William Morris Endeavor Assistants Now Being Paid Like Babysitters

Agent trainees are secretaries who don’t get overtime – that’s how the agencies get past the exempt/non-exempt definition for overtime eligibility. My 1970’s WMA agent trainee take-home check was $164 @ 2 weeks, with a $150 Christmas bonus. I was eligible for food stamps. Those who prospered and advanced at this salary were subsidized by parents (a handy way to minimize minority hiring) and/or kickbacks from their boss’ phenomenal annual bonuses, especially for the men trainees in Personal Appearances and Music. You had to dress nicely and live in Manhattan or you just weren’t invited to socialize with the agents and your peers. Also at least one of your two annual vacation weeks had to be spent hanging out at the other coast’s office to get your face known to the agents and bond with your peers. I heard a fired trainee sicced the NY Dept. of Labor on WMA and the salaries were adjusted to minimum wage and just above. The 50-hour workweek has always been there, though; how else would you deal with the L.A. office and London? These days, aside from family subsidy the trainees will get BlackBerrys from their bosses, along with a piece of their bonus and their frequent flier miles. The 50-hour "workweek" will include screenings, errands for the boss, and social events.

louise

Okay, I'll say it: I love Entourage. Especially Lloyd.

PandoraSpocks

@Foster Kamer: Try a year.

Sullygulliver

@Greganda: Yes, but your babysitter's job is actually important.

Sullygulliver

every girl would kill for this job.

labyrinthine IS DOING THIS

Well, maybe WME is paying overtime at 1.5x the base rate for the mandatory extra 10 hours a week. There is no question that they are leaglly required to. (See recent class action suit by a technical writer making $55 an hour against Intel that cost Intel millions.) Even if they are paying ovetime the compensation still seems to low to me, but maybe there is a real opportunity there.

ValborgMelbo

@FeyBoohoozer: Oh, no it will still be officially 30 minutes. But those assistants who are out for more than 5 minutes aren't going to get that dollar to two dollar raise.

I pay my teenage babysitter $15/hour cash. These WME assistants can never aspire to equal her buying power.

Greganda

@The Real JR: I went through this with entertainment PR. As you said, unless you are willing and committed to becoming that future asshole, it is simply not worth it. I used to wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night thinking that some errant piece of paper might be stuck in the fax.

@Trulymadlyme: Depending on how the agency operates, that might be how the assistants make a semi-living wage. Back in the day (~7 years ago) I worked at a big entertainment PR firm where I went from being the receptionist to an assistant. When I quit my Swimming With Sharks-esque boss was stunned to learn that I was making a whopping 28K a year (apparently receptionists were paid better than assistants). "Don't you think that's a big...much?" she asked me. Yeah, lady...I am rolling real deep under the poverty line.

However, while working for her she was always encouraging me to jack up my hours to make overtime money on the back end, explaining that that was how everyone in the department was able to afford to live.

@YongCalliope: They would probably need that extra time to work a second job which would be incredibly difficult after working a fifty-plus hour workweek.

Absent you making 20k a year, your opinion as to whether a 50 hour work week is "difficult" is useless.

As Sally Field reaches the top of those dark, polished stairs, right in front of the old William Morris portrait, she quietly holds up a sign. The clattering of the assistants' keyboards quiets as they all look up to read, "WHERE'S MY LATTE?"

dirtydeer

@WackoJacko: You are a frugaler person than I.

@Kitten_Witawip: Considering the amount of attorney's fees on the table here, I'm shocked there aren't plaintiff's lawyers salivating over the chance to take this sort of case on.

@Hiphopopotamus: Not always. Someone who is pissed off enough will blow the whistle. Whether or not WME can keep up this for very long is the real question.

Kitten_Witawip

@kimsama: paradigm hasn't paid their assistants overtime since the strike, but they do get that hour and a half lunch!!

@kimsama: No one will say a thing - they all know there are 1000 people willing to do their job for even less pay than they are making now.

Fear will keep them tethered to their desks.

@MissNormaDesmond: I live in New York. It definitely wouldn't be easy. You'd have to budget within an inch of your life with two or three roommates but it's doable.

@OopsRecession: What bothers me is not that the numbers are low--hell, I don't make much more--but that assistants from WM had to take a pay cut in the merger so that they wouldn't out-earn their peers at Endeavor, and these are the numbers they came up with. If a newly hired assistant at WM made 13, then there were likely some who made close to 20. Now the top earners have been brought down to 14, and I'm guessing there's more than enough money left over post-pay cut that no one should be making only 10, but of course there's no way that extra cash is going to lowly assistants, even though their salary is the pool it came from in the first place.

