User:Abd/Landmark Education/Abd/Company/Labor issues/Commentary

Comment
Landmark Education operates through a model that handles meticulous setup, course organization and supervision, as well as the leading of most courses, through participation of "assistants," i.e, volunteers. The Assisting Program is one of Landmark's course offerings. The commentary above seems to assume a body of naive fools, when people in the Assisting Program are often the most highly trained people in Landmark (such as Program Leaders and Coaches). We know what we get out of the program, not Rick Ross, who operates the "Cult Education" web site, and who escaped legal sanction only because the law shifted midstream on the liability of web site content aggregators. The sources given above:
 * (1) Cult Education web site. Article by Steve Jackson, Westword, 1996. No information on original publication, possible copyvio. Relevance to text unclear.
 * (2) Cult Education web site. Article from Time magazine, Charlotte Faltermeyer, 1998. Probable copyvio. Source does not support text, it has nothing to do with assisting.
 * (3) Cult Education web site. U.S. Department of labor report that makes a statement about volunteers. The report was an investigation upon complain about two items: failure to pay overtime to non-exempt employees and failure to pay wages to volunteers considered, by the investigator, to be employees. The description of what assistants are "told" is from the investigator and was an opinion, asserted in a primary source. This is a bit like what the prosecutor might say in a trial. It has not been established as a fact unless there is a binding finding. It appears that this investigation was closed without action other than the voluntary compliance by Landmark on the overtime issue.
 * (4) Cult Education web site. Article from Le Nouvel Observateur. This would have been published in French, so the linked page is someone's translation. And now I realize why at least some of these are being linked from the Cult Education web site. The originals were likely taken down. The references are presented to conceal the host. These are what are called "convenience copies," and are likely copyright violations. Knowingly linking to copyright violations is generally prohibited on WikiMedia Foundation web sites.

Reliable source standards require independent publishers who are legally responsible for content. A publisher may, exercising that responsibility, take content down that is found to contain errors, or, of course, to be legally damaging. That material cannot be considered reliable source. The Department of Labor reports may be public record, but they are primary sources prepared by an agency investigator that may be functioning as a prosecutor. They are not binding determinations of fact, and they are not neutral secondary sources. They are asserting the investigator's opinion.

To present a local report by a Department of Labor investigator as if it were a finding by the Agency is misleading. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 02:05, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Comments
Landmark chose to leave France rather than contest the finding. I have heard no reports that Landmark ever paid for those volunteers, nor that there was any prosecution or other legal action. Landmark does not "recruit," but depends on word of mouth by participants for spreading the news about the courses, but that is not a Landmark activity, it is a participant activity, or are people supposed to be paid for telling their sister about Landmark? How far would this go? I encouraged a friend to register for the Forum, and when he didn't have the money, I stood for the possibility for about six months. He did the Forum, because miracles happen. And then he got a job. And then he did the Advanced Course, this time paying for it completely himself. And then he got a much better job, paying more money than he'd ever made before, and he knows exactly how he got that job. So ... should I be paid for "recruiting" him? You know, it was important that I got *nothing* for doing that, except the satisfaction of seeing his life transform. Introduction Leaders do not get commissions. Should they? "Hey, sign up, I'll get $100." Or, of course, the hidden agenda. It's already bad enough, we want people to take the courses, because we know what they make possible, and half the training is how to let go of that and totally trust people to make the decisions they need to make. The famous over-eager "estie" was simply unskillful, raw, naive. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 02:05, 27 October 2013 (UTC)

Comments
None of the U.S. Department of Labor primary sources I could find, or other sources ,show any finding with legal weight that Landmark volunteers are legally employees. Larndmark contested the claim and it was apparently not pursued. The practice of using volunteer labor has been common in these trainings since before Landmark was formed in 1991, it came from the earliest days of EST, so this is up to forty years old. The 2006 report cited here, hosted on the Cult Education web site, closed with a warning to Landmark and a note that Landmark did not agree. It was clear that Landmark would continue to use volunteers. So was anything done? It does not appear that the agency made a determination against Landmark, this was simply an FOI request that revealed an internal document. Hence the usage of the source is misleading.

