"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
DoreenDotan@gmail.com