Corporations Want To Prevent Workers From Leaving Their Jobs

 Jacobin-  A Texas nurse switched to a better-paying job at a nearby hospital only to wind up with debt collectors at her door demanding she pay her former employer back for a loan she didn’t know she owed.

A cargo pilot faced a $20,000 lawsuit over job-training expenses at a commercial airline that had just fired him for refusing to fly a plane under unsafe conditions.

After being promised college tuition relief paid for by Chipotle, fast-food workers can get stuck with the tuition bill.

These are all examples of how millions of workers across the country are increasingly finding themselves bound by Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs), a new form of “stay-or-pay” contract that indebts employees to their bosses. Often inserted into contracts without workers’ knowledge, these restrictive labor covenants turn employer-sponsored job training and education programs into conditional loans that must be paid back — sometimes at a premium — if employees leave before a set date.

As regulators scrutinize similarly restrictive noncompete agreements for barring workers from obtaining better employment, a Lever review of class-action and state-level lawsuits reveals that employers in health care, retail, and transportation are turning to TRAPs to keep employees locked in their jobs and potentially evade law enforcement.

“It’s student debt, but coming from employers in the workplace instead of in schools,” said Mike Pierce, the executive director and cofounder of the Student Borrower Protection Center, which has tracked the spread of TRAP contracts nationwide. Other labor leaders on the front lines of industries adopting these clauses have compared TRAPs to “indentured servitude.”