Ex-Geeks staff lose legal bid to claw back withheld training costs from final paycheques Two men who quit software development firm Geeks Ltd failed to prove the company unlawfully withheld more than £2,000 from each of them to claw back its training costs, a tribunal has ruled. The duo, named by the London South Employment Tribunal as Mr Bennett and Mr Day, both left the South London firm in 2019 after spending …
So making them pay for their mentor, I guess that's "reasonable", but the director is protecting the corportate image, not training the newbie.
I would have retorted that the Director is actually training the mentor for things he should have picked up initially
Hm, interesting, I had thought EU law required that training that was deemed essential to your employment was considered 'free' to the employee.
On the other hand, he went from no training at all, to earning £35k in a couple of years, which is not a terrible situation.
I am disturbed however, that any employer who isn't a total sh****ck would try to charge their employees £18k for training them how to do their job. It's a nasty precedent, whether you have to stick with them for 3 years or not.
Charging management and supervisors time to any employee is unreasonable.
If that employee was not a trainee or intern, they would still be supervised and managed.
So management is not a benefit to the employee it is a necessary and normal component of business operation.
Everybody makes mistakes, so it is not appropriate to financially penalise employees for making mistakes. If you want to have a bonus scheme that rewards employees for not making mistakes, that would be fine.
Mentoring is usually not paid, so that situation should have been made clear to the employee before providing it and incurring a debt to the employee. I don't know whether it was or not.
Was the training actually recognised by anyone else? Could you say that the training would be on par with, say, vendor exams such as MCP or MCSE? I think if someone put that in the training section of a job application I received I'd just say "oh dear, scraping the bottom of the barrel here"
Somehow, I very much doubt it, and I suspect the court has just made it very much easier for any employer to palm off any old snake oil as training by giving them a template to follow for costs.
This is the point in the judgement that I have a problem with. The Employer is setting the employment terms, and the employee is really in a take it or leave it position. Prior to accepting the contract, it would be difficult for the (potential) employee to argue the quality of training or true cost, in the event of leaving the job early.
Presumably the complainants could have documented this lack of quality prior to the Tribunal. Either they didn't or the Judge wasn't convinced.
Not sure I have much sympathy for them tbh. It was well documented in their initial contracts and they knew what they were getting into, especially as they only had to stick it out another year to get the debt written off. I definitely have no sympathy for the guy who got a £10+ payrise upon leaving.
For me, the contract screams "walk away". Because I have been around long enough to recognize the scam. It's just another variation (although a little better for the individual) of the tech schools with no certifications that advertised on late night TV to train you in IT or nursing and then get you a job in the industry. They never did.
It also seems like the salaries are pretty low. What the developer was getting is Code Monkey pay around here. $15/hour is what they are wanting for minimum wage in the US, and that is just short of £23k, without discounting for the £7k/yr training costs.
It doesn't matter how experienced you are, there is going to be OJT before you are up to speed with a new company. Without details of what the training was, there is no way to tell if it had any value to the employee. If it is business specific, for example; here is our development process and this is our tool stack, then it's probably a sunk cost for the business and provides little value to the employee.
And like someone else mentioned, I don't see how the Director's time is training. That would have been a red flag for me on the contract. It sounds more like they have high turnover and they use new employees to cover the Director's paycheck.
These guys did get some very beneficial training though, Read, and understand, the contract BEFORE you sign it!
The first thing I would do as a lawyer would be to argue that they weren't actually given the training at those rates or quantities
Did they actually receive 1 hour of 1 on 1 training each and every day (or almost an entire days training a week).
I would also argue that the trainers didn't actually cost £60/hour salary (because it is cost to company, not charge-out cost) - a salary of £100k+. This is also very easy for the company to prove.
If their lawyers tried to validate both these assumptions, they probably did genuinely receive their monies worth.
