The title says it, and this obviously isn’t a new narrative. Anyway, let’s get into it;
I worked for a baseball team, I won’t say names but it’s fruit related, and the owner exploits his employees / interns SOOOOO BAD.
I was the singular full time videographer (shot and edited pretty much everything myself, aside from TikToks & regularly worked 14 hour days during the season and often taking time to finish projects off the clock, at my house) and I was making $32k/annually. Keep in mind I was receiving basically 0 bonuses/bumps if content or merch videos resulted in merch sale spikes or generated large ad revenue. Eventually I started getting like $200 if a video went over 1mil views but I had to fight for that.)
The broadcaster, who is the voice of the team and basically the only reason anyone enjoys their game broadcasts, who was also making ~32k annually, went and explained he felt he was being undervalued/underpaid, and was apparently told something along the lines of “yeah, we know” and then offered a whopping $2k raise annually.
None of this is /too/ bad (I guess), because salaried jobs with benefits are still nice and I understand that. However, this is where the fun comes in.
There’s apparently terrible inconsistency on pay, since I recently found out a full time employee is being paid $900 a MONTH, which certainly seems illegal but, apparently since the team is classified in the “entertainment industry”, the owner only has to pay his employees a minimum wage of $5.50/hr?? Idk how exactly that law works or if he’s just straight up breaking a law there but ¯_(ツ)_/¯
On top of that, This team literally relies on interns during the season (typically college kids eager to build their resumes) and hires a bunch every summer to properly staff up in preparation for games. That’s great, what an opportunity! Working with “the most fun team in sports”, how epic! Well, you get roped into it, most of them come from out of town (therefore having to find a place to live because, to my knowledge, that’s not provided) and you work your ass off, 9-5 on week days, 9am (11am if you get the “late start”) – ~1am depending how long the games go on game days, for $500…A MONTH.
If the disgustingly low incomes aren’t enough, the cherry on top is that the owner and President have addressed it. Saying “we don’t have much money, so no one makes much money here”. But then, they’re profitable during Covid, only team to play a season during the pandemic!! ((Yikes)) And after almost every game last season, the owner would boast about how we crushed merch sale records, night after night! He would boast about how we’re crushing ticket sales, selling everything out! Don’t forget Online merch sales, better believe those are up, too! Also, he owns at least 3 houses, 2 of which are on the islands, one of which has a whopping ~$1.2m price tag and a private beach entrance. Claims he can only afford these homes “because we Airbnb them” yeah, maybe, but also unlikely.
I, thankfully, got myself out of this organization. But even then, it wasn’t without what felt like some scrutiny.
The owner never spoke a word to me once I gave news I was leaving (aside from one back handed comment of something like “oh, you actually came in today” when I showed up to work once). They even tried to kind of make me feel bad by being like “we have xyz projects we need you to finish before you go. You’re putting us in a bad spot. Yadda yadda yadda”. Well, you wouldn’t be in a bad spot if you’d hired more than one person to basically run the entire media production aspect of your team like I’d told you. But nah, you “didn’t have enough money for that” but still hired 3 new people into ticketing(??)
Also, I frequently asked other employees if they were happy with their pay there and literally everyone I asked said no 🙂
But I digress, this is becoming a rant. Moral of the story, if you feel like/think you’re being exploited by your employer, you certainly are, and you should gtfo out and find somewhere that actually values you and what you do for the company.