You mean to tell me, in the Year Of Our Lord Two-thousand and Twenty, someone is paying less than a dollar per hour for a CSR job from a corporation that’s operating in a virtual world? You mean to say with Coronavirus running around and causing people to scramble for rent, these are the wages you wish to hire someone for?
According to the past week’s Virtual Secrets, this is the case of the gaming company MadPea. An anonymous submission for item number 18 screencaps what looks like an official job posting on behalf of the entertainment group, claiming a customer service job needs fifteen hours a week’s time in exchange for 2500 Lindens. In case you were not aware of the current selling rate, that’s a scant more than ten dollars a week.
MadPea didn’t reply to our request for comment, but we did find this online document that looks pretty official. In it, contains the responsibilities of each CSR hired, the contact for applying, and a form to fill out if you’re interested. If the document’s a fake, then someone went through a lot of effort to make it look legitimate.
While many jobs in Second Life and other virtual worlds often claim they are “roleplay jobs”, facilitating anything online can take a lot of effort. The duties listed for this particular role don’t seem to contain any amount of roleplay in it at all. So, it’s just a job. You do it online. Same thing as working as a CSR for any other company. It’s just paying a pittance for it.
Is this even legal? What is MadPea thinking?
How can you pay a customer service rep just double of what you sell your gaming experiences for? With as many people that participate in Madpea’s pay-for games when they release them, surely they can afford a proper paycheck for the employees who keep their machine well-running. A game experience runs for 1000 Lindens, and that’s not including the boosts advertised to make each experience easier. The VIP group costs just as much to join. This is an additional insult on top of how poor their employees are being payed.
And let’s talk about how insidious this is, with people out of work due to Covid and trying to find anything that will keep a roof over their head. Imagine being so heartless, that you think this is an okay wage to pay someone. Someone definitely filled out the form already due to desperation. They have to work fifteen hours for your company, plus seek additional pay with other jobs. Less sleep for them, keeping them in a spiral of worry.
Please–if you’re hiring someone as customer service for your established, branded company, pay them legitimate wages. Even if it’s minimum, that’s better than paying them a dollar per hour. If you can’t afford that much, consider fielding responses through a bot account until you can address them yourself. Don’t ask for this much work and give so little pay in return.
Do you like MadPea games? Do you work for MadPea and want to speak anonymously on the paygrade? Do you own MadPea and want to set the record straight with us? Leave a comment! We’d love to hear from you.
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Location: FBT Heaven by Varneon (VRChat)
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