In the Public Eye

EVERY four years a new batch of campaign promises to cut government spending and rid the land of federal bureaucratic red tape, mismanagement, and fraud bubble up and cover the nation in a sea of righteous froth, often just hot, soapy air but occasionally bringing forth such tangible changes as the current Proposition 2 1/2.

Government waste and fraud has long fueled campaign rhetoric, and this year's elections were no different. Ronald Reagan and a conservative Senate swept in on the tide of his anti-inflation platform, denouncing the increased deficit spending, congested policy making and great waste of the Carter administration, just as Carter rode four years ago on the tide of Watergate and anti-big-business sentiment directed against the Republicans in office.

Regardless of party affiliation or prominence, government waste and fraud is constantly in the public eye, hounded and exposed by a well armed array of waste-watchers from Ralph Nader to Jack Anderson to vindictive congressional committees. The public sector is available and accountable to a scruitinizing, sensitive, cost-conscious public. But what of the red tape and bureaucratic mismanagement in the private sector, as rampant if less detectable than public fraud? Who blows the whistle on individual, private rip-offs of the unwary customer?

Unfortunately, policing fraud and waste in the private sector lags far behind its more accessible public cousin, and the many inroads into it today just attack the tip of the iceberg. It is a rare occurence when private companies or corporations are hauled into court. Exceptions like Lockheed and AT&T of several years back cheer the little consumer but remain rarities.

And, contrary to popular delusion, the sheltered, self-contained oasis that is Harvard does not exempt its students from the occasional rip-off. Not simply as consumers, but as employees and burgeoning members of the working world, students are potential victims of private fraud and slow death-by-red-tape. Summer employment perhaps enerates the most calamities of all. A classic (and actual) case of summer employment rip-off involved a Harvard student this summer. One student pursued an ad in OCS-OCL's summer jobs file for a head-tennis-pro position, financed her own trip to Washington D.C. to try out for the job at a "placement" agency, was given the job, left the required $50 deposit, and waited happily for June to begin work. The placement agency had no one with any knowledge of tennis skills or playing experience; the plot was revealed when they hired four students on an adjacent court with sub-intramural tennis abilities, and ran a strictly profit-making business, stuffing bodies indiscriminately into contracted positions and avoiding the consequences by shifting all responsibility on the new hiree.

After discovering that her new "head-tennis-pro" position was in fact a glorified 24-hour a day bratsitting purgatory, the student endured two weeks of the aggravating job. Suffering with inexperienced tennis staff and repeated discouragements from using discipline on her renegade wards, she sought means to recover her initial outlay for the job, and the two-weeks earned pay. The scenario went something like this:

Student: "Excuse me, but I have not been paid for my two-weeks of work yet nor reimbursed for travel, interview, and deposit expenses. When can you pay me?"

Washington Tennis Service (WTS): "Sorry, you'll have to contact your employer. After all, he was the one you worked for and should therefore be the one to pay you."

Employer: "Your contract is with WTS, not us, so they are responsible for paying you. They haven't paid us anything, so we have nothing to pay you with."

Student: "Listen, WTS, my contract is with you. My employer is unable to pay me; therefore, you must pay me.

WTS: "We have no written record of your contract. You never sent a copy of it back to our files, so we're under no legal obligation to pay you."

Student: "but I never even received a contract from you."

WTS: "That is because you left early. It would have come eventually."

Student: "Then who is going to reimburse me?"

WTS: "That's your problem, not ours."

The student was never reimbursed, and without a binding contract, was powerless to contest the injustice done. She resumed the summer in mid-July, $500 poorer.

