uber driver even if it's still limited.
> end up as low-pay gig workers
Or you know switch to developing other software. As long as this is possible individual developers will be still in a much better position than low-skilled gig workers.
> Apple is buying up its supply chain AND other platforms copy Apple's tactics
Do they? Has Google/Android (or even Apple for that matter) gotten much worse in that regard over the last 10 years?
You can switch to making desktop, web, enterprise, video game etc. software. Or something more specialized. I mean yeah, I understand the issues you're talking about and I don't think they are not important. However it's not entirely black and white. And I don't think the situation really comparable to low wage/skill gig-workers who generally have almost no real choice whom to work for.
Are there really less viable (openish) platforms to build your software for than 10/20/30/40 years ago? I'm pretty certain that the answer is not that obvious as you seem to be implying.
Apple has gotten a larger market share and has implemented some new app store policies re: their 30% cut, but otherwise I think you're right that the landscape hasn't drastically changed.
>But the company [Arise] does not enlist agents who live in certain states. Currently on that list: California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Wisconsin, nearly all of which have tighter rules protecting workers.
Walmart right now across America has figured out to make as many jobs as they need into "contract hires", from stocking the stores, order "pickers", doing deliveries, to answering customer service voice/text/email
It's insidious because I am virtually positive the people doing deliveries are making less than minimum after vehicle costs (fuel etc) There are no tips required and no fees with "walmart plus" so I bet on some deliveries the people foolish enough to work for walmart under "contract" are making less than what it cost in time and materials to get it to a customer's door.
One day there will be a lawsuit but it will be class-action so everyone will get $1 while the lawyers get millions from walmart
Congress could end this overnight but since corporations buy the laws they want, it will never happen.
Notice how the big 'successful' companies are nothing more than the greediest, meanest, fakest, and most untrustworthy companies in the back room.....makes you start to think the pawn shops and loan sharks are pretty decent people :/
There’s at least one explanation that would lead to the same result, independent of communism: All of these countries were occupied for decades by a totalitarian government that was flying this flag. One is currently at war with the successor state.
Still, almost all of these countries have policies in place that in the US would trigger an immediate “but that’s communism!” reaction - for example universal healthcare and social security.
The underlying reasons for banning the USSR communist party flag is very likely to be much more complex than a single cause as you suggest.
I doubt it. It is probably a low margin business that gets pumped up with debt and passed around PE firms / family offices at increasing multiples due to low interest rates.
It was bought and sold a few years ago by this family office in Dallas:
As you can see, all the executives at Vivtera are Indian, and have a background at Genpact, so they have connections and know how in India for setting up cheaper labor call centers or whatnot. They probably are paid well by Indian standards, but the big money is in being able to find the financing to flip these businesses, like what Straight Lane and Warburg Pincus do.
Yep, one of the fathers of communism, Engels, started because he was appalled by the conditions for workers in industrial Manchester. Many others, such as Che Guevara also got radicalised like this.
