This has been a thing for a long time with nurses and some other professions.

It is perfectly valid. In any industry, there are high demand employers everyone wants to work for and low demand employers no one wants to work for. A lot of the entry level applicants will settle for the shitty employer and then nope the fuck out of there as soon as they build up enough experience to switch to a better employer. This results in the good employers essentially exploiting the shitty ones for free training.

While this is a good capitalist result, the less desirable employers have the right to essentially say "unless you work for us for X months, you owe us Y for training" in order to mitigate their turnover.

When a Washington state beauty salon charged Simran Bal $1,900 for training after she quit, she was shocked.

Considering that this would have been repeatedly told to her in order to deter her from quitting, and been part of a contract she signed, she is a giga-idiot if she was truly "shocked".

Nearly 10% of American workers surveyed in 2020 were covered by a training repayment agreement, said the Cornell Survey Research Institute.

Agreement, meaning signed contract.

On Capitol Hill, Senator Sherrod Brown is studying legislative options with an eye toward introducing a bill next year to rein in the practice, a Senate Democratic aide said.

Fucking Democrats and their socialism. It is a VOLUNTARY CONTRACT. Don't like it? DON'T SIGN IT. "But then they won't hire me". Umm, yes? You think you have the right to dictate terms to an employer? You don't. If you don't like the terms of the job offer, don't sign and find a different job.

"Employers are looking for ways to keep their workers from quitting without raising wages or improving working conditions," said Harris.

"Employers aren't behaving the way Democrats want them to." Boo fucking hoo.

The CFPB, which announced in June it was looking into the agreements, has begun to focus on how they may prevent even skilled employees with years of schooling, like nurses, from finding new, better jobs, according to a CFPB official who was not authorized to speak on the record. "We have heard from workers and worker organizations that the products may be restricting worker mobility," the official said.

Nope, and idiotic. Nurses only sign because they need that job and every better place won't hire them because they lack the training. Shitty hospitals effectively become training hospitals, which is a self-reinforcing cycle that keeps those hospitals shitty. It's not as easy as "just pay more" or "just treat your workers better". The hospital has every right to try to thwart the practice of new nurses working there for 6 months then leaving for a "better" hospital after getting trained up there.

I acted knew a nurse in this situation. It was a 2 year contract. The cost of training started off at like 15k and lowered each month until it hit 0 at 2 years. She planned to just leave and pay the penalty since her new job was going to pay her more anyway.

The survey found that 589 of the 1,698 nurses surveyed were required to take training programs and 326 of them were required to pay employers if they left before a certain time.

So about 17% of nurses had to work at a training hospital as a 1st job. Who cares.