Archives for Ethics

There’s a bad behavior pattern cropping up in business dealings these days: management or owners taking cover behind tough economic times when they cut workers off at the knees.

Three examples are rolling around in my head, one big and well reported, the other two are smaller.

A New York Times story by Nick Bunkley reports that General Motors and Chrysler, after showing 2,000 auto dealers the door last year, are getting some up-close-and-personal attention from the feds. The automakers sent the dealers packing as part of a monster bankruptcy proceeding. But they didn’t reckon with the number of family-owned dealerships willing to call foul.

This isn’t just about money. As the son of one Utah auto-sales dynasty said:  “My mom and dad want their honor back as much as anything…It’s the ultimate showing of disloyalty, after all the years we’ve been loyal to them, to take our stores.”

This is a situation to watch. If the feds slap the automakers and forbid such sweeping “layoffs” and closures, it will dramatically affect bankruptcy reorganizations. Whether that benefits consumers remains to be seen.

The smaller, yet insidious, other examples: I’ve now heard from a few people about what I call the “work-now, pay-later” approach. It’s simple. You the employee put in two or three months at your new job…and THEN you get your first paycheck.

The first person who told me about this practice was a broker in a large Bay Area brokerage; an experienced and successful transplant from a Pacific Northwest firm. He waited three months for the first check…no small challenge when moving to spendy San Francisco. The next story that wafted my way came from a fellow freelancer, in this case an award-winning journalist of considerable stature. She’s writing for one of the biggest news sites on the planet…and the first paycheck came two months after she started.

And this:

An international cosmetic company, let’s call it Terrific Skin Co.,  places its employees at counters in upscale department stores. These workers are in an odd netherland: Not employed by Terrific Skin Co., its huge parent company, nor by the department store.

Instead, a third party, a “staffing agency,” employs them as temporary workers. They have contracts, but the terms all favor the employer. As a result, the Terrific Skin Co. salespeople are often let go without any reason or warning. They may not even be eligible for earned vacation time or anticipated benefits if the axe falls early in their tenure.

This business model is cropping up more often since the economy tanked. It allows operations like Terrific Skin Co. to staff their counters with top-drawer supervisors (licensed skin-care experts in this example) during holidays and sales, then send them packing when things slow down. This model is one that adapts easily to any number of employment scenarios, from department-store counters to basements full of software-code writers.

Worker bees getting delayed paychecks and staffing-agency casualties: Take a leaf from the book of the auto-dealership victims. Tweet, blog, out your employers; complain at city and state levels. Tell the rest of us so we stop buying whatever it is your cheesy bosses are selling.

(Second Update: Check out this blog item from NYTimes about low-wage workers getting routinely cheated.)

(Third update.)

First, let me assure you that you are not alone if you are just now figuring out that your credit cards are touchy little bombs, ticking away in your wallet and ready to blow no matter how careful you are.

In the past the only way to know how these cards worked was to read and decode the disclosures that come with the bill. What a handy word, disclosure. It’s derived from Latin roots meaning “dense, impenetrable jargon in 4-point type.”

Since the last round of changes to credit-card regulations, however, we have greatly improved “transparency,” meaning less Byzantine code about “grace periods” and obscured interest rates.

We do indeed have clearer info at our fingertips. As proof, I offer this quote from my January Macy’s bill:

“As a result of the minimum INTEREST CHARGE of $2.00 being applied to your revolving account, the actual ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE charged on that account is 60.84%.”

(The capitalization is theirs. What better way to be transparent than to use uppercase letters, right?)

I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I do appreciate the clarity of that “60.84%” spelled out in type large enough to read. I appreciated it right through my nose with the half-cup of coffee I inhaled as I read the bill for the first time.

And I do appreciate Macy’s. If you’ve had a charge account at this mother-of-all-department-store-chains in the past, you know they bend over backwards to make it easy for you to buy things and feel smugly special. Coupons, cardholder sale days, even a “Star” club for those of us who really know how to shop. The Macy’s charge-account marketing people do everything but pick us up and drive us to the January white sale.

Now they have embarked on a breathtakingly clever strategy. It works this way:

(1) On Monday you charge $180 worth of stuff.

(2) On Wednesday you pay the bill in full online.

(3) Approximately two weeks later you get a bill that pretends you didn’t pay yet. The bill is for $180 and a $2 “interest charge.” (Remember, the payment was not late.)

(4) All of this is kosher because they spell out the interest rate associated with this out-of-nowhere interest charge.

When you dial them up to complain, the folks living on the other side of the world who answer such calls will assure you that the $2 will be credited back to you next month.

Thoughtlessly you go online and transfer another $2 to keep the account current. Only later it dawns on you that you’ve sent Macy’s a two-buck tip and asked them to keep it safe for a month, then give it back as a credit towards more stuff in their store.

I know: No one with a real job would dog this issue for a measly $2. And I won’t punish you by recreating the dialogue I had with the polite customer-service agent sitting 14 time-zones away. The bottom line is that refusing to pay the $2 is pretty much pissing into the wind. Feels good for a second, and then….not.

So, the choices are clear: Cancel your card and give up those discount coupons. Or resort to an Abbie Hoffman-like  gesture and pay the interest charge in some annoying way, such as sending a box of pennies or transferring an odd overpayment, like $2.02, via your online bill payer.  Or pay $1.98 today and .05 two days later. Yeah, way to mess with that computer’s mind!

It won’t diffuse the little wallet bomb, but you’ll feel better having lobbed one back over the fence.