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Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

businessinsider.com

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Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#261
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent wasn’t disagreeing with the collective payment responsibility (and I don’t know where you got that), only with the public school model that gives no choice as to which schools the money is spent at.

Suggesting a tax refund is pretty clearly proposing they should not have to fund public schools.

Refund or voucher to the parent suffering it. Still not seeing how you went from that to “don’t you understand that non-parents should fund public schools?” The premise is that those hurt by it, parents, recover money to otherwise educate their kids. Nowhere in that was a claim that the childless should get money back for being childless, so I don’t see how addressing that is responsive.

Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#262

"Equifax flagged 283 contractors for potential 'dual employment,' documents show." Would this not be a big flag to reclassify these contractors as employees? Being able to have multiple clients is one of the factors to determine if you're a contractor...

You get a lot of this up here in Canada. Companies hire you as a contractor, but prohibit you from working other roles.

I'm pretty sure this isn't legal in most provinces.

Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#264
post #193

I think there should be a law preventing companies from restricting their employees from having second jobs. As long as it doesn't affect their performance in their primary job and as they are not working at a direct competitor, it should be none of their stupid business (and should be illegal) to check for an employee's other jobs.

> "teammates" were fired for having "a second full-time job while maintaining their full-time role at EFX," Except that having a second FULL-TIME job does affect the first one.

That's exactly the problem. No company should force workers to have only their job. If full time equates to 8 hours, I might well take another 8-hour job (of course that's very tiring and ineffective though) and work 16 hours a day. Would I personally? No. But should anyone who wants to do it be allowed? Yes.

Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#265

"Equifax flagged 283 contractors for potential 'dual employment,' documents show." Would this not be a big flag to reclassify these contractors as employees? Being able to have multiple clients is one of the factors to determine if you're a contractor...

I believe contractor in this sense is more like staff augmentation, e.g. Equifax pays a fee to $COMPANY, who, employs (W2) John Doe to work 40h/wk at Equifax as a "contractor." It's very common in local/state/federal government to have these C2C (company-to-company) contracting arrangements to get around regulatory or legislative limits on government employee pay.

This is actually much more of an issue than someone just holding two W2 jobs, because these "contractors" are almost always billing hours, and if you're billing the same hour to two people that very quickly approaches actual fraud.

Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#266
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At one point our tax department started cracking down on this, then stopped, I'm not sure why. But it needs to be done. Around here (Poland) they tried to focus the crackdown on... contractors, planning on requiring a contractor to have at least 25% of their income from a second client to be considered self-employed and not an employee. The local IT lobbyists had a hearty laugh about this idea and that was the end…

Yeah, that's definitely the wrong place to focus - focus on the employers, as they're the ones who reap the benefits of treating employees as contractors.

It's Australia. They don't always have level-headed policy.

Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#267

> Executives, especially in the tech industry, have said they're worried that some remote employees are distracted. “Distracted” like the time that Equifax leaked hundreds of millions of pieces of personal data. Maybe instead of blaming the workforce they should worry about making the company a place that people want to work exclusively. Equifax does not matter at all as an organization.

Indeed. In an alternate universe, the Chief Information Security Officer of Equifax is giving interviews about the dangers of work from home for cyber security roles, informed by her masters in music composition and 0.0 years of IC experience as deep expertise. I'm still astounded no one ended up in jail over that. Software Engineering really does need some professionalization.

No post body was provided.

Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to know. I’m a contractor and am just starting my own business separate from my main contracting role. Was curious what precedent there is for this dynamic Edit: I was under the impression being a contractor would give one flexibility to do whatever they want when they’re not billing hours, depends on the contract wording of course

If you are in CA you have a "right to moonlight" provided there is no conflict of interest. In probably 47 other states you could be fired for your activity outside of work even without a conflict of interest.

You can still be fired "for no reason" in CA at any time. It's still at-will employment.

Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#269

On the one hand I get where Equifax is coming from. I’ve had coworkers before with multiple full-time jobs and only a very few can pull it off without it seriously impacting their expected productivity. The answer to this in that specific case is firing I think because it’s just dishonest. Not only are you not putting in the time, you’re also not making an equivalent business impact. The general answer is that people…

The level of wrong we can ascribe to holding two jobs when you’re not allowed to is minute and individual. A giant, rent-seeking POS like EFX (who already has proven itself negligent in handling sensitive data) exploiting their data for purposes it’s not intended for is much more alarming and far reaching.

Re: Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the time 'contractor' is used to refer to a W-2 employee of a staffing company rather than an independent contractor.

So the company in question has what legal right to investigate the employees of their contractors? Did the contractor’s employees sign off on this? It seems unlikely. A better remedy would be to fire the contract partner if you feel the work isn’t meeting the value you expect.

You can investigate whatever you want.

If you read the article and look at the differences, they fired the Equifax employees outright. They "flagged" a bunch of contractors. That almost certainly means they sent that list of contractors to their employer companies and requested additional verification of hours and/or requested they be removed from their projects.

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