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Oh great! Fabulous! Now instead of being told by a guy with a foreign accent that I can't lower my payments, it's going to be a local girl or guy! Well that makes it so much more fun, then!
I did not realize the Obama administration was pissed at them. Looking at the article, I hope the student loan change does pass. Sallie Mae can die in a fire.
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Meg, your unprofessionalism is very professional.
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If they cut down on the retention bonuses it would also be affordable.
I hope it passes too. I spent years trying to repay the last of my student loan and Sallie Mae and the various entities involved made it harder to do so by demanding larger payments that I could afford. They also need to ban the use of 3rd party debt collectors on student loans. I don't know if that is a dept of ED thing or Sallie Mae. I had one call me that was based out of a state prison. IIRC it was Pioneer Credit. Nothing like being threatened about your late student loan payments by a convict. Then they moved it to one in GA where they were contracting the collections out. I had a rather ghetto and angry couple who were using their home phone to do their collection calls for this company. When they started calling my husband telling him they were going to garnish his wages for my loan I filed a complaint. What really made me want the entire student loan system to die in a fire was when I read an investment article bragging how Sallie Mae was pegging 20% returns for investors. Between the amount I owed, interest and fees I could have paid my loan off much faster by putting the money into Sallie investments. It would have grown faster than interest and fees were racking up. That right there shows how screwed up the current system is.
So \"Bob\" might actually be Bob!
Too bad they will be all fired as soon as Obama stops the government from funding sallie mae.
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Or maybe it's because people are willing to work for $5.15 an hour again.
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I just wonder if the call center will be using the same scripts as before? My daughter became disabled before she could finish her senior year. We have yet (three years) to get her loan discharged, despite what the contract states.
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Too bad it took the government to step in, and companies still are not figuring out on their own that paying wages overseas without having overseas customers causes problems in the economy.
I agree with lalaland13. THEY CALLED ME (I never sought them out like they were trying to collect on me before I could even fall late.) because they felt I would have difficulty making my 1k+ payment a month on my student loans and offered me 4 years interest payment which would make it jump to 1500 a month (not helping me) then told me that I don't qualify for any thing that could help lower the payment and would in reality help me.
I told the lady \"You called me to say you have a concern about financially raping me...how is it you have a job?\" and hung up on her.
Since then, I have made that damned payment on time by working a second full-time job doing flashlight cop security, moving back in with my brother and budgeting but if/when I can get discharged I'm taking it. Sallie Mae deserves the worst pu*sy eating cervical cancer an angry god can bestow and I hope Obama gives it to her.
I can't help thinking \"too little too late\". They should've thought about this a decade ago, if that's really their motivation. Otherwise they're going to have to do a lot more than just bring back 2000 jobs.Frankly, I think there must be some economical advantage to bringing the jobs back right now. I don't believe they're just suddenly community-minded & patriotic or anything like that.
I never worked for Sallie Mae directly, it was worse. About 8-9 years ago I was between jobs in my field, and I was temping with a temp agency. I was hired, without knowing what was going on until once I was there, as a temp for Sallie Mae, with a group of other people. I worked calculating forbearances.
What was going on is that the company was in the process of downsizing, and in the midst of these big waves of lay-offs for the permanent workers, in preperation to outsource, the company found themselves with too much work for the workers they had left, and nowhere to send it to yet.
It was kind of insulting to the permanent workers particularly because they were probably paying the temp agency (though not us temps obviously, the agency gets a generous cut) more than they'd paid the workers that were previously let go. So in all reality, the company had probably screwed up, and it probably cost them more money in the long run the way they did things.
I won't say that the 'permanent' workers treated us with overt hostility or anything, but there was a distinct cold atmosphere toward us in general. And it's understandable. For the months preceding this, waves of lay-offs were happening, and nobody really knew whose job would go next. And yet here these temp workers were brought in.
I worked there for just a few months. Perhaps a year later, I was on a flight out of the area, and the person sitting next to me on the plane was a woman from India, and we got to talking. She was in the area on business, working for Sallie Mae, in training so that she could return to the India office to train the employees there.
The whole system seems totally messed up. U.S. citizens are behind other comparable countries when it comes to higher education. Big companies deliberately import educated workers, while many people complain about new immigrants. Citizens who do get an education have student loans they can't pay back because they can't even get a job at Sallie Mae because they've been outsourced. The people in the outsourced jobs in other countries are not buying goods & services in the U.S., so that money is gone from our communities. Meaning there's less jobs for the people to make money at, to pay back their student loans. It's like some horrid vicious cycle circle of illogical insanity.
The problem with corporate america is that it's all about short-term gratification for them. They're like an addict just looking for the next fix. Who cares if the company goes bust a decade from now because the business practices are non-viable for the long term - because the top guys don't expect to be in those jobs a decade from now anyway. They don't really own the companies, so they have no long-term vested interest. When the well starts to dry up, they go onto the next upcoming company offering perks & expense accounts.
There's a simple solution to bring all the jobs back to this country and more.
Limit top down executive compensation on a sliding scale to 100x the lowest paid domestic worker's wage, OR 1000x the lowest paid foreign worker's wages. By the hour, including all suppliers, contract, and subsidiary companies employees. No spinning off or starting new arms of the company so they can go bankrupt or you can pay sub-living wages.
I made a blog post about it here: [www.sexcpotatoes.com]
For a company whose lowest paid worker was $10/hr, the maximum a CEO could earn would be $2.08 million a year.
For a company employing exploited workers for $1 a day in a foreign country, (12.5 cents per hour if an 8 hour day), their CEO pay would plummet to $260,000 per year, extremely fair.
Unemployment would disappear, either from jobs being brought back into the country, or from workers getting raises and spending the money, creating new jobs. Simple.
@SexCpotatoes: A proposal to do something similar has been floating around as a \"Patriot Corporation.\" To qualify for US tax breaks, corporations would have to limit executive compensation to X times the lowest-paid (US) worker's; provide a certain floor of benefits and not cheat with too many part-timers who don't qualify (massive tax cost to communities); and on-shore a certain percent of their core functions. (You could offshore the call center, say, but not the manufacturing.)
This would generate more economic benefits for the US ... thus justifying your tax breaks. If you don't create benefits for the US economy, well, no tax breaks for you! Seems fair to me ... companies can still decide it's most profitable to pay the CEO ridiculous amounts and screw their workers, but then they lose tax breaks.
@SexCpotatoes: In addition protectionist policies make implementation of global trade more difficult.
Also how do you value perks in the calculations?
@SexCpotatoes: Just one problem -- private companies should be able to pay their employees whatever they want (I'm not talking about the AIGs of the country, here). If that's how they want to spend their own earned money, then so be it.