The Work Number: credit score but for your employment history – by Equifax

(employees.theworknumber.com)

24 points | by firefoxd 1 hour ago

9 comments

  • helpfulmandrill 10 minutes ago
    A vent: why is it any of your business why I had X months without work? Maybe I had enough money not to work for a bit and felt like doing something different. Why am I obligated to continuous labour even when I don't need it. Why am I subject to your judgement for not renting out my life at every possible moment?
    • w3ll_w3ll_w3ll 5 minutes ago
      Corporations want obedient wage slaves, so if they find out that you may have some "Fuck you" money that you can use to stop working for them at your whim, they will avoid you.
      • xnickb 1 minute ago
        I understand what you're saying, but corporation is made of people. How is this communicated to my hiring manager and why do they agree to play this stupid game?
  • Liftyee 23 minutes ago
    The US is rapidly catching up with China in the field of authoritarianism.
    • alex_duf 8 minutes ago
      I'd call it dystopianism, this page reads like an episode of Black Mirror
  • johnshades 8 minutes ago
    Some more background on this here… Equifax gets the data directly from America’s biggest companies https://www.fastcompany.com/40485634/equifax-salary-data-and...
  • northernsausage 46 minutes ago
    What is your S̶o̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ C̶r̶e̶d̶i̶t̶ Work Number score?
  • cultofmetatron 1 hour ago
    I see no way this could go wrong at all.
    • eru 59 minutes ago
      Seems like a souped up credit score? With pretty much all the pros and cons of that existing system.
      • smolder 43 minutes ago
        You can't mention that there are pros and cons and not mention that the cons vastly outweigh the pros, with any credibility.
        • eru 21 minutes ago
          I already don't like what I hear about standard American credit scores (but I don't live in the US anyway.)

          This seems mostly like more of the same.

        • throwawayqqq11 25 minutes ago
          There are pros for employers, they can hire based on whether a candidate has been punished by other employers before and keep punishing them based on an objective social credit system. And there are cons.
      • ventana 51 minutes ago
        Except in the credit report they only list your lenders and how much money you owe, and your payment history, and it's technically possible to not get any credit and have no information, or at least no recent information, in your credit report. In The Work Number, they not only list your employers, but also all your paychecks, and it's hardly possible to opt out.
  • ventana 58 minutes ago
    When you apply for a software job in the US and go through a background check, most of your former employments are verified through The Work Number. As an employee, I'm not aware of a way to opt out of this data collection, and I assume if there is a way, it will surely make the future background check harder.

    Now that they allow to look at your personal report, I went ahead, registered and requested a copy. This is just wow.

    First of all, I noticed that American Express casually requests my report a few times per year. Well, I guess, if I lose my job, they will know soon! Besides Amex, the only other requests were the background checks when I actually applied for jobs, so everything else is fine.

    But you know what else is there? All my fucking paychecks for all companies I used to work for here in the US. Nowhere in my employment agreements I did explicitly agree to my paycheck information to be transferred to Equifax, and yet, here we go.

    Looking forward for the moment when all this data is leaked, because, you know, Equifax has some history [1].

    [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-...

    • mwill 47 minutes ago
      Funnily enough, if you go to the FAQ, under the heading "Can I opt out of having my information on The Work Number?" it straight up starts with "No.", full stop and all.
    • eru 14 minutes ago
      Interesting, it looks like you can only get your own data, if you have an American postal address. So if you moved abroad (or never lived there), you can not get your data, even if they have it.
      • birdsongs 6 minutes ago
        Reason number xxx that I never plan to return permanently. The longer I'm away the more bonkers things seem there.
        • eru 2 minutes ago
          Oh, the form also expect you to have a US social security number and US mobile number.
    • Barbing 46 minutes ago
      Dear Equifax,

      Add to my report that I said: You suuuuckkk!

    • lotsofpulp 52 minutes ago
      >Nowhere in my employment agreements I did explicitly agree to my paycheck information to be transferred to Equifax, and yet, here we go.

      Nowhere in US law does it say your employer has to keep any of that information private.

      • ventana 47 minutes ago
        Sure, not all good laws are given. Must take a good public campaign or maybe a big leak for the law like that to appear. I would think California will be one of the first states to adopt a law like that, similar to how they now forbid to ask about your current salary when interviewing you for a job [1].

        [1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

      • b112 24 minutes ago
        Really? Anf if they took your paystubs, and posted them online? No problems? Nary a one?

        Why is Equifax special?

  • charlieyu1 58 minutes ago
    Should not be legal.
    • rustcleaner 47 minutes ago
      No, it shouldn't be. I agree with you.
  • beardyw 11 minutes ago
    Dystopian
  • sschueller 48 minutes ago
    I guess you don't need to be an authoritarian country. Just capitalist with no regulation...
    • eru 13 minutes ago
      > Just capitalist with no regulation...

      In what kind of anarcho-capitalist utopia do you live? Have you seen how many regulations they have over in the US? The Dodd-Frank act alone was 2,300 pages. And that's hardly the only rule they have on the books.

      You can complain that the regulations are bad, sure. But 'no regulation' is a stretch.

      • eecc 2 minutes ago
        Sure, depends for whom.

        “Rules for thee, not for me”

    • alansaber 44 minutes ago
      State consolidates power or a few megacorps. Unfortunately the middle ground (approximate balance of power) is always tenuous
    • rustcleaner 39 minutes ago
      Big banks growing up around a central bank is not capitalism, it's financialism.

      Mandate that any fresh new currency be apportioned and distributed to only living citizens, and a capitalism becomes possible again. As it stands now it's the money printers, and those adjacent, who hold the power.

      Giving everyone fresh currency, and taxing those of significant wealth to sop up inflation (corporations and individuals), is how business entities get forced into serving the people again. As it stands now they serve those who have the ability to leverage the printing press, and that's not you or I.

      Addendum: finance is not capital. Capital is the structures used to produce goods. Finance in our system is contractual trickery used to represent capital. To pull from Baudrillard: if capital is the land, finance is the map.

      • squigz 14 minutes ago
        > Mandate that any fresh new currency be apportioned and distributed to only living citizens

        > Giving everyone fresh currency, and taxing those of significant wealth to sop up inflation (corporations and individuals), is how business entities get forced into serving the people again.

        This doesn't really sound like capitalism, mate.

        • eru 11 minutes ago
          I don't agree with the mate's weird ideas, but capitalism is fairly adaptable and works reasonable well even in fairly weird systems. Have a look at eg Germany's social market economy.