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Blue Pill
Thanks for this info. Could you also confirm the following if possible -
Salaries for paid staff are all pathetic, usually in the £25k / $50k range
Unpaid staff do more than just the course related stuff. They do what could easily be proven to be work which would an "ordinary" organisation would have to recruit and pay salaried staff to do.
Employment contracts are either non existent or simple in nature for paid staff
Did you sign a waiver of any kind related to your rights in any way (Notice periods etc)?
Question to any EU residents - if employed, were you asked to sign a waiver of your rights in respect of working hours under the European Working Time directive?
Answers by PM please.
Blue Pill, I will answer what questions I can but I am not quite sure why you require them as PM and quite frankly I am not willing to do so
Salaries for paid staff are pathetic, I can't say what they are in other countries but they were very low over here and in fact at one stage we worked out that we were actually being paid below the countries legal minimum wage.
Most staff take a massive pay cut to work for landmark. the hours are excessively long. I worked six days a week 9am to late at night monday to Friday and 9am to 6pm saturdays plus I was expected to be at courses on sundays if they occured. I officially got one weekend off a month but this rarely occured. I was legally entitled to three weeks vacations and in the 18 months I worked for landmark I got one week off, during which time I was interupted by calls and faxed work from the centre manager numerous times (and to add insult to injury I had to pay to receive the faxes and to send them back)
The volunteers (called assistants in landmark speak) do a lot of varied roles, many around courses but there are also alot of roles that are what I would term office work, calling participants and financial stuff etc. Each staff member usually needs three or four teams of 10 to 12 people to get their job done. In most other companies I would say that these roles would be done by staff who were recruited and paid.
As for contracts, initially I signed a very basic contract which provided me with medical insurance which I never actually recevied. Later on there were more details agreements that we had to sign to keep our jobs. These were things like non compete agreements and other legal stuff, alot of which I still have to follow today.
As for agreeing to waiver any rights I am sure had it been legal for landmark to do this they would have however New Zealands employment laws supercede any employment contract either verbal or written. So as per NZ law I only had to give one pay period in notice.