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I have had a similar experience, although it never involved money at all. I'll highlight what I got out of mine if it might help. I did unpaid "intern" work for a lawyer. It was advertised as a paralegal position, but it didn't involve helping with legal research at all. It was more like pure admin assistance, answering the phone for him and other basic office tasks. Also, it involved no real training besides having to go up to him every single time because he didn't want to teach anything directly. Now, this particular person was "nice" half the time and got on everyone's rear end over the smallest things the other half, and did this to me from day two. So after a week of that I went from giving him five hours per day to two hours per day. Eventually I was doing almost nothing but following leads for his house rentals so I was giving him directly economically beneficial labor for free, as I see it. I at least wanted to learn more about drafting motions but he assumed it was so easy that I could do it an hour before court on my second time doing it, without any training. So of course after I couldn't do it, he just put me back on the phones for the most part. However, under no circumstances would I have taken poo poo such as, "I feel burnt by you, I'm giving you valuable knowledge and now you want to cut your hours!" He at least didn't do that, but if he wasn't flexible about my working for free, that would have been the absolute breaking point. It was lovely in many other ways but I won't go into more details. From this standpoint, I agree completely that you gave this photographer your own valuable knowledge and effort. The extra problem in this case is that there's money involved. It depends on how much you want to let this burn because the photographer could be a potential reference. Going by unpaid intern law standards, if you were giving any economically valuable labor at all, he should have been paying you. Thus the oral agreement to be unpaid was under-the-table and I would guess it wouldn't be a very strong defense in court. I put up with my own situation by cutting my hours, though, just to get some experience.
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Jun 11, 2013 02:24
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 05:19 |
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