I guess by now this is an actual series: Ways that companies and individual scumbags are preying on working people desperately trying to get by. Following close on the heels of wage theft and “job search” companies, we have this.
Companies buy tax liens from cities and counties that are themselves looking for ways to patch budget shortfalls. Then those companies charge interest rates up to 18% and major service fees, and homeowners find themselves foreclosed on for a couple thousand dollars in initial tax debt that’s suddenly ballooned.
Danyell Copeland, 36, is in court over a tax bill of less than $2,000, her lawyer said. Ms. Copeland, who works as a cook at the University of Toledo, said she had been fallen behind on her bills after her hours and overtime were cut.
She chose to not pay her taxes so she could make her mortgage payments, she said. Now she worries about losing the two-bedroom house where she grows tomatoes and peppers in the garden, and where her niece and nephew spend the summer.
People should pay their taxes, of course. But losing your home over a temporary hard time, over just $2,000, because some company wanted to make a profit on your misery? That’s just not how things should work.
Tuesday, PaulVA wrote at Daily Kos about radio ads that his own union, the SMWIA, and others have launched asking Chuck Grassley, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, and Blanche Lincoln which side are they on—the side of the insurance industry, or the side of their states’ working people?
Yesterday, Daily Kos readers heard from Kombiz about positive signs he was seeing on AFSCME’s Highway to Health Care bus tour.
Paul wrote:
The ads are the beginning of a grassroots effort on the part of several Unions to pressure wayward Democrats in the House and Senate to pass real comprehensive health care reform.
As Kombiz’ diary made clear, ads aren’t all that unions and their ally organizations are doing to win real health care reform now. We’re on the ground, around the country. In that vein, Working America has a few numbers for you–12; 30,000; 20,000; 6,000–and something you can do to make those numbers grow.
It really does seem to be the case that there are an almost infinite number of scumbags willing to victimize people trying desperately to make ends meet through hard work in a tough economy. Following up on this morning’s post on wage theft, we learn about the “job search” companies that exploit the anxieties of jobless workers, exaggerating wildly to get them to pay large amounts for services that amount to…well, pretty much nothing.
Edward Bockman, 44, who managed the technology center of an Illinois college before losing his job during a restructuring, paid a career management company $5,000 in late 2007 after responding to what he thought was a job posting for professionals looking to earn $100,000 a year.
Instead, he got a sales pitch from Benchmark Professional Careers in Chicago. He said he was told that a search for someone his age would normally take 13 months but that the company would cut that in half. Mr. Bockman said he believed that the company was a high-end recruiter, with access to a vast “hidden job market,” as he said company officials put it, that gave it connections to positions unavailable to regular job seekers.
Only later, after he began working with the company, did he realize it did not have any special pathways to job openings.
Officials in some states have worked to ban these shady business practices, but with little oversight ability beyond customer complaints, it’s difficult—and they just keep coming back. Sometimes literally—job search companies run by Robert J. Gerberg, Sr. in the 1980s were found guilty of violating New Jersey consumer fraud laws. Today, he’s a senior consultant to a company featured in this article, and run by his son.
USA Today has done some great reporting on how this economy deals extra injuries and insults to the most vulnerable.
Agustin Gonzalez became a casualty of the real-estate bust in 2007 when he lost his construction job in the Florida Keys.
Since then, he says, he has become another kind of casualty: a victim of wage theft.
Gonzalez now works as a day laborer in the Miami area, waiting on street corners or in front of Home Depot for pickup jobs. He says he has been cheated of pay three times, including twice this year on landscaping and construction jobs that cost him at least $2,600.
“I feel like a slave,” says Gonzalez, 38, who entered the USA from Panama in 2006 on a work visa that has expired. “I feel like day laborers are just here to be used without respect.”
This isn’t merely anecdotal:
Chicago’s Working Hands Legal Clinic has been getting more complaints from construction, restaurant, janitorial and other workers, Executive Director Chris Williams says. It got 252 in the first half of the year, compared with 161 in the same period last year.
Most are immigrants, he says. The U.S. Labor Department says illegal immigrants are covered under minimum-wage and overtime laws.
“We do a lot of work with workers at temporary staffing agencies, people who work maybe 32 hours but they’re only getting paid for 26,” Williams says.
The Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center, which helped workers collect $200,000 in wages last year, already has collected $160,000 this year, director Don Sherman says.
Apparently, to too many employers, the answer to a bad economy is to refuse to pay workers for their labor.
Dan Heck — Working America Regional Director
This morning, I sat down in my office and saw a letter from Sylvia, a member from Chillicothe. It almost moved me to tears, even though I’ve heard this story countless times. Here’s what she wrote to her Representative, Zack Space:
“I’m a cancer survivor and have been in the process of healing for 10 years. In the middle of the ordeal, my health insurance doubled and we were left with bills we either couldn’t pay or a premium we couldn’t pay. I am a nurse and believe me, I worked long hours to not have any insurance. We as Americans need health care!! I want you to support a public option. However, real reform means not taxing our health care benefits.”
This is a story we’ve seen in countless letters, and heard from countless members. It is extremely widespread. Middle class people who think they have insurance suddenly lose it, or find the rates become unaffordable, when they actually get sick. Any system that does that is broken, and needs to be fixed.
Health care reform isn’t about whether we think corporations or the government are worse. It isn’t about message points and 10 point plans and mountains of policy details. It is about Sylvia, because we’re all in Sylvia’s shoes. Even those of us fortunate enough to be in the middle class are one illness away from financial ruin. Our homes, our kid’s college … they’re all on the line because of a broken system that takes advantage of people when they’re sick, instead of protecting them.
Anyone who bothers to look at the health reform package knows that it will help protect everyone who works for a living. It helps keep special interests honest, and helps focus our hospitals on healing us, instead of just making money. An American Public Insurance option is a necessary part of that, because it will bargain for us and set the standard for others to follow. And if it doesn’t do that, people will choose not to use it.
But ultimately, this health care struggle is a whole lot bigger than any single bill, or any policy. We’re fighting to get the best possible bill for Sylvia, and all of us who are in her shoes.
Tags: Health Care, Ohio
