Abstract:

Teenage magazine sellers like the seven who died in a southern Wisconsin highway crash work under hardships while their employers prosper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says after a four-month investigation.

"The publishers shouldn't be able to sleep at night, given the dozens of deaths" among young people who work door to door," Earlene Williams of New York-based Parent Watch told the newspaper. At least 42 sellers have died or been injured in traffic crashes since 1992 nationwide, the newspaper reported. Two sellers and two customers have been killed by salesmen in this decade, and two women customers have been sexually assaulted since 1997, it said.

Full Text:
Copyright Madison Capital Times Aug 2, 1999

Teenage magazine sellers like the seven who died in a southern Wisconsin highway crash work under hardships while their employers prosper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says after a four-month investigation.

"The publishers shouldn't be able to sleep at night, given the dozens of deaths" among young people who work door to door," Earlene Williams of New York-based Parent Watch told the newspaper. "Your kid can end up maimed or dead and, in any case, indentured," she said.

At least 42 sellers have died or been injured in traffic crashes since 1992 nationwide, the newspaper reported. Two sellers and two customers have been killed by salesmen in this decade, and two women customers have been sexually assaulted since 1997, it said.

Incidents have been isolated and widespread, allowing the business to generally escape public scrutiny, according to the Journal Sentinel. Some magazines rely on traveling sellers for 15 percent of their sales, industry experts say. Field sales may represent 1 percent of subscriptions overall or $60 million, said Michael Pashby of Magazine Publishers of America. Williams estimated the figure at $200 million.

"There is nothing inherently wrong with doing business door to door," Pashby said in New York. The newspaper says some of the 100 people it interviewed in several states defended the business of hiring traveling sellers as young as 14, calling it an opportunity for disadvantaged youngsters to get ahead. "It's the American way," said Jack McGreevey, director of the National Field Selling Association, a door-to-door business trade group.

Partly at the urging of Williams' group, Congress held hearings on the business in the 1980s. A New York attorney general testified in 1987 that the companies recruiting young sellers are "sophisticated criminal enterprises masquerading as legitimate sources of employment."

Subscriptions Plus, an Oklahoma company that processes subscriptions, is a member of McGreevey's group. The company was associated with YES of De Witt, Iowa, which employed the 14 people who were in a van that crashed in March on Interstate 90 near Janesville, killing seven occupants. The driver has been imprisoned. Wisconsin has alleged 92 labor law violations. Kay Hillery, 35, who spent seven years as a traveling seller before establishing Subscriptions Plus in 1995, has a son who was a friend of one of the teenage victims of the crash. "We're done for," she said, referring to the difficulties affecting her Oklahoma City company since the crash. "It was a tragic accident that has . . . ruined my life. "I don't like being blamed for something I did not do."

Oklahoma officials have told her company to cease doing business in that state, citing violations of workers' compensation rules. Several of the Janesville victims' families have sued. Quoting "informed sources," the newspaper said as many as 100,000 minors and young adults are recruited by about 40 companies annually for magazine field sales.

Not all comments about the business are unfavorable. "There's a little disappointment when you get thrown in jail but the business was fun. I miss it," said Adam Stehm, a vehicle handler for YES. Daniel Lines, 27, who drives for a Subscriptions Plus crew, said he has $800 to $1,200 a week to send home to his fiancee. Drivers typically make $1 to $2 for every subscription sold by their passengers. "You do make money in this business," he said. "It's like an alternate reality: no bills, the travel," said a Kenosha seller identified as Michele. "The only problem was that someone practically owned us. They tell you where to go, when to go to bed."

Chelsea Stone, whose daughter Amanda Spurr died in a Kansas crash last December, said, "It's a formula for fatality." Added Carol Stankovich, whose daughter Amber died in October 1997 in a crash in Jackson, Miss.: "It's unreal to think that companies like this could be operating in 1999."