A copy of the 2006 document on Wikileaks claims that Wikileaks hosting was necessary because Landmark was acting to remove copies of the document from the internet. That would indicate that Landmark had the power to do this, which would indicate that some aspect of the document was not publically releasable. Essentially, this is an unreliable source, perhaps precisely because it makes a legal claim that may be unsupportable. However, for complex legal reasons, Landmark abandoned its lawsuit against Rick Ross and Cult Education, with prejudice -- I suspect that this was a legal error, but the state of the law was confused for a while. So Rick Ross is able to maintain these copies at this point.

But the fundamental point is that Landmark is not required to pay volunteers, under the conditions that exist. So the claims are clearly deceptive. There is a WikiSource page with another DOL investigation, from 1996. It tells a very different story, and seems to be more informed about the legal issues than the 2006 report. The user who put this labor material in this resource knows about this page, because he edited it a few days ago. It has these comments:


 * COVERAGE: Subject is a for profit corporation engaged in the presentation of a series of seminars on ontological conversation and inquiry, i.e., the series promotes self-help and self-improvement techniques for personal development.

"Ontological conversation" is a surprisingly sophisticated description of Landmark from a government investigator. Perhaps Landmark told the investigator that. It certainly did not come from the complainant.


 * subject has engaged hundreds of “assistants”, which it deems volunteers, which provided a number of supporting activities. Through its outside counsel of Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson of Chicago, none of Subject’s assistants are covered under FSLA, or, alternative, are trainees and not employees.


 * The strongest supporting argument for the volunteer position appears, as borne out by the interviews almost exclusively, that none of the assistants have been promised or expect compensation but work solely for their personal purpose works in activities carried on by Subject [for] both their pleasure or profit.


 * On the other hand, the strongest supporting argument for finding that the assistants are employees was ironically cited by outside counsel in Marshall v. Baptist Hospital which found that, if the assistants can be considered trainees, they displace regular employees that they would have to otherwise hire. Subject weakly counters that this, in fact, is not the case since the assistants are under direction by staff. Perhaps more importantly, the assistant activities is a common industry practice. In so stating, it should be noted that Subject is a for-profit, and not a non-profit, enterprise.

The report issued no finding on the volunteer/employee issue. It does include a copy of a letter from the complainant, which was not an employee, it was "Action Works," an organization purporting to act to protect the volunteers, who would allegedly be afraid of filing a claim, because Landmark would allegedly retaliaate by ... not hiring them at a low-wage job, or not allowing them to teach courses. The last part is true. One simply doesn't become a course leader in Landmark, another volunteer position, without having done a great deal of assisting. It's part of the educational design. In other words, if they don't volunteer, they don't get to volunteer. I'm sure they are terrified.

Sorry, sarcasm. I'm in the assisting program. To become any kind of program leader in Landmark, I'd need to do another eight-month training that involves an insane number of hours. I don't need it. I might do it some day if I live close to a Center, but I did that eight months, the first time, when I lived more than two hours from the Center, as I do now. It was not the actual assisting that was grueling, it was the travel! Grueling, I say, but part of the benefit was that I demonstrated it was possible for me, at my age, and I was promised that I'd walk out of the program unrecognizable, and that was happened. Every promise was realized. Literally. And, no, we -- and Program Leaders -- don't get expenses. Staff do under some circumstances.

Action Works is covered extensively in the Steve Jackson article cited by the material. Action Works proceeded from a very personal story of the founder and her ex-boyfriend. This was not a labor rights organization, it was an anti-cult organization, going after Landmark. Some of these efforts were supported by the Scientologists, but I saw no specific evidence on that here.

So Introduction Leaders, what I'd have been if I met the measures and decided to join the Leader body, during my training, got to drive an hour or two or more each way to run Home Introductions I'd set up out here. Why do people do all this work for no pay? Maybe if anyone would like to know, they should ask! --Abd (discuss • contribs) 02:56, 27 October 2013 (UTC)