Sunday, March 29, 2020

True? Or Urban Myth?

If this is true, public shaming is in order:
A company in Austin, Texas is looking to dock pay from workers who receive government stimulus checks, according to an anonymous employee.

With the historic $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus deal signed, Americans can look forward to receiving some economic relief during the pandemic.

An unnamed company in Texas, though, appears to be looking to use the stimulus to relieve their payroll strain.

On Wednesday, the company sent out a form titled “Employee Acknowledgement of ‘Government Assistance’ Pay Reduction.”

The form was reported by an employee who wished to remain anonymous, but the employee spoke to local news KXAN about the situation.

“The form says they are preemptively deducting funds from our paychecks. That number is based on what they’re anticipating the government relief fund to be,” the worker told the outlet.

4 comments:

Mike Thiac said...

If this is true, it's BS.

Steve USMA '85 said...

Can't say I agree with you on this one. Not saying I disagree but it would be based on situation. Consider a company trying to help their employees by going into debt paying a salary for no work. The company can only do this for a short while before it goes bankrupt and no one has a job or income.

If said worker is getting public assistance and salary from the company, they are actually getting a pay raise during an economic disaster. So you are saying the company should continue to put itself sooner into bankruptcy when instead it could briefly limit its outflow so that they can pay salary in the future a little longer. The employee gets the same amount of money to live on. The company can now extend how long it can stay afloat during this time.

Remember, a true business decision would be to layoff the workers in the first place and let them collect unemployment insurance. A business is trying to take care of its employees while trying to stay financially solvent and you castigate them.

Finally, I do note that Google searching a couple days after the original KXAN TV story, no original writing on the subject has occurred. All stories about this only refer to the few facts in the KXAN story. So, is this even a real thing or is someone grand-standing to get their 15 minutes of fame?

Darren said...

I think it looks bad. I understand the business decision, but it looks callous--even if they are paying their employees. That was a decision they made *before* the government stepped in, and they should either honor that decision or not--but don't try to use the govt as a reason not to honor it.

The story smelled a little fishy to me from the beginning, that's why I gave this post the title I did. Besides, how would the company know what someone's AGI is?

Ellen K said...

I've heard nothing of this story and I live in Texas. Keep in mind, the station you cite is very liberal and the person claiming that fact wanted his name and the company to be anonymous. I'm not saying it didn't happen but nobody outside of Austin seems familiar with the story. As they say "The first casualty of war is the truth."