This is long, but if you are considering working for this company I recommend reading it ...
There are/were 28 hours of classroom training. You were supposed to be paid $175 upon completion of this training. There were about a eight hires in my class. The training was an unorganized waste of time. The first day it was revealed that in addition to the 28 hours of classroom training, there would be a couple hours of take home training every night.
Older, more experienced job seekers were able to recognize the sham quicker than myself, and two of the eight did not return the second day. Even more dropped of the next. When I left, there was only one other trainee remaining and he was young, green, recent college grad like myself. We were past 28 hours of in-class training, we had not received $175, and management was unwilling to say how many more hours of training were required (they estimated six more hours).
I arranged a meeting with the executive director (who was in charge of hiring), to discuss what how this could be resolved. We were to meet early in the morning, before training started. He did not arrive the day we were to meet, so I sat through another day of training. The next day I showed up again, sat down in their lobby, and said I was waiting until the executive director arrived. Front desk called and let him know. He showed up and hour or two later.
During this meeting, I mentioned that I needed to receive in writing the hourly wage I was quoted during the interview process, $13. He said he would need to check with someone or something before doing so.
I then brought up that the $175 for training was for 28 hours, and that I'd like to be compensated accordingly for the extra hours. He refused, saying that even though the training is supposed to be 28 hours, the $175 is for up to 34 hours. This had never been mentioned before. To lessen the blow, he told me I would receive 20 hours of work a week after training. I was young and dumb, and was unwilling to just call the 30ish hours I had already invested in training a bust.
Because the amount of training left was undetermined, I asked if he could agree to pay $5.15 an hour (175/34) for however many hours of training ended up being required. He agreed.
I said I'd follow up with email so we could have this all in writing. He was visibly taken aback when I said this.
I sent him the email after the meeting with the discussed terms in writing, and he replied back that he actually could not agree to the terms we discussed. He said I actually could receive as little as four hours a week at two hours a day. His email did not address at all the $5.15/hour for training mentioned in my email. His email said he apologized about quoting $13 during the interview process; they would actually be paying me $12.50 an hour. I have all these specific details years later because I have kept the emails.
I replied back he could begin paying me $12.50 hourly tomorrow -- no matter if they had me working or doing more training -- or it just wasn’t a good fit. He agreed it wasn’t a good fit. I never received a dollar of the $175, despite having completed at least 28 hours of training.