The lesson behind this all-too-typical story is the importance of awareness, without which the consumer or emplyee is at the mercy of private business. The field of consumer awareness is a relatively new and fast-growing one. New do-it-yourself consumer guide books spring forth monthly, designed both to alert the reader to potential rip-off situations and to offer well stocked appendices listing where to go and what to do after the fact. One of the best new books around is aptly entitled Fight Back... And Don't Get Ripped-Off by David Horowitz, NBC's leading consumer reporting specialist. The book boasts an exhaustive index of all federal, state and local consumer agencies, as well as a complete listing of the nations's numerous small claims courts, newspaper, radio and television programs and hotlines designed to bring grievances to public attention and create pressure for quick redresses. Nearly every paper across the country today has a consumer advocacy column, many with follow-up services where the paper calls up the offenders and publishes the results along with the original grievance letter. The Philadelphia Bulletin's "Mr. Fixit" column has been intimidating businesses and inspiring readers for years, and makes for some interesting, if occasionally bizarre, breakfast table reading.

For the student, however, the extent of private industry rip-off is liable to be less serious than for those making their way in the world, those who must confront daily landlord-tenant situations, bill payments, insurance claims, and other harsh realities which entail numerous rip-off possibilities. The Phillips Brooks House small claims committee, operating out of Roxbury's municipal courthouse small claims advisory service, provides a campus link to the world of everyday consumer problems, and a chance for students to help combat them. Emily Skoler '82, last year's PBH small claims president, describes small claims as "a people's court, for consumers to take grudges against other consumers and businesses both," adding that "we do everything from giving advice to hand holding."

Many of the cases that come up are unique and don't fall under the realm of any law, so lawyers become superfluous since cases are settled by a presiding judge. Paralleling the development of the small-claims-court system is the rise of Mediation Centers, a recourse for the consumer in which the prosecutor and the defendant settle out-of-court in the presence of an objective witness. The Mediation Centers have proved much more effective in collecting damages and solving cases happily, as their more informal nature allows the opposing parties to break through stumbling blocks like pride and anger and get through to the underlying problem, which oftentimes has little or nothing to do with the original grievance. The majority of cases, explains Skoler, are between acquaintances. Landlord-tenant cases abound, followed by longterm customer service cases and family or neighbor squabbles. Another common case involves the "I bought it; it broke" syndrome, though with a thousand variations on a theme.

The cases that come before small claims courts read like a dossier on human nature--normal, bizarre, humorous and, sometimes, personally tragic. One case that came up before the PBH group this summer gave new meaning to "problem solving". Known simply as the "skunk case," a woman brought her landlord to court for an unusual claim of negligence. The air vent in the ceiling of the woman's apartment had been falling off regularly; and the landlord then fixed it, to his credit. However, when a small skunk found its way through the roof and into the air vent, the grate didn't hold out and the surprised skunk came tumbling onto the floor of the apartment, spraying the entire room in fright. The apartment and all the woman's possessions were ruined beyond repair, and the furry little varmint got away unscathed; but the luckless landlord was fined the maximum of $500 and the smell of justice lingered on long after.

Another typically screwball case occurred again between landlord and tenant. The "refrigerator case" originated when a woman leased an apartment from a new landlord two weeks before moving in, bought a refrigerator and stocked it with groceries to have ready when she moved in. The woman arrived two weeks later and found no trace of food or refrigerator. The landlord, it turned out, was a heroin addict who had eaten all the groceries and then sold the fridge to finance his habit. The woman won the case easily, and moved in the next day.

A third, less serious case involved a woman contesting her hairdressers. The woman went for a fashionable "Bo Derek" cornrows hairdo, and, for $50 came away with a frizzy mess. Undaunted, the woman marched over to another salon where she got a much more satisfactory hairdo for a mere $20, but not before having her best friend take photos of the messy do for evidence. Handing before and after photos to the presiding judge, to the great amusement of the court, the difference was nonetheless striking enough for a reimbursement of her original $50 from the offending salon and the satisfaction of justice done, however small.

The above cases make up the standard fare of a small claims court. The restriction of payments to monetary (as opposed to equity) payments, limited to $500, exclude more serious cases of life and death or multi-digit law suits with multi-digit lawyer fees. Small claims provides a service to mete out justice in the everyday affairs of the consumer, and for a small fee ($5) anyone can bring forth his or her grievance. As for the hapless student ripped off by the tennis placement agency, she never got justice, but if she had tried a few of the alternatives, she might be ahead today.