I have been working for a very very small private pest control company near the philly area of PA. ( Will not name the company out of respect of the owner )
For some back story..I was offered this job with a family friend right after i graduated high school in 2020, shortly after i accepted as i wasn’t sure what i wanted to do especially in the height of the pandemic at the time and it seemed like a great opportunity to learn a new trade/skill.
He started me at $11 dollars an hour for training because i was making $11 on the weekends at my previous full time dietary aide job at a nursing home.
After i passed each test category to further my pest control liecensing he gave me a 50 cent bump each time and originally told me he was going to give me 1% commission after each one as well ( that i never received) at the end of my testing i was at 13 an hour.
Now i will admit i knew nothing about pest control, what it entailed, the hours, or what the pay should all be. but $13 an hour for 4 categories of licenses seemed a bit low to me at the time. For about a year i was making around $800 ish a paycheck for around 80 hours which wasn’t and isn’t very suffice. The next year my hours had increased has the business grew and i had only gotten another 50 cent raise to 13.50 an hour until he hired another employee that he gave salary too right away, 2 weeks paid vacation ( as i only had one ) and what seemed to be a lot more freedom. Now he was a lot older than I and had more business experience to help out with but had no experience in pest control and was already getting seemingly better treatment. He did give me another 50 cent raise to $14 an hour and finally 1% commission around the time of this new employee’s hiring.
To make try and make this shorter it is currently a little over 2 years after that employees hiring and i am at $16 dollars an hour making 3% commission with still only 1 week of paid vacation, 5 personal days and no health insurance or benefits of any kind for most of the summer was at $15 an hour making 1% commission working around 95-100 hours every 2 weeks. My pay increasing very slightly but hours going way up along with increased scheduling responsibilities and other things of that sort that i don’t feel i’m being properly compensated for to that i would have to do at another company.
I Talked to another local but bigger pest control company this summer and they told me that they pay around $20 an hour for all the licenses and full benefits with way more of a consistent schedule but around the same hours and would also get raises and more vacation time every year. ( I just don’t want to deal with big company cooperate bullshit I told my current employer about this and that is when he gave me $16 an hour and 3% commission as he said it would average to around $20 dollars an hour. ( it doesn’t )
I kind of regret taking this job from a family friend because quitting while the company is growing with only 3 employees seems like a shitty thing to do. I know i don’t want to work the same hours ( 95-100 ) next spring/summer and barely make over 1k a check. If anyone could give me some advice on what i should do i would greatly appreciate it. I’m still very young and leaning towards a career path change because this has been weighing on me for a while. ️