Of course if any of that time was spent in group meetings (or group trainings) or the developer was creating value for the company during the 'mentoring' then it might not be the case
Have a read of the full judgment, link's in the article. Quite dense but that's exactly what Day and Bennett's lawyers did. The problem they ran into was Geeks had kept precise records (detailed in the judgment) and one of the claimants had actually received a full month of training time over and above what his contract said he would get. On the flip side none of the training was externally accredited.
From what's in the judgment (and I know what's presented in a courtroom can and does vary from reality) I don't think Geeks was running a bad shop. Training is a cost and ab initio trainees only had to repay it if they quit within 30 months. They even offered a repayment plan when these guys quit - details not given but I get the impression it would have been reasonable, albeit on the steep side.
Seems to set a dangerous precedent if this is training on an internal tool.
You start at McDonalds, you do a bunch of training courses from Burger-U about their world class business procedures and the use of their advanced burger making technology.
Then you try and leave and you find you are massively in debt - can anybody spell indentured servitude?
Ab Initio is Latin meaning "from the beginning".
As in, someone who studies a language "ab initio" at University hadn't ever studied that language before they started that course.
Someone who learns coding "ab initio" has no prior experience, is being taught from a blank slate.
The context it's been used in here is that; nothing to do with a specific tool...
Thanks for the warning never to accept a call from a recruiter for Geeks Ltd.
> It is not credible that the Respondent would permit employees in the Claimants' position to work from day one effectively under their own steam and without close additional supervision.
Judge Ferguson has clearly never spent time working in the real world. That sounds like almost every job I have had, in IT or elsewhere.
What is the point of being employees. Who ever said you'd need proportional pay for anything? Only the employees are insistent on being payed.
In due time, all the employees are required to donate to their employers for the gift of employment. Training costs? No, we do not charge training costs. Here, at our international employer facility, you are supposed to contribute to employer's success. You may do so by contributing financially to employer's bottom line. You, the employee, have the honor of being part of the greater good of employer. That should be all you ever need.
All hail to Employer, creator of greater goods, salvation of boredom and ruler of our daily tasks. May Employer go on forever. Employer's good deeds are legend.
Company A pay for the training of employee A but then don't pay for the employee new level of expertise they now have gained through said training. So employee A is now worth more but is not receiving the cash to reflect this so Employee A goes to Company B who have not had to pay for the training. So who's the fool here
Not entirely sure what your point is. They got a substantial payrise post year 2, maybe not as much as they might have got on the open market, going from the one sample we know about, but they only had to stick it out for a few more months to get off the debt scott free.
They got a career jump start thanks to employer A, and Employer A doesn't appear to have put them into serfdom to do it. They may not like it but it appears the judge also thought the company had been pretty even handed.
I suspect they jumped ship before realising how much they would be clobbered then attempted a tribunal as a way of getting back.
My sympathy for these 2 guys is limited tbh.
Not entirely sure what your point is.
A common problem with companies that don't have decent employee retention policies. Employees do their own market assessment to assess their value, and if it's higher than their current benefits, take their knowledge/experience/training elsewhere. Company then has to rehire & train to replace that employee.
They got a substantial payrise post year 2, maybe not as much as they might have got on the open market
Not that substantial, ie £18k in training & development for a new hire translated into only £2k of added value for the employee, which is less than the 'market rate' offered to the employee that jumped ship. The new employer obviously assumed the training/experience was worth more than the old employer. I kinda wonder if bodyshops that pimp out staff set themselves up for high churn because staff will inevitably look at their charge-out rates, their payslips, and decide they're worth more.
Basing salary on fees generated could be more fair, but more complex to come up with a fair split to cover SG&A and other overheads. In this case, also possibly fun if these employees ended up mentoring new hires because the value of that work was stated. I guess a sales-style commission model would work, but then again, those often have their own challenges.
My sympathy for these 2 guys is limited tbh.
Yup. Always read the contract.
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
—Tennessee Ernie Ford
If I have to pay to be trained by a company that hires me, I am going to walk the other way. My assumption in going forward with a job is that I have all the general skills needed, any training is that which is needed to fit how the company does things. Now if this is an "apprenticeship" situation and there are some tenure for training rules, that I understand and I wonder if this isn't at least a partly applicable issue to this situation. But if you want a job/need a job, sometimes it seems like anything you need to sign is what you need to sign to get it.
