Aci is a con job. It's true that one can make money as a sub contracted cable installer. The problem is, though, is that it is 85% on the company giving you good routes. Aci, or whoever is routing or handing out jobs, can make you or break you before you even show up in the morning. They _do _take care of the people they want to. And use and abuse as many other people as will allow them to do so. I know people who will take home over a thousand dollars in a week and others will take home 400 dollars that same week. Someone might argue that the guy who brought home all the money did more work or worked more efficiently but that is not necessarily the case. For example, hooking up an apartment with 1 cable box, internet and phone pays a tech about $35-$40, depending on your pay scale. These jobs take about 45min to an hour, max. On the other hand, going to a job to hang a drop (hanging new cable from pole to house) pays about $10, and will take about the same amount of time as the apartment job. Neither of these times include drive time. For instance if the guy who hooked up the apartment has another job a ten minute drive away and it's a similar type job paying the same he can make about $80 in 3 hours. The guy running the drop may have another drop to run at another house, a fifteen minute drive away. And in the same time period he makes $20 to the other guys $80. An aci rep would tell you that everyone gets a good mix of jobs and they try to be as fair as they can but that is just not true. They would, if pressed, give any number of justifications for the differences in types and locations of jobs for different employees, and the different enforcements for policies for individuals. But it is all just smokescreen and meant to sound authoritative, hoping you'll just let it go. Ultimately, their feeling is that they are the managers and they can do what they want, they make the rules, and if you don't like if you can quit. Until someone proves them wrong, legally, they pretty much are correct. Like any company they have people they value more than others. The rest of the employees, they will literally exploit to the extent that they are allowed to by that individual. No one who is willing to take a job that has a starting wage of $10.00 an hour has the money to hire lawyers to take on such a vague system. And by system i mean the whole system including how they pay, system for determining pay, how they decide who gets what jobs. I haven't even touched on the pay scale. A lot of this has been mentioned in other complaints. So for now, i'll let those speak for themselves. Ultimately, i think the only issue lawyers could touch is the pay scale, or aci's formula for pay, which just recently changed and i don't currently have an understanding of how it works.
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