Avoid Root Studios - Anonymous employee ROOT Employee Review

Hard to concisely articulate just what makes working for this company such a poor experience, but it has to begin with the absolutely abysmal pay when contextualized by the experience of the worker. Workers are paid barely above minimum wage and constantly facing stolen overtime wages and have to fight tooth and nail to get the upper management to remedy. This isn’t a rare occurrence, either. Nearly every employee at the company has experienced this “mix-up” in our earned wages. And when we confront the CFO about this, he responds with disdain and teeters on blame-reversal and let’s us know he’ll “see what [he] can do about it.” He blames it on the check company every time, and yet shows no sign of changing companies or protecting his employees. He will sometimes take several weeks to return these stolen wages (and this is assuming you’re asking about this on a daily basis.) Make no mistake, the withholding of overtime wages is overt and unrepentant. And you do not fight, you will be robbed of your labor. Your hours will be closely monitored. They will promise opportunity for overtime, then they will bend over backwards to make sure you don’t obtain it. They will have you work 17 hours one night, then cut you after 3 hours the next day. They make sure you do not have a balanced work life, they will still tether you to your work and ensure you do not reap the benefits. They treat us like salary and pay us hourly (when they see fit to pay us at all). Management play games with the will of their employees and they are very good at them. He has no sense of urgency when it comes to paying his employees for the attentive 24-hour service they are expected to provide, but will harass and berate you (even off the clock) and threaten your employment if his remote thermostat reads a 1 degree decrease in temperature. The way this person speaks to his employees is unconscionable. He speaks with such condescension and accusation, an onlooker might assume this was an abusive father, berating his child. Many times, he has verbally expressed disdain for non-english speaking employees at ROOT, making off-colored comments about accents and zeroing in on work ethic, belittling them and blaming them for problems unrelated to their work or logically impossible for them to have caused. Many other employees have noticed this and it is discussed commonly, but it never gets addressed in a meaningful way. As far as 2020 is concerned: They have kept their laid-off employees on a short leash, promising a shift or two to keep their former staff ready to go. After the COVID-19 lockdown was lifted during the summer, they promised many employees that they would be returning to their work; however, this was far from the truth. Most of us have been checking in with management on a regular basis to find out what may happen in terms of getting our jobs back, and each time, management has said we are “one or two weeks” away from employment. This is a lie each time it is uttered. The management has become comfortable with paying fewer employees for the same amount of work, even though the labor-intensive branch of the company is drowning in work. They tell the laid-off employees that there’s just not enough work coming in to rehire us, and this is a lie. The management has realized they can make more money this way. And the money that they rake in is not shared in the pockets of those who earned it. And the lowest blow of all is the influx of new employees hired to the studio services department. None of the currently laid-off employees who have been consistently inquiring about work all year had been asked if they would instead take another, lower-paying position at the company. There are many of us who would have happily worked in studio services until we could get our jobs back in our respective departments. There is no loyalty rewarded to the employees of ROOT Studios. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been there one year or 15 years, they will treat you like dirt and they will pay you in crumbs. I would avoid this company like the plague. They will not endure through the 2020s, and they will be remembered as a detriment to ethical art-making and a foul stain on New York City’s Photograhy Industry.