The New Indentured Servitude

For the last 10-15 years Americans have been slowly drifting into a new form of indentured servitude. Wages have been flat, especially since the Great Recession. Many people are stuck in jobs that they don't really like because they're afraid that can't find something better, or because they'll lose their health care coverage, or because they're 50+ and nobody will hire someone at that age at the same salary.

And it's only getting worse. These days companies seem to think they own their employees. Here are three examples of the new indentured servitude.

"Unlimited" vacation: My wife used to work at Honeywell, the company that made the round thermostat that almost every house in the country had on their walls. She recently went to a party for a friend who was taking early retirement.

He was quitting because of the "unlimited" vacation policy the division was instituting for non-union employees. Under this policy, you can ostensibly take as much vacation as you like, as long as your manager says it's okay.

The problem is, if your manager thinks he needs you, you have zero vacation. You don't accrue any vacation. At all. Your time off is completely at the whim of your manager.

This guy's parents were in poor health and he needed to go out of state to help them. But because this division has been laying off workers for years and not replacing anyone, the only person who could work on a critical project for the military was this one guy. So they told him he couldn't take time off to help his sick parents.

High-performing  personnel are penalized for their competence, while less competent employees can take time off because they're not essential. It's completely backwards.

So he quit. He can afford to, because he's got a large pension coming. But most people can't do that.

Non-compete contracts: 20 years I wrote software for a company that got bought out by a competitor. The buyers were jerks and they were losing in the market place, but they had big backers. The investors who financed the company I worked for wanted to cash out and sold the company out from under the founders, who were good friends of mine. My friends went off to form another company in a related field that didn't interest me. A year later -- when their non-compete contracts expired -- they expanded back into the same business. They asked me to work for them. I said yes.

But my current employer said they'd sue if I went to work with my friends. I had signed a non-compete contract with my employer when they were getting ready to sell (which I didn't know was happening), long after I'd been hired. We should have guessed what was going on. The contract was one-sided: I couldn't work for anyone in the same field, but they offered me nothing in return. Executive non-competes always offer some kind of golden parachute to make up for not being unable to work.

This kind of contract -- where they prevent you from working but don't offer compensation -- is not enforceable in my state. But the new company didn't want to risk litigating it, so they said they'd hire me when my non-compete ran out.

So I quit my job and cooled my heels for several months. My friends hired me as promised. Incredibly, on my first day my new boss asked me if I would sign a non-compete agreement. I declined of course, and with a smile he said, "I can understand that. I just had to ask."

I worked for them for several years, and we became the leading company in the industry, edging out the guys who bought us out. But eventually my new company got bought out by a third company (they were fine) and then that company got bought out by a giant conglomerate headquartered in Britain. That company had a policy of not hiring Americans in favor of software contractors from sweatshops in India.

So I quit. I was tired of corporate nonsense. I could afford to. But most people can't do that.

You can argue that companies whose business depends on intellectual properties such as software should have a right to protect their IP. But they shouldn't be able to prevent employees from earning a living in their field of expertise.

After all, the right to work is the battle cry of conservatives. They use it to hammer uninons: when aren't stopping companies from preventing Americans from working? States like Minnesota and California protect the rights of workers to earn a living by banning non-competes that don't offer compensation (though as my case shows, the threat of litigation often hinders getting a new job).

But conservative states like Idaho give employees the shaft: they allow companies to enforce non-competes, making it all but impossible for workers to get jobs in their fields if they quit. Worse, companies with no intellectual property to protect, such as Jimmy John's, the sandwich maker, have forced employees to sign non-compete contracts. Jimmy John's was sued in New York and Illinois, where such contracts have since been nixed.

But Jimmy John's can prevent delivery drivers in Idaho from working for Domino's because they might have some secret knowledge that would damage Jimmy John's business model if Domino's got wind of it.

It's starting to get creepy: A lot of people are getting their pets chipped so they can be quickly identified if they get lost. A small RFID chip is implanted under the skin, which can be read by a scanner.

Now a company in Wisconsin is chipping their employees. They are literally treating their people like animals. There is a myriad of health and privacy concerns. The company pooh-poohs these:

Todd Westby, the chief executive of Three Square, emphasized that the chip’s capabilities were limited. “All it is is an RFID chip reader,” he said. “It’s not a GPS tracking device. It’s a passive device and can only give data when data’s requested.”

“Nobody can track you with it,” Mr. Westby added. “Your cellphone does 100 times more reporting of data than does an RFID chip.”

This guy is flat-out lying. Anyone can scan that RFID chip with a reader. Any time you walk into an office, or a store, or drive past a police station, you can be scanned. It doesn't constantly broadcast your location like a cell phone, but it can have a range of 20 or 30 feet, depending on the size of the antenna. And unlike your cell phone or your access card, you can't leave it at home.

The CEO say the RFID chip is "encrypted," but this is nonsense. Anyone can Google "spoofing RFID chips" for specific directions on how to hack these systems. This gives the company a totally false sense of security: implanted chips are passive, which means that they just spit out a number when they get pinged by a scanner. Since can read that number, with the right software and hardware they can clone that RFID tag and spit out that same number, impersonating that employee.

Why would a company even think of doing this? At my last job I had an access card with an RFID chip in it. Why isn't an access card sufficient? Why does this company think it has to literally get under their employees' skins?

Do they think they own their employees, in the same way a dog owner owns his pet? Do they think their employees are too stupid to remember their access cards, or don't they trust them to not lend them to others, or do they want to track how long they spend on the toilet?

Companies are increasingly firing employees for things not related to job performance. Companies have fired smokers for smoking at home. Companies have fired employees for using medical marijuana legally. Companies try to force their employees to lose weight, exercise and do other things for their health (so that they can get a better deal from the health insurance company).

Conservatives think that the government is evil when it tries to force Americans to do things that are "good for them." Why are they silent when multinational corporations do it?

It would be insult to African Americans to say that corporations are treating Americans like slaves. But it is completely apt to compare modern employees to the indentured servants who toiled in the fields of Colonial America alongside the slaves.

Indentured servants, at least, had the prospect of freedom after their term of servitude ended. Modern Americans only have the bleak prospect of greater corporate power further eroding their freedoms under the rubric of "productivity" and "corporate profitability."