Imagine you work 20 hours a week. When you get paid, rather than having that money go into a bank account for you, or having the employer give you a check, they hand you a new card. This new card is prepaid and is how you will receive your checks for the rest of your employment. This may seem beneficial, but after the first month of pay, you notice that you are only receiving half of your paychecks.

It costs money to make money.

Today many employers are paying their employees on a prepaid card that employees can take to an A.T.M. to withdraw their checks. With technology on the rise and the workforce beginning to move away from using paper checks, it could be easy to see how this could be a good choice. With most people already using debit cards and having money directly deposited into their bank accounts, this seems like a sure fire way to cut out the middle man. It unfortunately comes at a cost.

Using these cards costs money. Similar to when you make a transaction at the A.T.M., when you use your prepaid card you can receive a fee. According to The New York Times these fees can cost $1.75 for a withdraw and $2.95 if you would prefer to get a paper statement. These charges seem to be unnecessary considering these are “luxuries” that employees had before the prepaid card came along.

The fees do not end there. If you lose your card you could owe up to six dollars. So why spend money on your card? If you could just withdraw the cash you wouldn’t have to pay the fee. That wouldn’t work either. If you choose to not use your card there is a fee of seven dollars for inactivity.

With all of these fees imagine how much money you could be wasting on fees instead of going out to eat with your friends. Worse, you could come up about 50 dollars short on your rent. It would not be long before employees start demanding to be paid in a different way, but employers have managed to make that difficult as well.

There is no reason for people to be charged for working. It is a slap in the face of the working world to be told that large portions of their checks could be potentially taken away in the form of a “fee.” You fall under the rule of your employer for when you can withdraw money, spend money or even not spend money. This is money that we work hard to earn and we should not be charged for choosing how and where to spend it.

Students are already in mountains of debt when they graduate, it wouldn’t help if students had to take out extra loans because their paychecks are not going far enough to pay the bills. With school, we simply do not have time to work enough hours to have any extra money for paying fees. Even if we did have jobs where we made more than enough money to pay the fees, the morality of charging employees to be paid is wrong.