The Work Number: credit score but for your employment history – by Equifax(employees.theworknumber.com) |
The Work Number: credit score but for your employment history – by Equifax(employees.theworknumber.com) |
At the minimum, new employee background check involved providing bank statement + social security contribution + income tax history.
Plus, I can verify for employers that I am a real human with a real employment history snd I can prove it...by giving them my SSN and Mother's Maiden name? What stops a bad guy from speed rushing the dark web, registering these things en masse and selling access to DPRK?
Now that they allow to look at your personal report, I went ahead, registered and requested a copy. This is just wow.
First of all, I noticed that American Express casually requests my report a few times per year. Well, I guess, if I lose my job, they will know soon! Besides Amex, the only other requests were the background checks when I actually applied for jobs, so everything else is fine.
But you know what else is there? All my fucking paychecks for all companies I used to work for here in the US. Nowhere in my employment agreements I did explicitly agree to my paycheck information to be transferred to Equifax, and yet, here we go.
Looking forward for the moment when all this data is leaked, because, you know, Equifax has some history [1].
[1]: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-...
What if you spent 10 years building a business abroad?
I remember early in my career being send by my employer on 'contract' assignments to other companies for 3 or 6 months. When I left that company and went interviewing, everyone was extremely concerned that I had been an independent contractor, some even saying they never employed such people. As though, once you've broken the chains, you're no longer employable.
I lived in what's known as a food desert. It was a place which required a car to get food. We drove on roads which crumbled and destroyed our car. The insurance (which we paid a pretty premium for) covered the fix. Lucky us! We found a garage, which took some time, but they scammed us. While we waited for the insurance to believe us, and we had no car, we tried to walk to get food. Technically, it was a 10 minute walk there, but the trucks (which were very large) made the 8-lane road impassible. We only realized this after trying. Our neighbors doorbell informed the police of this, and we were briefly detained for questions. It wasn't lost on me that the police's main suspicion was that we were homeless. Though not technically a crime, it is very incriminating. After our release, we asked an app to bring us food. It was a weekend, so there was an additional convenience fee. We also left a tip which "went directly to" pay for the human. We didn't hear them or see them, but the app told us the food had arrived and showed a picture of bags on a porch which wasn't ours. It was our neighbor's, whose doorbell had—once again—dispatched police for the intrusion. On Monday, we had no car to drive to the industrial park for work. The bus, which incidentally stopped on the other side of the 8-lane road, arrived once every 50 minutes, but must have had issues since it simply never arrived—though the app had no explanation for this. Nevermind, we called in "sick," which was laughable because being "sick" and taking a personal day were one in the same, but at least being "sick" avoided the shame of being desperate. We did eventually get our car back, not entirely the same, but we could at least move beyond the house again. The insurance app insists our case is settled, but we had to pay out of pocket (a credit card) and we needed reimbursed. We received a letter from the police not long after. A 300 USD fine for disorderly conduct in crossing the road. The date and time were wrong, but the social security number wasn't. We will take a sick day and go to court at 8:20AM next Thursday to appeal.It is also insane how much information the require for me to freeze MY information.
In what kind of anarcho-capitalist utopia do you live? Have you seen how many regulations they have over in the US? The Dodd-Frank act alone was 2,300 pages. And that's hardly the only rule they have on the books.
You can complain that the regulations are bad, sure. But 'no regulation' is a stretch.
“Rules for thee, not for me”
Mandate that any fresh new currency be apportioned and distributed to only living citizens, and a capitalism becomes possible again. As it stands now it's the money printers, and those adjacent, who hold the power.
Giving everyone fresh currency, and taxing those of significant wealth to sop up inflation (corporations and individuals), is how business entities get forced into serving the people again. As it stands now they serve those who have the ability to leverage the printing press, and that's not you or I.
Addendum: finance is not capital. Capital is the structures used to produce goods. Finance in our system is contractual trickery used to represent capital. To pull from Baudrillard: if capital is the land, finance is the map.
> Giving everyone fresh currency, and taxing those of significant wealth to sop up inflation (corporations and individuals), is how business entities get forced into serving the people again.
This doesn't really sound like capitalism, mate.
Nowhere in US law does it say your employer has to keep any of that information private.
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
Why is Equifax special?
Add to my report that I said: You suuuuckkk!
...but it's a choice...
You wanted cheaper prices for food, so of course Walmart would push out the local shops. You wanted to drive more, so of course the zoning laws were updated to expand the road. You wanted more convenience, so of course an automated bot handles your insurance claim. You wanted to feel safer, so of course your doorbell will dispatch police. You wanted better jobs, so of course your work and salary history is sold to employers.
Individual indignity caused by a privileged pride; you chose this.
Without being too dramatic, this reminds me of the U.S. Department of Transportation's page on A Consumer Guide to Air Travel:
The elimination of government regulation of airline fares and routes has resulted in lower fares and a wide variety of price/service options. In this new commercial environment, consumers have had to take a more active role in choosing their air service... In other words, airline delays aren't unusual, and defensive planning is a good idea when time is your most important consideration.Those cities have high COL and very competitive job markets because everyone wants to live there, and good luck moving if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck
See: every manager and CEO that gets a bonus from cutting down head count or keeping the hiring budget as low as possible.
There's also what you might call 'economics of scale in compliance'. Ie in absolute terms, the big guys suffer under the rules just as much as you do, but they can amortise the necessarily effort and billable lawyer hours over a bigger business.
This seems mostly like more of the same.
Plus, now that job listings have to show pay range in many states (including California), it’s not too difficult to now figure out a likely annual payrate for someone.
If you worked for American companies from abroad, you probably filed W-8BEN and were considered a non-US person for all tax purposes, had no TIN and nothing was reported on you to Equifax or other credit reporting companies (e.g. Transunion or Experian).
If you filed W-9 as US person, you gave them a TIN, which in the majority of employment related cases is your SSN, and then they most likely reported your employment to Equifax.
Also since the Stasi Germans have been very twitchy about privacy, which fed downstream into GDPR.