American here. I have a job where they have a perk where you submit receipts through their app or website and you earn points you can cash out at some point if you shop with clients of our company. Sounds like a nice little promotional incentive, right?
Well, they say it’s optional but it’s not. You can apparently get in trouble for not using this and we’ve been pulled aside about it and warned we must use this stupid thing.
The idea is the app you install must be given permission to see your location at all times. It then checks the area to ensure you are favoring clients of our company as opposed to our competitors when you shop. When you shop at one of our clients, you must report your receipt to the company showing everything you bought while there. Even if you are buying gas, you need to report it.
I don’t participate in this invasion of privacy. I actually want to put less of my data out there in general, not more. I don’t even have a grocery store discount card. We were told in a meeting this week that promotions in this company are influenced by how much/if you participate in the program. We were told people have been denied promotions because they did not participate in this program.
If I’m off the clock they don’t get to decide what I do. They can fuck themselves. And I am surely not giving them a little report of what I buy. But saying we are ineligible for career advancement within the company unless we buy groceries, gas, etc from preferred vendors seems sketchy. Is this legal?
European here, WTF?!
American here and still, WTF‽
This sounds like a company store with extra steps. IANAL but it sounds extremely illegal for your employer to dictate what you do with your wages in any way, including linking it to career advancement. I highly doubt this is a union job, so your best bet might be to talk to a labor attorney. Do not talk to the company’s HR dept., because they don’t work for you; they work for your employer.
Agreed, the company is just waiting out a class action lawsuit where they will only end up paying 20% of what they’ve made as legal punishment; a scam old as time. I would wonder if they’ve put this in writing or could be recorded demanding the employees do these behaviors.
That’s not a job that’s a scam
I don’t want to reveal enough to identify myself there but it’s absolutely a real company, a pretty big one in my state too.
A lot of real big companies run scams on their employees. Take Herbalife for example. Or amway. Or guitar center
What does guitar center do?
Pays their employees minimum wage
Harvests their love for music and their skill to sell overpriced low quality gear
A culture of lying and swindling basically.
A horrible little microcosm of late stage capitalism all driven by their minimum wage employees believing the lie that they are “working in the music industry”
That’s pretty much every arts industry though. The theater and film industries also have a bad habit of chewing up new workers, under the guise of “working on a passion project”. And it doesn’t matter how many people they chew through; There will always be a new graduating class full of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed graduates to abuse.
Hell, look at the video game industry. The entire industry is designed around underpaying creatives, forcing them to work unreasonable 60-80 hour weeks because of unreasonable launch dates set by marketing departments, and then abandoning the workers as soon as the game is complete. All because the creatives are passionate about what they’re creating, and capitalism has learned that it can abuse that passion. Hell, early Japanese video games even refused to put the employees in the game credits, because the publishing companies didn’t think the people who designed the games were important enough to mention.
Creative workers will tolerate a lot just so they can say they worked on a project.
Yeah the difference is
MI sales is not “the music industry”
Yet guitar center pretends it is.
I suppose that depends on how you define it, because they’re definitely tangentially related. I started my career in theater, running lights and audio for live events. Now I sell audio equipment, which I got familiar with by working in theater. I still occasionally run shows too, (when I have the time), because it’s what I enjoy doing. But the sales side of things is where the money is, so that’s where I landed in the course of my career. The vast majority of my clients are theaters, and if someone asked I’d confidently say that I work in theater.
