Working in SL Question

Okay here is a question I cannot find the answer to...
I worked in a club as a Manager for over a month... I had a $3,000L per week salary with the understanding that I worked all events.
I worked 2 events a night for 6 days (yes that is all of them) and on the 7th day was told the club is closed.
The owner of the club paid "some" workers and not others, including myself.
I sent her a notecard requesting to be paid and was told she has no money to give yet she is a Hired DJ.
She has since changed her profile to "asking for money that I owe you is petty".
Am I just "SOL" out of luck or is there ANYTHING I can do?
In RL no employer could get away with that and that was over 12 hours of my work and time...
your comments and suggestions are appreciated...

Sadly.....the short answer here is you're SOL.

LL does NOT get involved in disputes of this nature......and any job in SL that's claiming it can pay 3000L a week (roughly 10USD) I would be really leary of. As much as it would be cool to be able to 'work' in SL and earn L's with an honest living the way we do in the real world.....it's just really not quite that simple. EVERYONE is out to make a buck in SL, most especially the club owners......and if her club went down the tubes and she doesn't have the money to pay up........then she obviously started out with very poor planning and way too high expectations of what a club could do for her.

Your best bet is to not put so much stock in expecting to earn L's with a job like that......it's certainly possible....but normally on a much lower pay scale. Try searching the job/want ads in classified and do a bit of research before you just take a job. If an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. The other common truth about SL......is what you spend between your internet and energy bills, is likely not going to made back with a job.....a lot of folks just buy their L's the old fashioned way so they have free time to actually enjoy their time in-world. Or.....develope a skill and sell your creations.....that's often the most rewarding way to earn L's.

Contact Linden Labs and present whatever contract the two of you had. I do hope you did have some form of contract.

I suspect they have methods for this. This isn't an MMO where all transactions are buyer beware - Linden puts a lot of weight to their publicity that you can do business inside of their little "game" - that it isn't a game, but a virtual reality. So see if they're good on that claim.

And let us know how it resolves.

hahaha. Good luck.

LL specifically state that all transactions are at the risk of the participants and they will not intervene in any dispute. It's hard enough to get them to shift when laws are being broken (eg copyright cases).

Unfortunately the OP is basically out of luck.

This is one of the reasons I don't work in SL.

100% absoulutely , positively wrong. Right under "Your World, Your Imagination" in very small print is "Caveat Emptor. LL has categorically stated they will not get involved in Resident to Resident business disputes.

Coming into SL is like going to live in the Wild West. When it comes to financial arrangements between residents there is no law. It's a place where rugged individualists can make their own way with no "nanny state" intervention. As I keep saying, maybe LL should make that a bit more clear to people before they sign up.

You were there for a month. The club was only open to the public for a week. Were you getting L$ 3000 a week before it opened? Does she owe you for one week or four?

If you even got paid for just one of those weeks, you've out-earned most SL club managers.

Plus, if you're out one week, that's not bad exposure.

And my guess is that the owner had every intent to pay you when starting the business. The owner probably just wasn't keeping track of the expenses (if having a business plan in the first place) and ran out of money quickly.

Not to justify the owner's failure to pay you. It's a contract and a legitimate debt. You have no real remedy for it (LL doesn't get involved, period; if you can prove the contract you can theoretically sue in a real life court, but practically no, you wouldn't), but that doesn't mean you don't deserve what you were promised. But as far as SL rip-offs go, this one is pretty light, so there's no reason to dwell on it. The owner was a poor business-person at best, a jerk at worst. That's that; move on.

I'll remember that line the next time I go shopping.

I think maybe the club owner thought that they were going to be able to make $$ from the club, and then found out that clubs are a money sink, not a money maker.

I wondered the same thing, was it a month, or a week? did the op get paid anything, or nothing, and did they work the month, or the week?

and yeah agree pretty light ripoff


want a chance to make money without being ripped off, and only answer to yourself?

learn a trade in SL, be it making clothes, skins, shapes etc, or building, or scripting, or whatnot, if you make something everyone wants, you put it up for sale, they buy it.

you get paid and you answer to only your customers, and if you do a great job at whatever you choose to do, then you will have happy customers

Hmmm...

Well, if I'm that wrong, then any business would be absolutely insane to do anything within SL.

But in addition, there's a market there for Escrow services... though again, there is absolutely zero ability to enforce them, and it would be insane to use them...

To the person claiming wild west - the lack of this goes beyond that - we're talking a situation where you're safer investing in Somali banks than in any SL business activity.

The Wild West actually did have laws and people who enforced them, especially in a regard like this. As has almost every human endeavor through time. Finding a system where there is no recourse is unusually rare - even in failed states (Somalia) you can hire gunmen to make sure you're safe... O.o

I saw a 'SL PAYPAL' business once. Perhaps real money transfer contracts would be more secure than the $L.

.

Hiring in SL is a dangerous thing.

Not so much working for someone... hiring. Yep.

If you ever manage to get this person's real name/address, or even subpoena for it, let's look at all the issues if they are a US citizen:

1) failure to do basic I9 form ("legal working status" stuff)
2) minimum wage
3) worker's comp in some states
4) medicare / social security / SDI withholding and payments
5) $L 3000 a week is *real* close to 600 USD annual. 1099/W2 stuff, although this case didn't get that far
6) employee state tax reporting (in California, that's forms DE6, 7, 8
7) by law, all wages are due and payable within 72 hours of dismissal or there's gonna be a *world* of hurt for the employer
if certain standard government notices weren't given to the employee upon hire, it's fines time...

Okay, plenty of you are going to call me out as crazy. And that's fine, until someone like our original poster here gets mad and subpoena's, in which case the accused can call the government prosecutor crazy in front of a judge. "Work" is a four letter, highly taxable word in the USA.

