Moderation company refusing to pay for extra work done due to a bug.

[Deimos]

HI all,

I work for a company who offers a review service for large companies, whereby customers can review products and/or services and the reviews appear on the companies own site
My job, along with roughly 10 others, is to moderate those reviews.
We're all on a zero hours contract, we do work as and when it's available.

The way the system works is for every 120 reviews we moderate, we get paid the equivalent of the basic minimum wage, so £11.44 per 120 reviews.
If this were a steady supply of reviews, it could be a decent income, but it's not, so you end up spending a lot of time doing nothing and not being paid for it, such is life

For the last 3 months or so they've had an issue whereby a lot of reviews were duplicated up to 15 times and we were told to moderate those as we would normal reviews, You can imagine how many reviews we've been having to moderate, my moderated review count was probably around 4x the number I normally do, almost throughout the entirety of June this was going on for.

being quite excited about the prospect of a boost in income, to me and other mods surprise and shock, we're not being paid for all those extra hours and work done, for the past 3 months when the issue started..

We're only being paid for the non duplicate reviews, plus 5% on top.

In my case, instead of receiving around £1500ish for the month of June, I'm only receiving around £500

I mean, I get it, marking each of these duplicates was very quick/easy, as it was a repeat decision from the previous 14,

but to let us do all that work and not pay us for it?

[Emmzzi]

As you are a worker and not self employed, you are entitled to minimum wage. I would write to the employer stating what hours you did, and confirming what the pay should be at NMW.

You do of course take the risk that they will stop giving you work; but then again, they may not be the kind of employer you wish to continue working for.

 

[Deimos]

2 hours ago, Emmzzi said:

As you are a worker and not self employed, you are entitled to minimum wage. I would write to the employer stating what hours you did, and confirming what the pay should be at NMW.

You do of course take the risk that they will stop giving you work; but then again, they may not be the kind of employer you wish to continue working for.

 

Yea, it's a weird system.

Basically I moderated 14,442 items for June, so if my math is correct, 14,442 / 120 X £11.44 = £1376.80
But they're only paying me £540.04

I did contact my manager about it and all I got back was a slightly edited copy/paste email from the previous day

====

Thank you for raising your concerns.

We acknowledge the duplication issues with the reviews, which have been an ongoing challenge since April. We have requested to proceed with the reviews, but duplicate reviews are a matter of repeated acceptance/rejection.

Given that this issue has persisted since April, we have not applied any reductions to your pay for May and June. We have taken this into account while processing your payment for July. Your initial pay for July was calculated as £462.90. To recognize the additional effort required due to this issue, we have added an extra 5%, bringing your adjusted pay to £540.04. The 5% is equivalent to almost 7 hours of additional pay.

We appreciate your understanding and patience during this period. If you have any further questions or need additional clarification, please do not hesitate to reach out. 

Edited July 18 by Deimos

[lolerz]

Duplicated or not you've done the work, it's one you've had to reject.

You're entitled to pay for all 14k of those reviews.

[Deimos]

Just now, lolerz said:

Duplicated or not you've done the work, it's one you've had to reject.

You're entitled to pay for all 14k of those reviews.

That's what I thought as well.

I said that in my email to my manager and the reply I got back is the one above.

The email I sent was:

===

I emailed (supervisor) about the duplicate issue back at the end of April and was told twice to moderate those reviews as per normal and until further notice.

You may remember I also queried what the pay rate was based on the number of items moderated at the end of May

There was no mention in any of those email exchanges that this work would be unpaid.

Regardless of how much easier moderating the duplicates was, it was work done and we should all be paid for the time spent doing them

Offering 5% on top of our base pay for what is essentially hours of extra work, is to put it mildly, quite shocking.

[Emmzzi]

I can see you have this on 3 different forums and the advice you are getting is broadly similar on each. It all depends on your appetite for risk; sadly no one can force your employer to behave, with no potential consequences to yourself.

[Deimos]

21 hours ago, Emmzzi said:

I can see you have this on 3 different forums and the advice you are getting is broadly similar on each. It all depends on your appetite for risk; sadly no one can force your employer to behave, with no potential consequences to yourself.

Indeed.

Another interesting tidbit I've been finding out is only some of the moderators received the email about not being paid, namely those who did the most work

4 have come back to say they never received it and they did less than 2000 reviews in June.