this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Belgique
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Being recognized is indeed a struggle, but even without a bank account, if they are not recognized, they wouldn't be able to work, to find accommodation, etc.
Ukrainian refugees opened 11k basic accounts: https://febelfin.be/fr/presse/banque-et-societe/11-292-comptes-bancaires-ouverts-par-des-refugie-e-s-ukrainien-ne-s-en-belgique
Banking is a part of society, that's not specifically Belgian. It can be accessed using BPost bank, for free if you receive at least 500 euros on your account monthly: https://www.bpostbanque.be/comptes-et-cartes/comptes-a-vue. Otherwise it's 1,5 euro.
I don't even think employers would agree to pay you in cash today, for security reasons.
They do. As I said, they work for a middleman and that middleman is where the paper trail stops. The middle man takes a cut & they get exploited. It’s a hard life but they survive.
Glad to hear there are success stories. But those do not obviate the horror stories. The horrors are facilitated by a system of forced banking while the success stories do not require forced banking.
Optional banking is part of society. Forced banking creates a crippled society that’s gradually and quietly becoming a reality in Belgium. It’s not an acceptable society to create. So far it’s unlawful. Belgian law still requires a cash option but it’s going unenforced. If you report Manhattan Burger for refusing cash, your report will be ignored.
Banks decide who you’re allowed to pay. E.g. ~10 or so years ago banks in collusion decided if you wanted to donate money to Wikileaks they would not support it. Donors were blocked. Luckily cash enables people to escape from that nannying. When the cash option is gone banks will be able to abuse their power much more rampantly. They can collude to cancel any org they want.
Banks can also block your account spontaneously for trivial reasons such as the copy of your ID card on their records expiring. Indeed this is how some banks inform you that you need to help them update their records- they just block access to your money. Luckily when that happened cash enabled me to eat until the bank opened again on Monday morning (although this was a time that I was expected to be present at work).
Banks inherently collect data which is then vulnerable to breaches. The best defense against data breaches is to not arbitrarily create the data to begin with. I.e. pay in cash. Outside of the GDPR region, banks would gladly sell records on how much you spend on McDonalds food, tobacco, and cigarettes. Health insurance companies would love to have that data. Within the GDPR, I think they can still do that but they have to put it in their terms of service you must agree to. So it’s important to have the option to disagree.
Is it possible to pay water bills with cash where you come from?
Yes. I did not test it but the legal tender law there is that all debts can be paid in cash. Point of sale is different. If you try to buy a product the merchant can dictate form of payment. If the two parties do not agree, no one loses.. consumer keeps their money and the merchant keeps their product. But debts are different because debtors must have a way to pay. I suppose a malicious water supplier could make a requirement that you make a deposit from a bank account before water is turned on, then unbanked people would be unable to accumulate a debt. But I’ve not heard of any such scenario. Water suppliers have never asked me for an advance deposit that I recall.
There’s a European Commission recommendation that member states make all debts payable in cash. Belgium does not distinguish debt payments from points of sale. Belgium requires cash to be accepted in both varieties of transactions. But now that Belgium is not enforcing cash acceptance it’s a problem. Some articles imply that the law only applies to retail transactions. So I’m unclear on what the law says about cash payments to public services. Communes have started violating the law if they are bound by the same law.
Interesting.
You mentioned some groups advocating for no banking dependency, do they plan to start any legal action?
Anyway, seems like you are in a stuck situation. I realistically don't see Vivaqua bringing the ATM back, they are known to have bad management since years
https://www.lesoir.be/art/881137/article/actualite/belgique/2015-05-18/vivaqua-verse-dans-l-illegalite
https://www.lesoir.be/453205/article/2022-07-08/sept-mois-de-bugs-informatiques-chez-vivaqua-au-moins-85000-clients-bruxellois
https://www.dhnet.be/regions/bruxelles/2022/11/25/vivaqua-contrainte-demprunter-plusieurs-millions-deuros-pour-payer-son-personnel-nous-ne-recevons-pas-de-subsides-4PDARX4FBNAKDKKBQOVMIIKQ4I/
I only mentioned the group who opposes forced digitization of public services and the removal of over-the-counter service. This is largely comprised of elderly people who are excluded by technology but also some tech people who realize the importance of an analog option because tech is fallible and often incompetently administered. Cash defenders are also somewhat encapsulated by that movement to keep analog options on the table, but I do not know of a group that is focused on the war on cash. I would be interested in finding such a group if there is one.