Doesn't cost a lot to start up something like this. Here's the leverage: Small businesses have been trying to dodge medicare / social security payments for soooo many decades now, that it is not amusing to the IRS, the courts, or anybody *even in the slightest* when some new method to 'cheat' the government comes up. Especially these days. Depending on the state, in today's litigious environment it's not even a good idea to 'hire' a kid to mow your lawn.

In fact, the US government presumes all income is wage earned income unless it can clearly be proven otherwise, and the burden of proof is not on them (it's tax law). This is why I've never even 'pretend hired' anyone, ever, here. I might buy something from somebody but that's where it ends. Also, if you declare income earned from SL in a manner like "income falling in from the blue sky for no apparent reason" it's one of the best ways to trigger an audit.

Considering this person likely worked over 12 hours across six days, it's gonna be waaaay cheaper to give them $L 3000 (12 dollars) to go away because if they got a couple hundred bucks of spite worked up, someone's gonna find out exactly what it means to be a fraudulent employer in the US.

To misquote Michael Caine: "Not many people wanted to know that!"

nobody wants to know the monster under the bed is real...


But it came up awhile back with one of the companies that had SL residents on a payroll..

you were hired as a manager?thats a bad sign already..plus the profile thing she wrote..
sounds like you are SOl..if you ever do get your money..i would keep on moving on..
3,000 you are in the hole about 12 usd and some change..

if i were you i would just let the club die and enjoy that it will..no place stays open long doing business like that..

I have a sneaky suspicion that Desmond is right, since he's the proverbial man when it comes to running a business, but it seems to me that shove come to push the owner could make a good case for the OP being simply a contract worker, especially if they were doing work for other clubs as well.

That said, anyone who puts "asking for money I owe you is petty" in their profile is...less than professional. "Sorry, I'm broke" might not please, either, but at least it has the taint of honesty to it.

I'm brainstorming on ways to prevent this. I'm obviously not a SL scripter 'at this point' (or probably any point in the near future)...

1. A human escrow service can't be trusted in an anarchy. So no human solution to enforcing a labor contract will work.
2. I assume that posters here are correct, and Linden has chosen to not carry through on its promotion of SL as a place to do business, by not having any means to enforce contracts.
3. RL litigation is possible, even in the case here, but would involve RL courts in something they would have a lot of trouble understanding (on the other hand, one request for discovery from a RL court and Linden would probably start doing its own enforcement - complying with discovery requests is not optional and extremely expensive).

Given the above...

Is it possible to make an object that:
1. An employee logs into when they arrive at your workplace and sign in.
2. Monitors the continued presence of the employee.
3. Automatically pays the employee X lindens every Y time interval. Deducting that from you.
4. Allows customers to submit feedback on the employee's performance, useful for making decisions about retention / promotion / etc.
5. Doesn't violate any Camping or bot TOS policies.

?

You don't need it. One motion for a request to order discovery from Linden Labs and the worker can get your contact info and sue you in a RL court. to do that they'd not need much more than a showing that there probably was a contract between the two sides - which is as simple as an agreement. You'd prove the terms and actual existence in the suit, but at the discovery stage, it more akin to 'probably was there' rather than 'actually was there.'

The only defense L-Labs could possibly make to that is difficulty to produce, which is not viable here as the info is rather easy to produce.

Most businesses in SL are not out to fleece their customers or employees. I've been working strip clubs for most of my Second Life. I have worked for both professionally-managed clubs and clubs whose owners didn't have a clue (and I've walked out of many of those). I feel that I know the strip club industry pretty well.

Having said all of that, I believe that a 3k/wk salary is insane. Most managers I know get a salary somewhere between 1k and 1.5k per week, if they's salaried at all. Very few clubs operate in the black; most run deep into the red.

Of the clubs that do operate in the black, or at least somewhat close to it, and can afford to pay salaries, these clubs are generally very selective about who they hire, particularly into management positions. Most managers are hired internally (that is, they rise up the ranks within the club). I used to work as an events manager for a professionally-run club before it closed down. My salary was 1k per week. I have not sought out any management positions since then as I am quite happy just being a dancer; so I consider myself lucky to be one of the few salaried dancers in SL, earning 200L per event, plus 80% of my tips.

Even if I was one of the most well-known figures in the club industry, I would still be extremely suspicious of a potential employer who wants to hire me straight into a management position with a 3k salary. I would be doing some serious research into this club, its owners, and its managers.

Such an object (an employee time clock analog) is definitely possible, and probably not that incredibly hard to script, either. It's a bit beyond my capabilities, personally; but I know it's doable.

That works out to about 4-6 USD/week for the lower numbers. Even at L$3K, that's roughly $12US.

It's all insane. You can make better money than that panhandling.

I was in a popular Neko club tonight and I think I saw a version of the very object I am thinking of.

Some kind of employee time card item. I was standing next to it waiting for my horrid lag to resolve when one of the employees logged out and a chat message hit my screen telling me so.

(the club btw, is real person popular, but low on search engines. Found it through an external blog for Nekos. Another example of why the traffic mess is starting to frustrate me. )

I don't think there is much of a market for escrow services, or something similar, for this kind of situation. The cost of providing the service is too much for the small amount of money changing hands.

The best thing is to just keep your risk low. Don't spend any money in SL that you wouldn't mind throwing into the fireplace. And, I guess, don't do an amount of advance work equivalent to an amount of money you wouldn't mind throwing into the fireplace.

The last time I paid a manager for a club, I paid her in advance. I didn't expect her to stiff me; and if she did, heck, I was out $2 USD. The grocery money was safe.

That's what we keep saying.