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Staff pay.

Enthetan

Master of Disaster
Well there is a term for it, Dev-T.

Having been in a number of orgs, SO and Class V, I see the situation as being inherent in how LRH organizes things, and the way he structures incentives.

Private businesses MUST be efficient enough to pay decent salaries plus get the products out, for one simple reason: the ones who aren't do not survive. The only ones left are the ones whose execs have figured out how to be productive enough.

Scn orgs don't have that restriction. They operate off free slave labor. The execs who succeed are the ones who are best at intimidating people into doing more for free. As such, they resemble the Communist and Fascist dictatorships which are responsible for so many millions dead over the last hundred years. The Sea Org IS a collectivist dictatorship.
 

Enthetan

Master of Disaster
How well do WISE members pay their staff? Is it on par with other businesses? I just read the WISE thread. Since Scn. feeds it, or they feed Scn. how efficient do these WISE businesses operate?

I remember missions paying a wage to their auditors. I forget how much I got when I did some auditing for them. It was a nice acknowledgement for work done. The mission was an uplifting place, relaxed and making money. That is until the Org somehow wrangled out their status and public from them. Were they ever pissed. One could feel the daggers before, then after, there were many more hard feelings. As a naive young scientologist I could not understand the problem. We were all here for the same purpose, to clear the planet. I guess the mission ran on a more efficient business mode then the org.

This is just my speculation, since I never worked in, nor ran, a mission: the distinguishing characteristic of a mission is that it has a Mission Holder, who is ultimately responsible for its debts. As such, he has an incentive to ignore stupid orders from uplines that might cost money on silliness. He has an incentive to focus on financial viability rather than chasing stats. He's harder to remove at whim, so he is able to be a bit defiant in the face of stupidity.

With orgs, I've seen a tendency by Int to maximize the amount of money flowing from orgs to Int, at the cost of the financial health of the org.
 

xenusdad

Patron with Honors
I recall we lived very frugally - given that we rarely got a day off - we had no time to spend any money really.
I love this^!!! It's ok not being paid, we had no time to spend money anyway, I'm sure countless slaves throughout time had the exact same problem.
 

20000000

Patron
A few years ago, after being conned into becoming a W.I.S.E member and promised that my business will be affluent once using the LRH tech, i implemented the LRH financial policy into my bussiness. My staff and i realised that it was impossible to live on the percentage of money that was allocated for staff wages. That percentage was truly what one would pay for wages if one was employing slaves. Some of my staff left before i realised that this was another one of LRH's bullshit policies.:grouch:
 

Terril park

Sponsor
This is just my speculation, since I never worked in, nor ran, a mission: the distinguishing characteristic of a mission is that it has a Mission Holder, who is ultimately responsible for its debts. As such, he has an incentive to ignore stupid orders from uplines that might cost money on silliness. He has an incentive to focus on financial viability rather than chasing stats. He's harder to remove at whim, so he is able to be a bit defiant in the face of stupidity.

With orgs, I've seen a tendency by Int to maximize the amount of money flowing from orgs to Int, at the cost of the financial health of the org.

There is more to it than that. SO could only enter a mission by invitation
thus staff and clients couldn't be ripped off. I believe all the other networks
could not go in missions iether. No LRHcomm, FBO, GO, etc.
 

TalleyWhacker

Patron with Honors
Having been in a number of orgs, SO and Class V, I see the situation as being inherent in how LRH organizes things, and the way he structures incentives.

Private businesses MUST be efficient enough to pay decent salaries plus get the products out, for one simple reason: the ones who aren't do not survive. The only ones left are the ones whose execs have figured out how to be productive enough.

Scn orgs don't have that restriction. They operate off free slave labor. The execs who succeed are the ones who are best at intimidating people into doing more for free. As such, they resemble the Communist and Fascist dictatorships which are responsible for so many millions dead over the last hundred years. The Sea Org IS a collectivist dictatorship.

Well said.
And I think a structure like the C of $ tends to attract a "Socialist" type of personality to join staff.
It's a communal existence in most ways and perspectives.
 
Here's what I was told:
"When the Org is running at ideal conditions and stats are up, the staff pay will go up. This will happen before we know it."

I didn't believe it then.
And as it continued to be said again and again with no significant improvement, I still cannot believe it.

My ex said he would work part time at a wog job, part time at the Org so that I was not the sole source of income, though was convinced that staff pay was supposed to be enough once things were running smoothly. Instead, living with other staff members who can't afford places of their own because they get no money either is a much more ethical decision than organizing your life and having a stable 2D..
 

The Great Zorg

Gold Meritorious Patron
Apparently staffers are abused at ALL levels of scio... I know of a mission staffer who worked their Day and Foundation hours (about 90 hours a week) and would receive at most, $10.

