Pros
The office is cool. They give employees free drinks and lunch some days. Which somehow makes up for the lack of benefits, I guess.
Cons
Tutors are completely at the whims of their clients for attaining hours. There is no guarantee of pay on any given day, and even a 24-hour cancellation usually results in no pay. The company does almost nothing after training and setting up tutors with clients, and still they reap 75% of the money billed from clients. $40/hr sounds good on paper, but when you factor in transit time, preparation and transit costs, it ends up being more like $10-20. And the company bills the clients $150-300 per hour. Tutors are expected to be on call constantly, and many work 7 days a week to make ends meet. You could have one hour on Wednesday and seven on Friday, making the Wednesday hour hardly worth your time. Actually working eight hours in a day is impossible--you'd have to travel at least half an hour between clients, meaning it would take 12-16 real hours to accomplish such a feat. No transit pass. No job security. Work is extremely variable--$1000 one month, maybe $2000-3000 a month during finals, zero during slow times (summer, winter break, etc.). It can take years to work your way up the ladder. It wouldn't be so bad if management wasn't hypocritical about this. They appeal to education as a higher value as a justification--as if by teaching rich children was a virtue. But these people are not students in any sense--they are clients, through and through, and the relationship to tutor is monetary. Tutor Associates preys on recent graduates, usually from Ivies and excellent schools, and promises them wonderful things, lots of money and clients and hours. They rave about how great the company is, and how you can make extra ($15/hr) doing curriculum development, which is mind-numbingly boring. As a final note, one of the more horrifying aspects of this job is the income disparity between clients and tutors. Frequently I found myself entering these penthouse suites in the Upper East Side and considering that I had to forgo food that day because my last paycheck was only $600. Our job is to make sure these people's children will be as rich as them, and ascend to their undeserved spot in the technocracy--why shouldn't we, the "help," be remunerated better?
