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Antiwork

Unpaid shadow work?

I had an interview at a horse barn that I’m considering working at for a summer job. They seemed like very nice people, and the facilities seemed to be very well taken care of. But I was a bit thrown off with their pay system. Firstly they use a contract system rather than an hourly wage system. So you get paid for doing a certain amount of work rather than how long it takes you. When I asked how much it generally works out to hourly they seemed to side step the question by saying that typically people make about 65 dollars a day. And that some of their workers are able to finish in about 3 hours. Never explicitly saying how much the average person spends working, or how much work they actually do. Lastly they said their reasoning for using a contractor system for this is that they…


I had an interview at a horse barn that I’m considering working at for a summer job. They seemed like very nice people, and the facilities seemed to be very well taken care of. But I was a bit thrown off with their pay system. Firstly they use a contract system rather than an hourly wage system. So you get paid for doing a certain amount of work rather than how long it takes you. When I asked how much it generally works out to hourly they seemed to side step the question by saying that typically people make about 65 dollars a day. And that some of their workers are able to finish in about 3 hours. Never explicitly saying how much the average person spends working, or how much work they actually do. Lastly they said their reasoning for using a contractor system for this is that they don’t have to pay to train you. So you essentially shadow an employee (unpaid) until you feel comfortable with the work.

This seemed really sketchy, especially since I’ve never heard of a farm hand job or really any not salaried job where you don’t get paid hourly.

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