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

AdamPD

HI all,

So 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, so 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, so 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.

So being quite excited about the prospect of a boost in income, to my 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.
So 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?

Marcon

AdamPD said:

HI all,

So 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, so 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, so 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.

So being quite excited about the prospect of a boost in income, to my 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.
So 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?

What exactly was requested/agreed - do you have it in writing?

AdamPD

Marcon said:

What exactly was requested/agreed - do you have it in writing?

Hi Marcon,
When the issue first cropped up at the end of April, I did email my supervisor about it and she said

"(manager) has advised that these please need to be moderated as normal for now and that he has raised this for further investigation."

No mention of anything about not being paid.
And when I asked how we should handle them, my supervisor said:

"Please moderate all duplicates as you would the original. For example if you’d accept the review then please accept them all and the same for rejecting."

I did query the pay rate for moderation again a month later and my manager replied

"That is correct, 120 reviews per hour, and the hourly rate is £11.44 (from April 2024)"

There was no follow up or comment about the duplicates issue until today, so they basically let us do all that extra work until it was fixed, then told us we wouldn't be paid for it.

Marcon

AdamPD said:

Marcon said:

What exactly was requested/agreed - do you have it in writing?

Hi Marcon,
When the issue first cropped up at the end of April, I did email my supervisor about it and she said

"(manager) has advised that these please need to be moderated as normal for now and that he has raised this for further investigation."

No mention of anything about not being paid.
And when I asked how we should handle them, my supervisor said:

"Please moderate all duplicates as you would the original. For example if you’d accept the review then please accept them all and the same for rejecting."

I did query the pay rate for moderation again a month later and my manager replied

"That is correct, 120 reviews per hour, and the hourly rate is £11.44 (from April 2024)"

There was no follow up or comment about the duplicates issue until today, so they basically let us do all that extra work until it was fixed, then told us we wouldn't be paid for it.

I'd go back and politely (grit your teeth!) quote all the above, saying that you and your colleagues were all working on the basis of the confirmation given that these moderations would be paid at the normal rate.

AdamPD

Thanks Marcon, yea I was writing a reply as I read your reply here.

Hi (manager),
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.

MeteredOut

You accept the moderation of the duplicates was quicker. Can you put a percentage number on that?

eg, if they still took half the time, you could argue for a 50% payment rate for the duplicates.

It looks you are expected to moderate a "normal" review in an average of around 30 seconds.

AdamPD

Half would be acceptable, yea, I might mention that when the manager replies.

The annoying thing is, there was no choice not to moderate them, as the page we work on only displays 10 items at at time, so if there's 15 duplicates, you had to clear those 10 items, go to the next page, clear 5 more, then moderate another review and again, 15 more duplicates, so it wasn't that much easier.

AdamPD

Ah gotcha, sorry
No it's basically 50% quicker
Each normal review, for me at least, takes a max of say 8 seconds to quickly read and click an action
Accepting is one click, rejecting is two with a mouse scroll to see rejection reasons.

AdamPD

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

Duplicated or not, the work was done, so I and all the other staff should be entitled to full pay I would think.

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. 

Dakta

My thoguhts with all of this is a duplicated post isn't actually no effort at all, theoretically there is work in checking it's a duplicate and obviously whatever process to mark it/sign it off as well.

I don't get the impression this is a very, well, legit sort of business, or at least one that uses exploitative practices. 


Anyway, since it seems you're in typical employment (albeit zero hours contract) and the way you worded your opening post that being paid your expected rate you would 'just' exceed the national minumum wage, it seems what's been offered is going to be much less than that so the route I'd be looking at, as an inexperienced bystander is similar to that of those who do not receive the minimum wage.

At the end of the day it is money for time worked, not 'reviews done' - if the company want to look at it like that they can, but for legal payment purposes it's time done.

I'd certainly start scouting for a better income opportunity, but I think youd be right to fight this. You've done the work, you've got documentaiton (and make sure you keep it) of them telling you what to do, and now you want to get paid for it.

Just bear in mind you will burn your bridges fighting the fight, but IMO you are in the right. 

I wouldn't worry about finding another job over it either, literally any company offering employment legally will treat you better. 

MeteredOut

AdamPD said:

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

Duplicated or not, the work was done, so I and all the other staff should be entitled to full pay I would think.

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. 

Can you quantify how many hours those 14,442 items took, and, therefore whether you were paid minimum wage for those hours?

I wonder if responding with a suggestion that they're not complying with the law might change their mind. Alternatively, they might not like that thread and you could end up with a strictly 0 hours in future, as per your contract... Then, it'd be over to you for next steps.

However, it looks like you *were* paid fully for the duplicate items in April and May. Is that correct? And, you have accepted these items took 50% of the time compared to new reviews. On that basis, have you calculated how much you profited from the issue during those two months, and whether that covers the £836 you're claiming as underpaid for June?