Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees

Uhhh, don't the employers get to keep all the profit from the employee's productivity because their role is to take financial risks to reap the rewards?

And the employees just get their paycheck because they are just selling their time to the employer and not participating in the risk vs reward?

This is just the 37th consecutive flavor of socialize the losses, privatize the profits.

Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees who decide to leave the company prematurely.

Employers can go fuck themselves. You're recouped on those training costs when the people that receive that training become better at their jobs and make the stupid number go up. If employers want to treat people like fucking investments, they need to learn the risk of losing money on their investments.

Classic indentured servitude.

Back when I was first trying to get a job in the programming world (in the mid-90s), I submitted my resume to a supposed job-finding company named SearchMasters. When I went to interview with them, I learned that their fee was 33% of your salary for your first six months on the job. This was clearly insane, but it got even worse: if you quit the job or were fired before the six months was up, you were immediately liable to pay SearchMasters the remainder of what their fee would have been in its entirety. I told the dude (an obvious steroid user squeezed into a garish tight suit) "I thought indentured servitude was illegal" and at one point I found myself trying to extract my resume from under his arm while he was alpha-male glowering at me while leaning on it with his full weight.

I dealt with a lot of headhunting firms in my first few years of working and it's a scummy industry, but SearchMasters put them all to absolute shame. And this was a big room with like 30 agents working in it, so there must have been thousands of poor bastards that had fallen for their bullshit, just in my city alone.

Edit: I mis-remembered this. The fee was 33% for the first year, but you were only on the hook for six months of that if you quit before the six months was up.

Fuck. That. Noise.

Shit. They used to do this a lot in my industry. You’d not get paid during training, or you’d sign a contract that if you succeeded training you’d be required to work for that employer usually for two years. If you left before the time was up, you owed the employer whatever pro-rated time you had remaining vs the stated cost of your training. Was still happening with signing bonuses recently.

Me, before I read the article: this is nothing unusual, and I don't see what the problem is. My employers have paid for some pretty advanced training over the years. In return, they asked me to agree to stay for six months. NBD...

Me, after the article: HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

This shift has also opened the door to a new industrial complex of employer-run, for-profit training sites and academies, which many workers are steered into when they’re hired for a job. Critics say employers now use these job training programs to force workers into debt and suppress wages, courtesy of TRAP contracts.

This is heading into Company Town territory. Seriously predatory shit.

Until they reach a certain age anyway

how do we keep people working for us? Shall we pay them better? Nah we will just coerce them.

Here's a few tricks that will ensure your employees can NEVER leave, you will save a ton on turnover.

1. Pay above market
2. Treat employees with respect, engrain this culture in your management
3. Offer good benefits options
4. Ensure there are long-term opportunities for career growth at all levels
5. Communicate routinely from the upper management to the whole organization. Create opportunities for people to provide feedback in small groups
6. Never even consider making employees liable for training you encouraged them to do. Fire anyone who suggests you write something so insane into a contract immediately

There are still companies out there where the primary way people leave is via retirement. They are profitable and productive companies. Employees want to leave immediately after getting trainings because turnover has become the dominant culture in large companies.

Just in case anyone missed this gem from a few months ago: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/dont-tell-me-this-is-a-functional-country Case example for emts getting the same treatment.

Some C-suite asshole really thought they were clever shoehorning that "TRAP" acronym in there. These people are just sociopathic children with too much money and power.

I'm certain that hiring managers would view reading the entire employment contract a major red flag.

They can't take what you don't have.

Ah so slavery, the wonders of capitalism

This is called indentured servitude

St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store

The article is mixing two different concepts one sucks one doesn't.

• The one that sucks is when an employer requires an employee to do training as a condition of the job, and then puts the threat of repaying that cost of that training back on the employee. This needs to change or be regulated for the fairness to the employee.
• The one that doesn't suck is when the employer offers the option for employees to get training/college education paid for with not obligation to do so to keep the job. Even these usually only have 1 year or so of that repayment requirement if they leave early. The article is calling out Chipotle for offering free college tuition, as long as the employee continues to work there for 6 months after the last payment was made to the college. That is shorter than most employers which require 1 year. I used a benefit like this at a past employer to finish my Bachelors degree and which meant I never had to take out student loans.

Mixing both of these types of training/education paths in one article equating them as parts of the same thing is a bad thing. Employer reimbursed college tuition is one of the few ways that many students are able to obtain higher education without taking on burdensome student loans.

When I first watched the show "Continuum" 2012-2015 I thought yeah, this is a good message to get us back on the right track. However the life debt part of it is a little over the top. No way that kind of shit can happen in real life. For fucks sake.

Ok, maybe my brain is malfunctioning, but how would this play out if the employee just said, "ok, then I'm going to be an absolute nuisance at work until you fire me"?

This TRAP clause started to spread through new graduate nurses hired during the pandemic 21-22. The one I was given specific numbers on was $8500 if they left before 2yrs. Rumors speak of sums as high as $14k. This is fairly new practice in non-HCA hospitals based on what I’ve been told.

There's NO WAY that Forcing Unhappy Workers to stay will BACKFIRE!

Can't we just...torch an important corporate building to the ground so they can learn?