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What I did not know, because I was constantly being lied to about it, was that NO ONE EVER MADE MONEY WHILE ON STAFF. No one ever made enough money to support a modest apartment and a used car. All around the world, no one ever made a living wage as a staff member for the Church of Scientology.
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I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with you on that one Alanzo old chap (actually I’m rather relieved to be disagreeing, as I’ve agreed with him on a couple of other points and I was getting worried that I might have slipped into his valence).
Some people
did make a good living out of Scientology. Well obviously there was Elron himself and a few of his immediate cronies and of course there is li’l Davey who by all accounts lives a life of unparalleled luxury, in the Sea Org at least.
But, I have know of a few who have managed to rake in a fair amount of cash while ‘doing the greatest good’. I remember one cold, miserable night around Nov ’86, sitting in a dimly lit and pokey office in CLO at St Hill, while trying to decide where our meagre resources should be allocated, along with the other members of the FP (Financial Planning) committee. It was quite obvious that we would be lucky to get £5 each staff pay for that week (again) and then the son of one of the Tours Org reges, who had been listening in, piped up with the rather depressing boast that his dad (David Beal) regularly made £500 a week from book commissions. This was more than I had made in the last 6 months, so you can imagine how that made us feel.
Later, I learnt that David Beal had been ‘cooking the books’ and had left the SO under a cloud, which didn’t surprise me at all.
There have also been a few other staff members who were very good at finding the right public and getting them to buy various things, usually ‘materials’ which gave them a 10% commission. Most of these seem to have left the CoS under dubious circumstances as well. Hmmm – there’s a bit of a pattern emerging here!
But, the fact that I can only think of a handful out of several hundred, does rather back up Alanzo’s post (damn!) in that if you want to work as a Scientology staff member, you had better be prepared to give up any hope of financial reward and in many cases, consign yourself to a life of poverty.
When I was in the SO, the minimum wage was set at £23 per week. On top of this, we were supposed to get all our food and accommodation, clothes, laundry and any other necessities and have the chance of earning bonuses if we ‘produced’.
In reality, the average was between £5 and £10 and out of this, we had to buy our own clothes (and pay to clean them at the launderette) and buy any ‘treats’, toiletries or any other things that made life more bearable. Unless you had another source of income, this just wasn’t enough to survive on and after less than a year, I’d had enough.
Axiom142