The Fee Hand of the Market 6
Management has found a new way to rip employees off: pay their wages through fee-heavy debit cards.
She was to be paid about $7.44 per hour – her paystub didn’t list her hourly rate. Minimum wage is $7.25.
According to the complaint filed, the JP Morgan Chase payroll card lists several fees, including a $1.50 charge for ATM withdrawals, $5 for over-the-counter cash withdrawals, $1 per balance inquiry, 75 cents per online bill payment and $15 for lost/stolen card.
Gunshannon said she had taken her concerns to the main office of the franchise holder – Albert and Carol Mueller, trading as McDonald’s, in Clarks Summit. She was told that the card was the only option, she said.
You don’t have take-home pay any more.
You just get to watch it go by, without even choosing where it goes.
Afterthought:
It’s hard to argue with this, from later on in the story (emphasis added):
“I can’t afford to lose even a few dollars per paycheck. I just think people should be paid fairly and not have to pay fees to get their wages.”
Wonder whether the franchise owners are getting any kickbacks benefits from Chase.
June 16, 2013 at 9:49 pm
See what I said the other day. We live in a corporate fascist state. You have the freedom to shop if you have money. And corporate American, from banking to national security contractors, are free to prey on you. This would be illegal in a country that still functioned for everyone, akin to usury. They have the option to reach into your account at whim and they sell it to greedy employers by pitching it as cheaper than cutting checks or direct deposit, extracting profit by stealing from the wage. There aren’t enough Elizabeth Warrens to reverse it. It’s simply theft from what should be frictionless transaction.
June 17, 2013 at 7:21 am
I thought of your comment when I saw the story.
June 17, 2013 at 10:15 am
The key bit in there is the understanding that the tactic can drop the pay below minimum wage. The reporter should have gone though an example with a weekly pay. People who earn more that the poor wouldn’t put up with a company dispensing with their payroll office and extorting the cost of it from the worker. What’s more, this idea doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s not that greedy couple at the McDonald’s who thought of it, it was financial services people at the bank who designed the program and “service” fully knowing that it is custom made to clip from those who have the least. That’s nakedly immorality. Then we are asked to consider what has enabled this? The tech revolution. All that innovation the Silicon Valley culture is allegedly going to is process running for those with capital, digital automation enables this to be done seamlessly and at little cost to those who possess the process. So you will have noticed that much of the innovation that now comes from the US tech industry simply is aggregate automation for the disempowering of the mass for the benefit of those with the capital to employ it, that is the tearing off of shreds of skin from the herd and reapportioning it to the 1 percenters.
June 17, 2013 at 10:20 am
So nobody ever explains to me why they think we still live in a democracy. The US is the exceptional corporate fascist state, unique to its own history. People who are citizens don’t do things to move the country forward, they have been placed in the position in which all things are -done to them-. If you want to survive you have to cooperate with the rules of being prey and every four years you get one little shot at making a choice about the immediate future, one between really terrible or just statically bad in which the guy you chose is powerless because the government process is all locked up.
June 17, 2013 at 10:09 pm
I was wondering today how this cannot be an “unlawful taking.”
June 17, 2013 at 10:11 pm
And it’s not a democracy until we start regulating Wall Street again. Wall Street has made itself the de facto government.