Workers Have To Pay To Get Paid

I'm not sure how this is even legal:

A growing number of American workers are confronting a frustrating predicament on payday: to get their wages, they must first pay a fee.

For these largely hourly workers, paper paychecks and even direct deposit have been replaced by prepaid cards issued by their employers. Employees can use these cards, which work like debit cards, at an A.T.M. to withdraw their pay.

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, using the card involves a fee. And those fees can quickly add up: one provider, for example, charges $1.75 to make a withdrawal from most A.T.M.’s, $2.95 for a paper statement and $6 to replace a card. Some users even have to pay $7 inactivity fees for not using their cards.

These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account, according to interviews with consumer lawyers, employees, and state and federal regulators.

Devonte Yates, 21, who earns $7.25 an hour working a drive-through station at a McDonald’s in Milwaukee, says he spends $40 to $50 a month on fees associated with his JPMorgan Chase payroll card.

“It’s pretty bad,” he said. “There’s a fee for literally everything you do.”

Certain transactions with the Chase pay card are free, according to a fee schedule.

Many employees say they have no choice but to use the cards: some companies no longer offer common payroll options like ordinary checks or direct deposit.

At companies where there is a choice, it is often more in theory than in practice, according to interviews with employees, state regulators and consumer advocates. Employees say they are often automatically enrolled in the payroll card programs and confronted with a pile of paperwork if they want to opt out.

“We hear virtually every week from employees who never knew there were other options, and employers certainly don’t disabuse workers of that idea,” said Deyanira Del Rio, an associate director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, which works with community groups in New York.

Wonderful.

So now corporations - our employers - are teaming up with the banks to gouge their own employees, making them pay to get the money they've already earned.

Tell me again how we don't need unions.

When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in a jobs bill

For the longest time, teahadists and other fascists would excuse their boorish behavior and flat out hatred of all things good as being "patriotic" or part of their "Christian values."

In Fitzwalkerstan, they've decided to change things up.  Instead of the using a flag
or a cross, they are using the terms "jobs" and "tax cuts."

Women can't chose what happens to their bodies because that'll create a tax cut.

Poor people can't have health care because that will create a tax cut.

The environment has to be polluted to create jobs.

We can't have a job creating high speed rail system because we need to create jobs.

You get the drift.

Now the latest in this line of bullpucky is that usury creates jobs:

Exempting those businesses from the Consumer Protection Act would give consumers more choices, and sets outs rules for both the industry and buyers, according to Vos, a Burlington-area Republican.

Rent-to-own stores in the area, like Rent-A-Center, formerly at 1130 Washington Ave., shuttered their doors in part because of push-back from state leaders, namely former Gov. Jim Doyle. A flurry of lawsuits in the late 1990s and early 2000s additionally forced certain companies, including Rent-A-Center, to disclose annual interest rates in Wisconsin.

But Wirch and other Democrats say the exemption would allow those businesses to “prey on consumers” by not fully disclosing their fees in terms of annual interest rates, which can run as high as three or four times the product’s actual value.

It’s an especially dangerous exemption in Racine County, where the rate of unemployment and poverty tops most of the state, Wirch said.

But that’s the same reason some Republicans, like Vos, support the measure: jobs.

“Our top priority this session is to create the best environment for private-sector job creation,” Vos said in an email last week.

So allowing a company to gouge their prey for whatever amount of money they want is going to create job how? Or is the job creation in the part where they don't have to tell how much they are charging?

Vos apparently has replaced his brains with one of his stale popcorn balls. Depressing an economically depressed region will not create jobs. And there are very few places more economically depressed than Fitzwalkerstan.

Now some might think that the only reason that the Teapublicans are pushing this is because of all the kickbacks from the pay-to-owe companies and their lobbyists. They might be right, too.

But I think that it just might be more of a professional courtesy.

I mean, can you think of anyone that rips off people as much as these fly by night usurers than the Teapublicans?