Their website is quite telling about the environment
"Our team of over 95 full time staff are all employed permanently. Our delivery team alone consists of over 75 brilliant software engineers, testers and project managers who are all based in our Sutton offices."
"At our headquarters we have a 3500 sqf entertainment hall with refreshing facilities such as massage chairs, snooker and pool tables, fussball, table tennis and TV game consoles. Also there is an abundance of soft drinks, juices, ice creams, breakfast and fresh fruits available to all staff free of charge".
"At Geeks, every employee gets 120 hours of training a year, along with access to leading premium online education portals that makes the latest technologies and trends available to them to continuously grow and maintain their status as a trusted technical adviser to our clients."
Hm, so I would take that they basically take virtually all uneducated staff, give them "£15-20k" of debt to watch "Open University" style education videos, then charge their customers £100 per hour for technical support on how to use Excel and workflow process apps?
What the actual feck would you trust them to build?
If you sign a 30 month lease on an apartment, or a car, or a phone, you can't just decide after 24 months to cancel it without some penalty.
This is no different. They had the choice of either continuing to work for 6 months or use a percentage of their new, increased salary to pay back Geeks (not even all at once, since Geeks offered installments).
Sorry to be a dick but in the UK there are some decent protections under rights of termination for all of the above (for a car see "Halves & Thirds" rules).
Likewise most consumer contracts are pretty much unenforceable in a court room.
If however, you're talking about company-based contracts, then yeah, more often, you're f#cked.
I actually like their model - not 100% though. Apprenticeship wages can be rather low so paying a trainee a reasonable wage but garnishing their pay if they leave early seems like a decent benefit to the trainee. I don't think the training costs are entirely reasonable in this case though.
The US is generally regarded as one of the more employer friendly places in the developed world, a place where custom, practice and legislation has brought the notion "heads, we win, tails, you lose" to a fine art. Even so, I cannot think of a situation where employees would be billed for training, especially for nominal (and arguable costs) such as a supervisor's time. Training and supervision are generally regarded as part of the cost of doing business. The exception to this is the zero-hours contractor, the nominally self-employed employee, where the cost of 'training' someone like a home based telephone support person is required up front by fly-by-night enterprises who prey on people who's situation prevents them from getting a proper job.
I left the UK in the 1980s, about the time the government was big on pushing notions like "a return to Victorian values". Apparently those values included Victorian employment practices.
My wife was offered a job by Ross Perot's company in 1989 with a very similar (but MUCH more onerous) arraignment. (We weren't married at the time.)
The detailed breakdown is the part that I don't buy. There are WAY to many ways to play fast & loose.
But an arraignment of "after x weeks training, you owe us y, prorated over z years" is a clear contractual arraignment. Take it or leave it, your call.
I've actually mentioned the possibility of a similar arraignment to potential employers regarding relocation support.
<Reaches for helmet, ducks, and runs for cover>
From my experience of educating and training people over many years in the public sector, I actually agree with this sort of contract. From my point of view, too many doctors and nurses take very cheap education and early training here and then immediately go somewhere else where the wages are better (I'm not talking about students from overseas who are paying small fortunes to be here). I'm definitely in favour of a pay-back system for home students - say five years working in the NHS, with a financial cost for each year less than that.
Also, from my 20-odd years involved in law learning, teaching and research, my opinion is that anything Lord Diplock said was wrong.
The terms seem a bit sucky when you read them out aloud but they shouldn't have been a surprise. I can see why they'd do it if people start from scratch and leave having gained industry experience (because that's what the "training" really is).
But then if an employee can leave for a 40 or 50 percent pay rise that's the reason you have a problem and probably the one you should address.
Are the costs and charges realistic? I doubt it, it's just part of running a business - supervisors are called supervisors for a reason after all. It was what those two agreed to though and I suspect they'd both do exactly the same thing again if they went back in time and were told what was going to happen.
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