After a short interview Richard was hired and along with several other people began a four day training program. But from the beginning things did not seem quite right to Richard. There was the matter of fourteen people in the training when the job ad had stated that there were only five openings. The training was rushed. “They seemed more interesting in selling the product to us, rather than for us learning how to sell it.”
When Richard was presented with a contract at the end of his training, to his surprise, the contract stated that he and his colleagues were not employees of Global Air Care, but self-employed “private consultants.” The contract also stated that they would only be paid if they completed fifty sales presentations a month and that Richard was to complete six “practice presentations” on friends and families before he would be activated as a “private consultant.”
“At this point it got very awkward as all week they were suggesting that we would be selling to clients provided by the company, but were now slowly trying to convince us to sell to our own friends and families over the weekend. They even went so far as to offer too good to be true deals like ‘if you sell three units this weekend, you will not only get your $300 commission, you will get a free TV as well.’” Richard became skeptical and decided to quit.
Richard had run into what many workers have come to know as a job scam. Job scams take different forms. In Richard’s case, the scam involved the increasingly common practice of making workers sign contracts that say they are “self-employed” or “independent contractors” in order to avoid employment standard laws. Often these contracts have no legal standing as workers cannot sign away basic workers rights. But companies count on workers not knowing the finer workings of employment law.
A common job scam is for companies to ask workers to pay a fee for training the company says will lead to a “guaranteed job.” Often there is no job offer at the end of the training and getting your money back can be difficult. Not only is this a job scam, but according to the Employment Standards Act, unpaid training is a form of wage theft.
There is one basic reason why job scams exist and why companies are able to get away with running them in increasingly large numbers. In workplaces and in the economy in general, employers have a lot of power over their workers. This power has increased over the past three decades as government after government have deregulated the economy giving employers a freer hand over how they treat their workers.
Few companies running job scams are ever brought before an employment standards tribunal, less are successfully prosecuted and of these, even less end up paying a significant penalty. A study done by the Toronto-based Workers Action Centre found that between 2001 and 2006, just over 100 million dollars in workers’ wages that the Ministry of Labour ordered employers to pay went uncollected.
At the same time, private sector unions, which when present, provide workers with on the job protection “from below” have suffered defeat after defeat; as a result, most workers in the private sector will never be in a union. Add to this the desperate situation of many workers stuck in minimum wage jobs or unemployment and it is easy to see why so many workers have become easy prey for employers and job scams.
It will not be easy to change this situation, but clearly the key to turning things around is for workers to come together, build collective power and in so doing tilt the balance of power between employers and workers more in the workers’ favour.
Some former Global Air Care workers have already taken steps in this direction with the help of Steel City Solidarity. Luc Peters is one such worker. He worked for Global Air Care for nearly a month without being paid. “They promised a guaranteed salary of $2, 754 per month but I have yet to see a single penny.”
Working with Luc, Steel City Solidarity has put pressure on Global Air Care to return his unpaid wages. In the course of this campaign Steel City Solidarity has organized a group delegation to Global Air Care’s offices, aided the CBC’s Marketplace to carry out an investigation of the company, and put pressure on job bank sites to remove Global Air Care ads from their sites. At some point in the campaign, Global Air Care appears to have shut its doors --though companies like these will continue to operate under a different name and in a different location. Meanwhile Luc’s case is before a provincial arbitrator.
As for Richard, he is considering filing a claim for the four days of unpaid training. He has also taken the time to warn other workers about Global Air Care, posting what he has learned about the company on several online forums. Several other former Global Air Care workers had done the same previously. No doubt dozens of workers have avoided Global Air Care’s job scam as a result of the actions of Luc, Richard and all the other people who have lent a hand in this campaign. Such acts of mutual aid and collective action are exactly what build workers’ power so that we may better protect ourselves from employers, whether they run job scams or not.
Steel City Solidarity is a network of workers in Hamilton dedicated to helping each other through mutual aid and collective action.
