Companies have found a defense against the Great Renunciation: charging for training courses

The pandemic has generated numerous changes in our society, especially in the workplace. Telecommuting, hybrid format, ‘coworking’ are concepts that we have begun to deal with much more frequently and that indicate how the way of working is evolving. Another very common concept today is that of the Great Renunciation, a phenomenon that many companies do not know how to deal with. Some of them, to avoid any possible resignation of the workers establish mechanisms to retain them coercively through training contracts.

the idea is simple. The worker, prior to joining the workforce, signs a training contract that contains a refund clause for the amount paid by the company during the learning period, which will be activated if he leaves the company before a date determined by it, which may or may not coincide with the end of the formation. Sometimes, either the amount is disproportionate or the training does not contribute anything relevant, and there’s the catch. Many workers could give up changing to a job with better conditions for not assuming this cost.

Increasingly. This is a practice that is spreading in the American workplace. In the United States, 10% of workers surveyed by Cornell University Research Institute in 2020 they had signed a training reimbursement agreement. Currently the number is increasing. One such worker is beautician Simran Bal, whose story was told by Reuters.

Aesthetics course for a beautician. Bal was hired by the company Oh Sweet Skincare, located in Seattle, in August 2021. Being a graduate in aesthetics, she had to take a training course focused on issues such as the purchase of cosmetic products. When she resigned in October of that same year, she received an invoice from the company for the training she had done, the value of which was 1,900 dollars, just over 1,921 euros. According to the beautician, they were charging her for a course on “services in which she was already licensed”, for which she did not pay. The owner of the company denounced Bal and, finally, this September, the judge determined that the professional had not completed the course and that, therefore, she did not owe the company anything.

alarm in usa. This practice is widespread in the health and transportation sectors, according to data from the American National Union of Nurses and the International Brotherhood of Truckers, of North American origin. In fact, According to the latter organization, in England there are companies that charge more than 6,000 euros to drivers who quit before a certain period of time. However, the North American organization SPBC -Protection Center for Student Borrowers in Spanish- points out that it is a cross-cutting phenomenon throughout the economy. That’s why the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has started studying this practice.

Violation of labor rights. These training courses, called traps in English, they began to be carried out by high-income, skilled workers in the late 1980s, and they were relevant. However, companies, in recent years, have begun to use them as a way to retain workers. Instead of raising wages or improving working conditions, some employers they use this option to avoid the resignation of workers, says Jonathan Harris, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Against the ILO. According to Consumer Financial Protection Bureausome unions have already denounced this practice as an obstacle to labor mobility, which violates the article 23 of the International Labor Organization that states that everyone has the right “to freely choose their job”. There are senators and attorneys general in the US who are aware of the problem that these practices generate and are willing to fight themso it seems clear that greater legal supervision is necessary to guarantee the basic rights of workers.

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