There is a rumor that a group of people entered a cashless cafe with cash, ordered food and drinks, then insisted on paying in cash. The cafe threatened to call the police. The activists said “please go ahead, we will wait”. When the police arrived, the customers explained that they are happy to pay in cash which the law entitles them to do. The police said there’s nothing for them to do and the group was free to go.
I appreciate the links. I could only read the 1st paragraph in the 2nd article but the others I could access in full. The last one is interesting indeed because it actually showcases the problem of forced banking. That is, the invoices need to be generated with structured codes or the whole system falls apart. Whereas paying cash does not require a working structured code. One can probably make a deposit at any time which would would then be a credit on their account.
With cash consumers can pay in advance as much as they want which can sit on the account until the invoicing problems get resolved. You could have previously paid a couple years worth of water and not have to deal with bills, if you want. With structured codes the amount must match the invoice amount. When there’s a mismatch, payment systems are often designed to treat it as a mistake and send the money back. So if you are poor and want to pay a partial amount, you can’t.. it’s all or nothing and not a penny more.
This is to match it automatically with the account number. In the cash version, you need desk people doing that matching for every individual. Otherwise, without those desk people, the whole system falls apart. You could replace it with ATM-like machines where people would be able to deposit the cash and authenticating with a username/password on the terminal, but having those machines everywhere to cover the whole country would have a significant cost.
Strictly speaking it’s the invoice number that’s encoded into the structured code, which then maps to an account. That’s how the expected amount is known. It’s a good system so long as there is also an analog option if bugs happen, the grid goes down, or if a cyber attack brings down the bank or invoicing system and the tech fails. You can’t fix those things in a day. Bug hunts can take weeks to find and more weeks to resolve and recover the data. And the engineers are not cheap. When there is an analog option you can always add unskilled workers cheaply and even train them on-the-fly if needed. You can’t just throw more people in to accelerate work on a software problem. But with analog systems you can. You can scale them up quickly with temporary contractors. Even if all the info systems are down you can accept cash and make paper records until the info system is recovered. When a software dev is hired, they actually cost the employer money for training and the time it takes them to understand the complex code and quality systems. Some say it takes 3 months before a developer becomes productive enough to offset their own cost. Some say that crossover point is closer to a year. If a software dev CV shows that they left a job short of working 3 years in a position, employers will often reject them because that’s not enough time to have made the company a worthwhile profit.
Not in Belgium, I can tell you ha ha ha
UberEats and Deliveroo seem to be getting away with it. Those workers have been made into independent contractors (something they protest because of the lack of job security it gives them).
Yes, but a public organism such as Vivaqua would not use this kind of structure.
It depends on your career. And strangely enough, the law makes career type a factor. Cash wages are legal in industries where that norm is established such as domestic work. It would be unusual for a white collar worker to be paid in cash and because it’s unusual, it’s illegal. There’s also an unusual law in Belgium, France, and Spain that prohibits B2P cash transactions over €3k. So even if all workers had an equal right to receive cash those whose paychecks exceed €3k would still have a problem.
(I had to break my reply into 3 parts because the lemmy form just goes to lunch if there’s too much text)
Domestic work in Belgium is used with the Titres-Services systems, which prevents cash transactions (the whole system was designed to make it more appealing than cash). https://www.belgium.be/fr/famille/aide_sociale/titres_services
That’s just an example where I heard cash wages were normal. The law is strange because it just says cash wages are acceptable if it’s the norm in an industry. The law does not list industries where that’s a norm, so if someone is prosecuted someone would have to convince a court whether or not cash is normal for the line of work.
Bank transfer are just more convenient.
Cash wages are used when people (sometimes on both sides of the transaction) are trying to avoid the law: off-the-grid constructions, waiters, etc.