Pay by Debit Card is Legal Wage Theft

Starting in January, Kentucky state government is going to punish all its employees who make too little money to afford a bank account by paying them with Chase Bank debit cards - cards that could subtract as much as $50 a month from the employees' pay for the privilege of being forced to get paid by credit card.

Down with Tyranny:

This really sucks. From this report (last week) by the NY Times's Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Stephanie Clifford:

A growing number of American workers are confronting a frustrating predicament on payday: to get their wages, they must first pay a fee.

For these largely hourly workers, paper paychecks and even direct deposit have been replaced by prepaid cards issued by their employers. Employees can use these cards, which work like debit cards, at an A.T.M. to withdraw their pay.

But in the overwhelming majority of cases, using the card involves a fee. And those fees can quickly add up: one provider, for example, charges $1.75 to make a withdrawal from most A.T.M.’s, $2.95 for a paper statement and $6 to replace a card. Some users even have to pay $7 inactivity fees for not using their cards.

These fees can take such a big bite out of paychecks that some employees end up making less than the minimum wage once the charges are taken into account, according to interviews with consumer lawyers, employees, and state and federal regulators.

And they offer some cases in point, like that of 21-year-old Milwaukee McDonald's employee Devote Yates, who "says he spends $40 to $50 a month on fees associated with his JPMorgan Chase payroll card," and says, "It’s pretty bad. There’s a fee for literally everything you do."

SNIP

As you could surely have imagined, the use of these cards didn't come about for the convenience of workers. It saves companies money, and that's all that matters.

This sounds like a job for Elizabeth Warren. Or riots in the streets.

Steve M:

Do you know what we really need? We need an angry mob with torches and pitchfork marching on the Hamptons, or wherever the hell the scumbags responsible for this system frolic and gambol.

Seriously, what we need is a genuinely populist political leader who makes this sort of thing a top priority -- not whining about the deficit, or about the existence of the Fed, or about big government, or hemp still being illegal, but about ordinary people being screwed.

And that political leader needs to be someone who connects with heartlanders -- which means I'm not talking about Elizabeth Warren, alas. I think Warren could connect with heartlanders, but she's been too nice, too polite, not sufficiently egotistical or ambitious. She lacks the vaulting ambition of Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot or Ron Paul or Ted Cruz. She connects with Massachusetts residents and with the residents of that Portlandia of the mind known as culturally sophisticated liberal America (i.e., you and me). She's still a boutique taste. (Most of our heroes are -- Wyden, Feingold, and Grayson among the pols, Maddow and even Ed Schulz among the media types, etc., etc.)

Somebody has to get the word out to Middle Americans that it doesn't have to be this way. No national figure has done that, and there's no sign of any such national figure on the horizon. But we're screwed until "real Americans" are awakened, or wake up on their own.

Kentucky's Personnel Cabinet claims the Chase debit cards will have no user fees at Chase ATMs. Really? Anybody know how many Chase ATMs there are in the hollows of Morgan County? Among the shuttered storefronts of downtown Covington? Along the undeveloped roads near the Mississippi River?

None, is my guess.  And the Commonwealth of Kentucky - in cahoots with Chase Bank - is committing wage theft.