I happened to run across an offer the other day that appeared to be from a local hotel, looking for desk workers.
I applied immediately. My web development business is doing fairly well, but as anyone with a fairly new business knows, it can be up and down. The idea of having something part-time sounded good.
It turned out to be an offer to work for a company who works with Arise. Arise bills itself as a Virtual Call Center.
I was suspicious right away. While everyone’s BS threshold is a little different, if the opportunity was legit, then why was it being presented as a local job?
This is how it seemed to work. Arise has a bunch of contracts with varying companies for call center services. If you want to do these jobs, you have to first incorporate yourself/join an existing corporation.
I am no lawyer, but it seems to me that this is simply to make it absolutely clear in a legal sense that you are a company providing services to Arise, not an employee of Arise. This allows Arise to offer a call center service without having to deal with inconveniences such as minimum wage laws.
The ad I saw was someone who had already incorporated looking for people to join their company, so the advertising of local jobs can’t be laid at Arise’s door but rather to that particular company.
I already mentioned that I felt suspicious, so I did some digging, and the first thing that caught my eye was that there was a class-action lawsuit against Arise in the state of California for… not paying minimum wage.
Here’s the thing. A lot of times, no matter if a company says that you are an independent contractor, whether you are or not has to meet certain tests by the IRS. This is something I will talk about more in another post, but California appears to believe that fundamentally, all these people in sub-corporations contracted by Arise are really employees, and thus Arise owes taxes and compensation.
In further research, I discovered that Arise-connected people seemed to come in two flavors–really enthusiastic and really negative. You can check out some of the reviews here.
There were enough issues that I decided to give this one the go-by. It may be that with Arise, your success depends on the corporation you join, but I’d hate to have to pay all those training fees hoping to get work only to get ripped off.
Scam-o-meter: Proceed with extreme caution