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A Call For The Eradication Of Exit Fees

• May 23, 2022

Exit fees for jobs is a topic that everybody has their own opinions on… I personally very strongly disagree with them.

First thing’s first, what are exit fees?

An exit fee is a charge a company applies if you leave your contract early.

In recent news the accountancy firm KPMG has signed up to be a new client of FDM group (a tech firm who charges graduates up to £15,000 if they leave their role in under 2 years).

This is particularly poignant considering KPMG openly states how they care for young people, it has been seen as betraying the very people it claims to want to help.

It is also particularly important to point out that KPMG made very public and bold pledges to be a ‘champion of social mobility’ in the working world and are now actively working for a company that stifles its workers and holds them in a tight grip for two years.

Not only this, but many of other FDM clients are actually pushing away from the company and their rivals are beginning to scrap exit fees completely as a result of the Stop Exit Fees Now campaign created by the company Graduate Fog.

To really show the severity of this ‘betrayal’, that is a whole group of young people who are being chained to their contracts for two whole years with the threat of a possible £15k fine hanging over their heads for the entire contract.

Graduate Fog did research into those with recent contracts with FDM and found many new hires who were suffering from physical and mental health concerns, feeling as though they were ‘trapped’ in their jobs as they wanted to leave but knew they could not afford to leave.

This is a genuinely awful practice and should never have been put in place in the first place.

This does not inspire loyalty to a company when they keep their employers in chains for the first two years working together.

If anything this kind of behaviour would create hostile employees who are just counting down their days to freedom to move on to companies that do not imprison them like this.

These exit fees put the most pressure on the young people hired who are from disadvantaged backgrounds, they do not have the luxury to give up that sort of money.

There are around 4,000 graduates stuck in these jobs with a huge debt to face if they try to leave it early. These graduates who will already have all of their student loan to immediately worry about, will now have thousands on top of that if they feel like they cannot deal with their current job they are trapped in.

This strain could result in some extremely dire consequences for two years.

If individuals choose to leave without being able to pay these fees, they are being threatened of being chased down by lawyers trying for bankruptcy.

These companies try to get away with these exit fees by claiming that these fees cover the costs of training new hires, though the training rarely ever matches these extortionate charges.

By more people being aware of these harsh realities in some of the biggest companies, it will be easier to prevent them from happening in the future.

It is time to try and stop these fees.