American Capitalism is reaching a new all time low according to the New York Times this morning.
While some firms are struggling in an economy that has seen unemployment grow to nearly 10%, a company named Talx is making out like gangbusters.
Are they producing new green technology that will fuel a recovery?
Maybe they're retraining workers for 21st century jobs?
Nope. They're being hired by American companies from Fed-Ex to Walmart to use every means possible, no matter how unethical or even illegal, to keep workers from getting the unemployment insurance to which they're entitled.
America's savvy Capitalists are not satisfied with offshoring jobs for the last 30 years until America's manufacturing base has been decimated.
They not content with importing H-1B workers to drive down wages in the jobs that were supposed to be "the future" for American workers in IT and engineering.
They aren't even willing to take a pause from screwing over workers after the finance industry bought de-regulation from a corrupt Congress and White House, used their newly won "freedom" to gamble away workers' pensions then again bought off Congress and another White House to get bailed out.
No, after driving down wages, cutting benefits and destroying job security for a generation, after creating the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression with their greedy, irresponsible behavior, America's corporate elite is spending lots of money not to hire back workers but to deny them even the pittance of unemployment benefits that might keep food on these workers' dinner tables for a little longer.
The work has made Talx a boom business in a bust economy, but critics say the company has undermined a crucial safety net. Officials in a number of states have called Talx a chronic source of error and delay. Advocates for the unemployed say the company seeks to keep jobless workers from collecting benefits.
"Talx often files appeals regardless of merits," said Jonathan P. Baird, a lawyer at New Hampshire Legal Assistance. "It’s sort of a war of attrition. If you appeal a certain percentage of cases, there are going to be those workers who give up."
When fewer former workers get aid, a company pays lower unemployment taxes.
Wisconsin and Iowa passed laws to curtail procedural abuses that officials said were common in cases handled by Talx. Connecticut fined Talx (pronounced talks) and demanded an end to baseless appeals. New York, without naming Talx, instructed the Labor Department staff to side with workers in cases that simply pit their word against those of agents for employers.
Talx answers the with kind of corporate double-talk we've all heard from company shills and flacks.
"We can speed the whole process, rather than bog it down," said Michael E. Smith, a senior Talx executive. "The whole idea is to protect those employees who have lost their job through no fault of their own and make sure they get unemployment insurance."
Right. Companies pay you millions to make sure workers get their unemployment. How charitable of them.
The truth is that companies hire Talx to stall, lie and cheat the system as long as possible, hoping that workers will give up (or starve) before they get their claim approved:
In the case of Dina Griess, Talx and its client, the subprime lender Countrywide Financial, were involved in what a judge deemed an outright fraud. Ms. Griess worked for Countrywide outside Boston and quit as it collapsed in 2008, saying she was distressed by internal investigations of lending practices. People can receive unemployment benefits if they quit for "good cause," like unsafe working conditions, but Talx argued that Ms. Griess’s reason did not meet the legal standard.
She won benefits at a hearing that Talx and Countrywide skipped, but Talx successfully appealed, saying the Countrywide witness had missed the hearing because of a family death. Later asked under oath if that was true, the witness said, "No, it’s not."
A Massachusetts judge reviewing the case, Robert A. Cornetta of Salem District Court, denounced the deceit and gave Ms. Griess benefits. "The court will not be party to a fraud," he said.
Who is Talx? The FTC brought an antitrust action against them in 2008 alleging that they had acquired competitors in this "business" with the goal of obtaining monopoly control over pricing.
Now they have been bought by Equifax. Equifax is one of the companies, you may recall, that provides credit reports to companies so that unemployed workers can't get hired because they haven't been paying their bills on time.
There's Capitalism at work. First, workers are laid off because of the massive corruption practiced by the society's most outrageously overpaid people--investment bankers. Then they're denied unemployment for weeks because their oh-so-compassionate former employer pays money to scummy fraudsters like Talx to keep them from getting unemployment. Then the worker's credit rating is destroyed because there's no money coming in. To top it all off, the worker can't get a new job because of a bad credit rating.
The American dream has become a nightmare.
The New York Times article provides a partial list of companies employing Talx to screw unemployed workers. You might want to let them know how you feel about their cold-blooded, profit-uber-alles business practices.
Other major employers that have used Talx include Aetna, AT&T, Best Buy, FedEx, Home Depot, Marriott, McDonald’s and the United States Postal Service. (The New York Times uses Talx for a different service, to answer inquiries from lenders about its employees’ earnings.)