"ISSTA" - One of the Companies
that Makes Workers Pay for their Errors
The
day my son flew to the US, the woman who sold
him his ticket called the house asking for him.
I told
her he was en route to the States.
She
told me that a mistake had occurred with the amount he was charged for the
ticket and that he owed "Issta" another 150
NIS.
I asked
her how that happened. She said she made an error.
I asked
if they have anything in writing saying that he still owes them money. She
answered in the negative. In fact, the receipt indicates that he paid in full.
I asked
my son about it and he said that he thought a mistake occurred, but not to pay
it as it was the ticketing clerk who made the mistake.
I
called her back and said: "If you made a mistake and the receipt says my
son paid in full, then you have no legal charge against him. Would you pay your
local grocer if he one day said to you that you owe him 150 NIS but had no
proof that you in fact owed the money? It's a bad precedent."
She
answered: "I understand, but if you don't remit the money; I will have to
pay the difference out of my pocket."
That
pulled the worker solidarity strings of my heart as two memories came back to
me. In the first, I was a 15-year-old worker in McDonald's, my first job. A
quick change artist came to my counter and ripped me off. The rip off was
deducted from my salary, as was the amount that my cash register was once
*over*. Fast forward six years. I am working as a cocktail waitress
at the Fountainbleu Hotel on Miami Beach once got
bumped into by a customer as I was carrying a full tray of drinks that went all
over the floor. *I* had to pay the full price of those drinks, which was
considerably more than I made that night of eight hours on my feet.
I sent
the check - which the company said should be made out to "Issta".
I also
sent a letter to the main branch of "Issta"
telling them that I am utterly disgusted with their policy of making workers
pay for errors when they make so much money hand-over-fist.
Many of
you will be in a Capitalist state of mind and will agree with the company
policy. "Hey, you'll say, she made the mistake. She has to pay for it. Right?"
Wrong.
A
simple clerk earns enough working for a company like "Issta" to live an upper middle class lifestyle after
two hours of work per day on the average. All the rest goes into the company's
pocket.
That's
right. A full 75%, at least, of your work time is for the benefit of the
company, not to your benefit. If your boss is a real SOB, even by Capitalist
standards, and forces you to work overtime, without reimbursing you
time-and-a-half, and some don't reimburse at all, that too goes to their
advantage, obviously. When I worked in a "Telma"
food factory*, the workers were forced to work overtime, *LOTS* of
overtime, and still earned so little that they had to get an income
supplement from National Insurance.
*(That's
right; I've worked as a counter girl, waitress, factory worker and lowly
clerk at about 50 low-class various jobs despite my fancy shmancy education, which, as Jim Croce said so very
eloquently "prepared me for life in the Middle Ages", because my
heart is with the workers and I wanted to know their lives first hand. I've
done jobs that involved more "prestige" too, including teaching and conducting
research, and found that, with one notable exception when I tutored at a
boarding school for asthmatic youngsters with a prince of a General
Manager and a dream staff, that those "respectable" jobs always
involved the moral degradation of shutting up and covering up, which I could
not conscience and also paid far below the worth of the workers.)
Take
into account too that when a worker "reimburses" hir
(hir is the accepted non-gender specific form of both
his and her) boss for a mistake zie (zie is the gender non-specific form of both he and
she) doesn't pay the net cost of the good or service, but the resale cost.
I
realize that this abuse of workers is so very much the norm that it is taken as
a given. As I wrote, I have been a victim of it. I also realize that it is the
corporations that determine what people are generally made to think is right
and wrong and they train people how to react emotionally to them via the mass
media, but this practice is an abuse and must be stopped. People have the
right to make honest mistakes. Don't the owners and bosses tell themselves
they're only human when they make mistakes? Too bad they don't tell themselves
they're only human when they relate to their workers and set company policy.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel