Unethical
I signed up to work for this company as a professional reader of nearly 50 years. It seems OK at first but they have this "Hold rate" for readers where if your calls last over a certain number of minutes you are paid 25p per minute, below that it goes down to 10p per minute. I normally see calls lasting much longer than 16 minutes but it wasn't long before I saw a spate of calls lasting less than a few minutes and my holding score degraded as did my pay and then I found I was logging on for over 80 hours per week to earn around £50 max which is exploitation of labour. Then I got to this past week and logged on for 11 hours 25 min and 50 seconds to earn a paltry £7.04 with a holding time of 04.19 I only had 34 min and 32 seconds talk time out of that 11+ hours and the rest of the time I was sat idle earning nothing. This is diabolical. Then I was unable to hear callers calling in on their premium rate line. The reader manager had a go at me over this and fired me when I dared to complain over the premium rate line callers calling and I could not hear them, so that then they hung up after a minute or two it degraded my hold time score down to such a low level that it reduced my pay per minute down to 10 p from 25pm in an instant. These people have ZERO respect for their readers or customers and exploitation is rife. This in turn will not make for a good ethical service. Happy readers make happy customers but clearly there is something very wrong here. For the whole of the month of September 2024 I logged on for 221 hours, 39 minutes and 3 seconds and read for just 13 hours 52 minutes and 52 seconds out of all of those hours I was logged on and for the whole month I earned £197.76 which is diabolical exploitation of labour. I would get WhatsApp messages from the reader manager asking me and other readers to log on as only 2 readers were logged on and they were losing customer calls, and they wonder why so few will log on? These people should be subject to a public censure for unfair treatment of readers. I am surprised they remain open for business at all. You only have to watch the platform and you will see that one reader is getting over 80% of the calls whilst the rest sit idle but not because she is a better reader than the others, it is because she has been on the platform the longest and has built up a client base where others fail as she is getting all of the work. The whole platform is set up to exploit readers and customers alike and they need hauling over the coals for abuse. I am appalled by how little respect I have been shown for putting long hours in for a pittance. The customers who called some used foul language and ranted at me and when I raised this as a concern with the reader manager I was told to tell these customers to phone the one reader who gets all of the work and she would sort them out. What sort of company does that? I think this company needs to be looked into before more decent people get exploited. It is a disgrace. They have no respect for their loyal readers or customers.