Usually there was no pay. Apparently the closest 'org' was bleeding the mission dry for 'training' the mission staff (or else!). That, along with $cio's worldwide 'donation', building rent, operating costs and this goofy 10% reserve fund, that left little or nothing for the staff.

Most staffers would work either Day hours OR foundation hours and hold a job just to eat. Those foolish enough to sign onto both shifts went hungry and ended up living in communes of 5 to 10 other sad clams. This was the main reason staffers blew: they had to eat.

Missions, orgs, cc's, asho, anzo, flag, SH, SO, it must and no doubt still is a living hell on earth.

It kills me sometimes to see all those robots and puppets in all those videos spewing the same crap, like human tape recorders running an endless playback loop, and they're all so poor and mindless.

What bothers me the most is thinking about all those poor bastards on an RPF right now, tired, broken, hungry, eating beans and rice... I think about these people some nights when I'm pigging out or snoozing in my bed. I've caught myself clenching my fists... and my wife asks me about what is going on or what I'm thinking about...

.....
 

xkcd

Patron
I was in staff for four years and I had good stats for it. I never got paid more than 200 dollars a month. What bothered me though was that I was struggling and having to bust my ass, but there were Sea Org members with nice clothes, iPads, iPhones, and even really nice laptops. I would love to know how the hell they got the money for that when the most I made one year there was 1500 dollars. I was struggling, and I didn't have a whole lot period. My parents essentially left me out to dry, and the org wasn't helping. I hated it, and I don't get how 90% suffer and 10% get free reign. Also I would love to know how so many SO members got dental and eye treatments, along with taking care of a fellow SO member who had cancer in FOUR places so easily, while it took me almost 3 years to be able to afford a dental appointment and a dental scaling. I need $1300 worth of work still too, and that was that the Scientologist dentist said. I think the pay system is retarded, horse shit, and completely unfair. "Bonus units" my ass.

Funny side note to all of this, after I left I have been offered more job opportunities (I'm a freelancer,) and they have all been high-paying. They say that you pull in bad shit when you blow staff, but frankly my life has been better and I've slept way easier since I left that hellhole.
 

lotus

stubborn rebel sheep!
The staff pay is one of the rare thing in $cientology that is not under law of ethics

They don't want the amount to be in affluence - they want it to be below non-ex!

Thus the staff pays remains about the same for 30 years!
somewhere between 0 and 0
 

Helena Handbasket

Gold Meritorious Patron
I've worked for no pay.

But this wasn't in the church. This was in the freezone, at a place whose name anyone here would recognize. I thought there would be SOME pay, enough to offset the cost of living, but that was just my own silly-assed assumption.

The only way to get paid would be to get tech trained and take a technical post. But then I wouldn't have the admin post I really wanted. Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Exploitation is alive and well in the freezone, too.

Helena
 

Leland

Crusader
The staff pay is one of the rare thing in $cientology that is not under law of ethics

They don't want the amount to be in affluence - they want it to be tbelow non-ex!

A sublime and brilliant post Lotus

I vote this post for Best Of....:yes:
 

mockingbird

Silver Meritorious Patron
This is an excellent thread and the vast majority of info aligns with my own experience of 25 years in Scientology.

Almost all staff and SO get slave wages and staff often get nothing and rely on welfare or having a spouse or parents support them 100%.

It is a recurring story for decades for many families that puts tremendous financial and emotional strain on relationships.

That strain helps break up families which Scientology is designed to do ; LRH wanted your first loyalty to always be to HIM and many cults break down family bonds to strengthen their grip on slaves.

It is designed that way on purpose for several reasons : LRH had an insatiable lust for wealth and power and felt no compassion for others AND due to megalomania actually considered that he did all the work and deserved all the rewards.


He also studied other cults and psychological and social data and knew that often the populations living in extreme poverty are exploitable and get a kind of apathy about changing their lives , while from upper lower class up through middle middle class people have hope and some mobility and independence.

In the cult papers by a orange ( free online ) the issue of cults keeping members in poverty as a routine action is discussed and is agreed on by many cult experts.

He played a very old game , just repackaged to not be recognized.
 

Free Will

Patron with Honors
I often saw payroll figures in 1973-5 at AOSHUK (I worked in Dept 8 and also as FBO) and again around 1980/1 (FBO again). The top execs generally didn't get paid significantly more than the rest of the crew. The ones who raked it in were the reges and booksales people. The Non-SO tech people, in the days when there were such, generally got more money than the SO people (duh), but since they had to pay rent and buy food etc. that was not unfair. They were rarely paid a living wage, let alone huge amounts. There could have been some ridiculous tech bonus system for NSO, but I didn't see it.