DahlELama

With few exceptions, to be exempt an employee must (a) be paid at least $23,600 per year ($455 per week), and (b) be paid on a salary basis, and also (c) perform exempt job duties. These requirements are outlined in the FLSA Regulations.

/nerdery.

@kimsama: Yeah, an FLSA class action with punitive damages could seriously blow up in this agency's face. I've seen it happen so many freaking times.

@skt.smth: Funny you say that... that's basically what I did when I was reped by ICM.

I do love Sherry

@sanyucat: and that these guys are palyers - now that's funny!

budy920

@EsotericPopCulturePun: I thoroughly agree with this person. Assisting in the music industry is akin to a sort of slavery in which there are superficial perks but not really. You have to live with your parents, you become a sort of succubus and then you turn into these bloodthirsty A&R and other such executives who screw everyone below you because you had to be fucking STARVING for the first 5 years being in the periphery of the real money and copious pussy... it's a terrible system.

@Trulymadlyme: Wow, yeah -- I hate to be a nerd, but overtime pay is federally mandated for all non-exempt employees who work more than 40 hours/week.

There are companies that try to claim non-exempt employees are exempt (so that they can screw them out of overtime), but the U.S. Dept. of Labor doesn't like that too much.

I wonder if anyone there would be pissed off enough (or know enough about FLSA) to blow the whistle and trigger an audit?

They get overtime after 40 hours though, right?

Maujer

a mandatory 50 hour work week

I hope they're paying overtime!

my first job in the entertainment (music) industry i was making $22,000 a year in NYC which comes out to about $10.50 an hour if you're working 40 hour weeks. I was working more than that.



This was also a few years back during that boom in the economy. I lasted sans trust fund or second job, but it wasn't fun.

That's just how it works. I moved out and moved on. It just wasn't worth it. I'd rather be able to afford to see a show and buy some beers than have somebody throw me on the list and drink water the whole night.

EsotericPopCulturePun

@PaisleyPajamas: Expecting to have a pet? Look, this isn't a game for those with aristocratic upbringings.

@PaisleyPajamas: Thanks for sharing.

@ChillbearLatrigue: Yeah, if they don't sell your share of the apartment to the one remaining can of pork and beans in the cupboard.

You might look at this as barely livable wages, but I see it as a 10%, 9% and 16.7% raise successively. That's what above cost of living increases. Think of how proud you'll be to tell your 11 roommates that you got a 16.7% increase after just three years with the company. That is if you have the balls to ask for the max.

@MissNormaDesmond: The good thing is that, if you're working those sorts of hours, you don't really need a place to live. Just sleep in a bus station and tidy up at the YMCA or something.

@WackoJacko: Are you currently living in L.A. or N.Y.? Because if so, it's amazing you could afford that salary and a place to live.

As someone who for years worked my way from answering phones to being on a desk alL I can say is RUN! RUN as fast as you can. The turnover is very high. And as for advancing you have better luck hanging out at Home Depot looking for work. i was lucky and was able to leave the ent biz and found a job in another field that turned out to be a lot more lucrative and a lot less ass-isms!

MiriamSanny

@sanyucat: It was possible to be entertained by the show for the first season, maybe two, if you could take the boneheaded fratboy atmospherics. But after a while, the available plot directions sort of dry up. OMG is Vince's career going to boom or bust? But if it really busts, can the show go on? If he becomes a mega-superstar and "wins the game," can the show really go on? There just isn't a whole lot of room to move in the premise of the series.

As far as I can tell, the only thing funny about 'Entourage' is that it's supposed to be a comedy.

sanyucat

Considering I basically make the upper capped yearly wages of a WME assistant for working less than 20 functional hours a week (the rest are desk hours), I have to say they're getting a pretty raw deal.

Are these supposed to be surprising numbers for media jobs?

Employed at WME less than 1 year - $10/hr

Employed at WME 1-2 years - $11/hr A whopping additional $2,080 a year--don't spend it all at Taco Bell!

Employed at WME 2-3 years - $12/hr Oh, Oh! Now your talkin'! $4,160!!! You can afford to put gas in your car and actually DRIVE yourself to work!

Employed at WME 3 years or more - capped at $14 hour. Oh, baby. Another $8,320 and you can afford to have a pet, but not one that needs to be fed. We're talking air plant or fish in a bowl that eat "flakes."

THIS is why I stay in Austin and write my guts out hoping someone just throws a big check my way. Sheesh. Film school, be damned.

Would I have a 30 minute lunch hour or the have they cut that down to 25?

FeyBoohoozer

I could TOTALLY rock 26Gs a year.

(and I'd really like to as I am currently unemployed)

@IamnotStarJones: Almost no question, you would've heard about it already otherwise. Typically don't kick in until after three months...

do they still get benefits?