this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Belgique
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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.
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.