I did see ridiculous book bonuses being paid out, week after week after week, that did make me sick. Thousands of dollars being paid to reges for getting people to use money they had on account already for training and auditing for "special properties", i.e. fancy leather-bound copies of books selling for thousands of dollars. Just in case anyone doesn't understand this, here it how it works. Book income and tax setasides and so forth are subtracted from the gross income for that week, and the org gets to spend maybe 40-50% of what is left (the "Corrected Gross Income"). This is irrespective of whether the book income is fresh money, or is a debit from account of money paid in years before.

So maybe the org makes $25,000 income that week, and the CGI would have been maybe $20,000, and the org gets to live off maybe $8,000 for utilities, postage, promo, staff pay etc. If some criminal reg like Hazel Grafton or Peter Morgan then "sold" a leatherbound piece of shit to someone for $4,000, making themselves $600 commission in the process, it would make no difference to the Gross Income for the week, but the book income would jump by $4,000, and the CGI would shrink by $4,000. In this case, the org would suddenly have only $6,500 for stuff that week. It was heartbreaking. My complaints were met with "Books make booms," and the fact that one leatherbound copy of Battlefield Earth bought as an investment (hah!) didn't exactly fit into the "Books are Dissemination" theory didn't enter into their thoughts at all.

Paul

Gosh, Paul, you've reminded me how mad this used to make me at the time. (I was there throughout the whole period, as you'll recall). We would be on beans and rice, re-rolling dog-ends of roll-ups (everyone was pretty much a chain-smoker) out of ashtrays, getting paid a few pounds per week). Hazel Grafton and Peter Morgan (and a few others) would come into Treasury to get the accounts files of their selected booksale targets - often public stuck in Ethics - then do a full number on them. Because they were earning (sorry, I mean getting paid) hundreds every week, they could keep passing cigarettes to their 'prospects' and plying them with coffees and eats from the Canteen, building up rapport or friendship. They were buying cars and suits with their bonuses, while we were shuffling to and from Stonelands for our beans and rice sitting in the back of windowless vans or on each other's knees on a crowded bus. It was disgusting.
 
I was thinking about pay in the SO the other day and I remembered that as a minor, we received half pay. I asked why this was, because we worked the same hours as everyone else due to not being in school. I was told it was because it was illegal to pay minors the full wage of $50 a week. Like a good robot, I accepted that, but I think I have figured it out now. They paid us half pay, not because it was ilegal to give us full pay, but because it was illegal to have 14 year olds working 16 hours a day. So by paying us half pay they could make it look like we didn't work full time.

Now THAT is a good racket. :clap:
 

prosecco

Patron Meritorious
Gosh, Paul, you've reminded me how mad this used to make me at the time. (I was there throughout the whole period, as you'll recall). We would be on beans and rice, re-rolling dog-ends of roll-ups (everyone was pretty much a chain-smoker) out of ashtrays, getting paid a few pounds per week). Hazel Grafton and Peter Morgan (and a few others) would come into Treasury to get the accounts files of their selected booksale targets - often public stuck in Ethics - then do a full number on them. Because they were earning (sorry, I mean getting paid) hundreds every week, they could keep passing cigarettes to their 'prospects' and plying them with coffees and eats from the Canteen, building up rapport or friendship. They were buying cars and suits with their bonuses, while we were shuffling to and from Stonelands for our beans and rice sitting in the back of windowless vans or on each other's knees on a crowded bus. It was disgusting.

One of the things that started the process of me wanting to get the hell out, was during the renovations of the castle. We were all doing long hours and hard work for zero pay. About 20 construction workers from the US were brought over and paid a fairly decent wage. I don't know how much as they were told not to tell the Sea Org staff. But I do know that they were on expenses and would go out for a meal in the evenings, usually to the curry house.

There was a tight deadline and I ended up doing some mopping before an inspection. Bitty Miscavige laughed, yes laughed, that I was mopping saying something like, 'ha ha, isn't it funny how she ends up doing all the mopping...'

Ha ha, Bitty Miscavige. Thanks for that piss take. It made me realise how cruel and unkind management was, which made me decide I had to get out.
 
New update to this thread:

At least from the org I was working at - I got living wage (after staff status 2). I was getting a basic 220 / 300 a week. Then after staff status 2 I went to 500/600 a week.
 

La La Lou Lou

Crusader
I really wish I hadn't destroyed it but I found an old invoice for a years pay, one of those annual tax thingies, it was from London Org in the 70s and it was less that 300 pounds, for a full years salary, less that 467 dollars. London was a big thriving org then, one of the best. Even moonlighting in nightclubs and theatres and cleaning companies staff barely survived.
 
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