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Staying Legal

I was not familiar with the stay-or-pay clause in employment contracts. The stories of folks for whom staying was not a viable option are eye-opening. The employer makes your work-conditions completely untenable maybe because they want you to quit and as a bonus pay them for the privilege. The first story is reminiscent of H1-B body-shops from back in the day when those were running fast and lose. 

The right to work in the US came with a big price-tag. The employer paid the hapless visa holder a fraction of their fair market value, gummed up the works as far as processing their Green Card and maintained a crushing degree of control on this person who was free to quit their job and return to India in 60 days, all the time and effort spent in gaining stability in the US upended instantly. For many that was not a choice they could easily make and they had to suffer in ways that are similar to Vidal in this story - but somehow this is legal

Before moving to the United States, Vidal had signed a contract stipulating that, if he quit or got fired within three years, he would owe A.C.S. an unspecified amount of money to compensate the company for damages. Soon enough, Vidal received an email from a law firm representing A.C.S., warning him that if he quit his job, he could owe the company $20,000 or more. The company argued that their damages included the cost of finding a replacement, which the lawyers estimated could mean $9,000 for each year remaining on his three-year contract.

There was a time when people only worked for one company their whole life, sometimes the next generation followed in their foot-steps. They got to live a comfortable life in retirement funded by the employer. It is beyond astounding that a person would need to compensate the employer if they got fired. At-will employees can be fired for no-cause. I guess they wriggled around that one too. So we can have a situation where the employee gets fired because her boss hates for reasons that have nothing to do with work or performance. For having precipitated such displeasure and turning unemployed in the process, she needs to pay a hefty fee- and this is all legal.

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