Chairman of the ACCC - Rod Sims - believes these fines send a clear message to the companies that employ these salesmen. He believes the message is now loud and clear that door-to-door sales tactics need to remain clean and honest. He said, "The ACCC will not hesitate to take action to protect consumers in their homes from unscrupulous sales tactics and enforce compliance with the laws".
As a former employee of one of these subsidiary companies, I can tell you this: they don’t give a damn. Unfortunately, these types of companies have little regard for ethics or the law. The more sales they make, the more money they make and the better they look to their parent company.
Where I worked, disregard for clean marketing started from the beginning. Some of the training techniques they taught us were downright unethical, under the proviso of ‘just don’t get caught’. Of course, when somebody did get caught, the company totally washed their hands of them.
The thing was though, our managers were marketing geniuses, They had been wheeling and dealing for years, peddling all kinds of things from vacuum cleaners to solar panels (in Melbourne). They had the capacity to convince you that what you were doing was what the customer needed. They taught you to turn a no into a yes, no matter what.
They were good at it, I’ll give them that. However with such talent comes ethical responsibility, and I think they may have skipped that class.
They target the vulnerable – they considered commission housing to be “prime turf”, and put up ads in backpacker hostels. All their staff were either backpackers or young adults struggling to make ends meet. They knew if they didn’t pay these kids that they couldn’t afford to do anything about it – and so that’s exactly what they did.
The poor got poor and the richer got richer. After I quit in disgust of being paid nothing for six weeks, one of the other employees was digging around in the office looking for a copy of an old commission (that he had never been paid for) and he accidentally came across a document outlining the two million dollars the directors had taken home in the past financial year.
Eventually I came to my senses. I quit and took my case to the ombudsman, who initiated an investigation. The company I worked for told the ombudsman I had been fired (false), I had been charged with fraud due to conduct whilst working for them (false) and even provided a police report number to them for the fraud charge (also false). The police report number was actually that which had belonged to another employee, whose laptop was stolen from their office.
The company had kept no records of start and finish times (which is illegal) which meant that the ombudsman could not compile enough of a case to take them to court, and recommended taking them to court myself. As someone who was still struggling to earn enough to eat, this was not an option.
My experience is not an isolated one. I have worked for a three of these companies, all marketing different products. I have witnessed manipulation, coercive manipulation of customers and staff, and sly marketing tactics in all of the marketing and sales companies I have worked for.
The ACCC will fine them, and they will stay clean for a few weeks. But it seems door-to-door sales companies will always return to swindling to make a quick, ill earned dollar. If the ACCC wants to ‘protect their consumers in their homes’, then without fundamental attitude change within this industry, we will hear stories of people being cheated in their own homes, over and over again.
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