I am going to be hired to work at a tutoring center this week, but one thing that had me a little worried is their hourly wage. The ‘advertised’ hourly wage is $14.00/hour. But any data entry/administrative tasks there only pay $10.00 an hour, and prep time (gathering materials for the next group of students, etc) only pays $6.75 an hour.
It seems rather suspicious why they would structure their pay system like this and makes me feel uneasy that I would get stuck spending 90% of my time doing ‘prep work’. Every job I worked at up until now has paid based on the time spent, not the task performed. This pay structure makes it hard to estimate how much I would earn in a week/month/year.
I’ve seen training contractors here (a major Pharma company) get paid under a varying rate - Prep time and admin work were paid less than classroom time. The assumption, I guess, is that if you’re contracted to be a trainer, then other tasks aren’t ‘core,’ and are less valued.
How do they know when you stop a $10/hr task and start a $6.75/hr task? “Okay, I’m all done data entering, I better go clock out and clock back in before I start my filing.”
Here, classroom time is easy to track - Classes are sceheduled, and take place in designated classrooms. Prep time is an engineered value, determined by kind of class taught and number of students. Admin/development time is everything left over.
It doesn’t sound too dubious to me, but I would be curious as to how much of my time would be spent doing each type of task.
Do you have the opportunity to speak with any of your potential peers who also operate under the same pay structure? I would ask how the percentage of total hours work break into those three aspects.
It sounds like timekeeping is going to be a major aspect of your data entry/administrative tasks.
To me, this sounds more like a payment scheme intended to encourage employees to spend more time tutoring and less time doing “prep work”. I put the quotes on prep work not because such work is intrinsically a waste of time, but because I suspect that they have had problems in the past with people claiming to need large amounts of time to prepare- because preparing is easier than tutoring.
This feeling is based partly on recent conversations with my aunt who works in an office where many people prefer working behind the scenes to working at the front desk where one can not eat or make personnal phone calls and can only gossip when there are not people needed to be assisted. Her situation may have nothing in common with yours, but I doubt that they are trying to entice you with a high hourly wage and then pay you the minimum so much as they are trying to encourage you to maximize your time spent with the paying customers doing the things which justify the higher hourly rate.
Here, in Bus-Land, the drivers who work for me work under a similar wage plan per their CBA. Driving rate is one, Miscellaneous is another.
Anytime they are behind the wheel, regardless if they’re driving a bus load of brats, hiking a bus to the state testing lanes or shuttling for the mechanics, they’re getting paid driving wage. Miscellaneous pay is for anything else in thw world they may do, which can include: seat repair, meetings, training, helping with yard work, etc…
Their route pay is regular and scheduled on contracts that guarantee they get the same pay each week. Anything extra they do requires them to fill out an Extra Pay Sheet, which is initialed by a supervisor, and they get paid the extra time at the appropriate rate.
Thanks for the feedback. As far as I’m aware, the breakdown is-
Lessons: Each session is 50 minutes long, with a 10 minute prep in between each class. I would be teaching 3-5 classes a day.
Admin: This is generally on an as-needed basis depending on how behind they are on paperwork, or if my own students don’t show up and they want to use me for something else. So this figure can really vary, unfortunately.
Prep: I talked with them again, and found the prep time takes up a very minimal amount of the workday, so on second thought getting paid minimum wage for it probably isn’t gouging my paycheck.
Regardless, I’ll make more money at this job than my current part-time jobs combined, so I am going to see how things pan out.
Per the OP, “prep time” consists of gathering materials for the next group of students. Doesn’t take that long to staple together stacks of handouts and such.
I work in a plant doing unskilled labor.
We are all paid the same wage.
I spend 8 hours working.
Many of the other folks "working " there spend much of the time chatting with their friends.
I deserve to be paid better than most of the others but because of the pay structure it ain’t gonna happen.
For the small consulting company where I work, everyone has to wear multiple hats, and different tasks are paid at different rates. If I’m doing something that requires my particular area of expertise, I get the maximum rate; if I work on in-house tech support, it’s rather less; and administrative stuff gets billed at the lowest level. One reason in our case is that we can’t bill clients for the use of a particular person - we bill by the number of hours for a given task, which had better be in line with reasonable commercial rates (i.e., no way would I ever get scientist-level salary for the time I spend editing - not writing - a report). The other reason is that not all tasks can be billed out to a client, and the company doesn’t have the resources to pay me at scientist wage while I troubleshoot a network problem.
In my experience, people get a uniform hourly wage when their responsibilities are limited and specific. If you only tutored, you should expect to never get less than $14/hour. Your tutoring center could guarantee that by hiring other people whose only tasks were admin work (at $10/hour) or prep time (at $6.75/hour), but it would be a big pain to administer all these extra people in what could be a small operation otherwise. So they ask you to to other tasks in addition to tutoring, but pay you at the going rate for those jobs because they don’t make enough profit from your tutoring time to pay you $14/hr across the board. Does that make any sense?
