The massive worldwide cell phone Insurance Company, Asurion, by the order of Sprint terminates it’s “Within the United States Only” American based “Remote Tech Support Employees” as of November 1st 2019.
When you think the “End of the year” the idea of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and every other Holiday you can imagine are pretty much packed into the “Last Quarter” of the year. However, Asurion has decided that the best gift is to leave their “Contracted Remote Tech Support” Agents and Techs from their “Anywhere Expert” Platform without a job. Here’s the email they sent out:
Anywhere Expert program is ending
-Anywhere Expert help@
Hi -redacted-,
Anywhere Expert was created a little over two years ago with one goal in mind: to connect customers with Experts for quick, easy, flexible resolution for any tech or device problems that come their way.
As of Wednesday, October 30, 2019, Asurion will end the Anywhere Expert program and terminate all contractor access to the customer platform.
The final weekly pay out for all contractors will be on Wednesday, November 6, 2019, with regular weekly payouts continuing until that time.
As we grow closer to October 30, you may also see volume decrease, as customers are gradually routed away from the platform.
While we look forward to your continued partnership up until the final day of the program, we will continue to diligently monitor the customer experience and Star Rating thresholds; terms and conditions of the contractor relationship will continue to apply and any negative customer experiences and breeches of the terms of service will be addressed immediately. The Expert Success Specialist Support team will remain available through the end of the program to assist Experts in resolving customer issues. Any questions regarding your status as a contractor with Asurion should be addressed by referencing the terms of service.
Finally, we encourage you to consider employment opportunities that can be found at -redacted-
Sincerely, The Anywhere Expert Teamtheiremail
So far the “Independent Contractors” have laid down and taken the beating without desire for compensation or recourse for justice. We’ve found over five dozen of these “Anywhere Experts” whom never got any notice. Even one of our reporters who’s in the program didn’t get the notice till 17 days into October! They had the following to say:
We got laid off without any real warning and I was given the “you got the email on the 25th of last month” nonchalantly by a Coach on the 16th but it wasn’t in my history, junk or even general email and told that we can “go for careers on the website”and battle the almost 300 other folks wanting the job you’ve already been doing for 2 years and with that they’ve washed their hands of us. What am I going to do? I depend on that income. The only way to make that much in a local domestic job as a Phone Repair Tech would require 80+ hours a week just to make as much as 60 hours a week as an Anywhere Expert. I spent so much for a home setup to provide an ideal setting to work just to be kicked to the curb days before my son’s birthday while taking care of two disabled parents. Since we were “Independent Contractors” we can’t get any unemployment despite paying taxes like everyone else. California railroaded AB-5 to prevent this kind of disregard for workers and as soon as it was made law they decided that since we were lined up against the wall the cheapest solution was to pull the trigger, not provide us with sustainable jobs or placement. I loved being an Anywhere Expert, helping folks get their phones working without going into a shop, working off my feet because of my gout but Asurion doesn’t care I kept hard at retaining my rating for over 2 years and gave them 6 days a week or more. All I get when I ask for help is a “Good Luck applying!” from whatever random coach is on. I was lied to when I asked Quan how long the platform was going to be around two months ago when they said “Not for a long time” but I guess to them a long time could mean 5 more weeks. I still get emotional about it and it’s been over a week.”
L.B.
That’s not all. Earlier this year we and several other news outlets were contacted by a former Asurion Employee:
“This isn’t about providing jobs. This is about the stock market ticker and how happy the investors are. They are going to cut workers from the United States of America and move more jobs overseas and micromanage everything in-house and to the Philippines or the middle east just like T-Mobile and Verizon. It’s a scam: They have you paying 15 dollars a month to pay an additional 150-250 for a screen repair (or entire device replacement and you still have to pay off the lost phone) when they can get the repair done for the same price combined or less at a franchise like CPR Services or the Mom and Pop owned businesses. They lured hundreds if not thousands that came and went into their “Anywhere Expert Platform” paying them $2 (or $4 for the folks who stayed in the system since 2017) per chat and expecting a higher meta-score to govern the overall Human Resources factor and terminating anyone who dropped below the stat baseline. If you do the math and crunch the actual numbers of “Posted Chats per hour” and “Resolved Per Expert” you’ll see a staggering statistic:
L.L.
Average Per hour (with sustainable Meta Score): 7 per hour
Average income per hour: $14 on $2per/chat (a majority of Contractors were on the 2 dollar per chat payscale)
Average working hours Per week to make $800+: 60
Average Living expense for a 4 person home: $4,045
Asurion was paying folks working more than full time LESS than it takes to sustain a 4 person family at 60 hours a week at 10 hours a day 6 days a week.
The turnover rate was staggering with 20-40 terminations a week. While the pay may have fluctuated based on demand and how many people were using the app the overall income logic was “This is a great side hustle” all under the legalese umbrella of “Independent Contractors”. Now, California (and other states) have passed bills into law like AB-5 which require Asurion (the company) to limit their Contractors or abolish the “Gig Independent Contractor” standard and hire everyone or fire everyone. They chose the later.
If the Email about the program shutting down is real, the statements are fact, and the situation is underway then the Anywhere Experts of Asurion are on their way to a quick end. The reporter we quoted was lucky! Many of those displaced and terminated don’t have another source of revenue or really any other recourse.
Sprint and Asurion are businesses looking out for it’s stockholders for sure but they’ve lost sight of what really matters when it comes to their Customer Service Motto: “Connecting Customers with Customer Service” and the American Dream because those jobs are floating over the ocean.
We haven’t even mentioned the part that some of the contractors they are terminating are Veterans with zero other means of income due to being disabled but none of those statuses and situations matter when you agree to the Terms of Service and User Agreement written in a predatory manner to take advantage of anyone looking to “Work for Sprint” as their inner “Expert Blog” as an Independent Contractor which they have effectively deleted from their servers knowing this is possibly grounds for a massive class action lawsuit for Abuse of the Independent contractor system.
It’s too bad this had to happen a month before Chistmas, right? Anyone with more than 3 months of employment may want to see what the law says in their respective state about Abuse of the Independent Contractor System!
#Sprint #Asurion #Iamanywhereexpert #laborabuse
-We Are Control
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.