Jim Stone, Freelance Journalist

Something new to be aware of (I had no idea this was going on)

When you get a new job, that job often includes training. That training always used to be free. Now companies are having minimum work times required to "pay for" the training, and if you leave before that time you get charged thousands of dollars.

Remember the song sixteen tons? Sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt . . . I owe my soul to the company store . . .

What is going on now is the new form of that.

Back before workers rights laws, a lot of corporations would have their factories or mines or whatever else in such remote locations that there was no way to leave to buy food or anything else. So they would set up company stores at the job site, and what was in the stores was priced higher than what people's wages could pay for, so they ended up in debt to the company and could not leave until that debt was paid off. That gave the corporations a literal slave pool they could rob, they'd get back all the pay in the company store which basically amounted to a slave's com(m)issary.

Now, asking for people to pay for job related training before they can work (training that used to be assumed and free for any job) is beginning to take the form of the old "company store".

When getting a new job, be careful of what you are getting into because a lot of times the wording in the agreements is tricky and that training is not free, when it really should be. This includes explicit wording in big print saying it is free, which the fine print nullifies. This can subsequently be used as a way to force you to work for a place far longer than you wanted to.