Unfair Practices Employed by Essay Companies on Writers

Many campaigns (in this forum and other online platforms) advocate for the rights of student customers. It is not very often that folks here highlight the ordeals of writers in the hands of essay companies.

I have been a writer for more than a decade. During this time, I have witnessed all manner of practices from several essay companies run without clear-set regulations or standards of operation. Some of these practices are incredibly unfair while others are outright criminal.

I need to point out that it is only the unscrupulous sites that engage in these practices. Legitimate and established companies act right by their writers:

1. Force-assigning orders. During registration, most companies state that one of the benefits of working for them is that writers get to pick/take/bid only on orders they are happy and comfortable working on. This honeymoon phase doesn't last too long though. At some point, their Support Team needs people to work on those off-putting orders that no writer wants to touch (for whatever reason), but whose deadlines are fast approaching. This is why they "force-assign" to writers they think may complete the orders. Now, a writer is "free" to "reject" such assignments, but usually (and unofficially) at their own future expense. First, habitually rejecting force-assigned orders limits the number of future bids being accepted. Then there's a threshold for the number of rejections possible before triggering a "warning letter" for being uncooperative and unsupportive.

2. Manufacturing Lateness. There are several ways they do this. The common one is putting a paper back on "revision" with an unbelievably short deadline at a time when the writer is most likely unable to execute. A cruder way is by manually shortening an assigned paper's deadline and hoping that a writer won't notice (yes, it's been known to happen). They do this either to directly fine the writer for the late order/revision, to accumulate lateness counts to trigger an overall fine applied to all orders, or to prevent the writer from achieving bonus-tagged efficiency milestones.

3. Altering instructions midway without compensating the writer. The way most companies operate is that they charge the client a fee for changing order details (or changing the deadline) after work on it has started. This is normally to compensate for the work already done or the effort and inconvenience of changing course. Not all companies trickle this additional payment down to the writers.

4. Withholding funds unrelated to alleged infraction. Some sites dismiss writers (for plagiarism, lateness, or whatever) then deny them (the writers) access to the funds they've accumulated up to that point from previously completed papers. This is different from fining the writer to compensate the client. Even sites that have no stated compensatory obligations to the client (in the event of plagiarism or lateness) do this. This is just one example.

5. Robbing writers outright. There's a disreputable Eastern European group that has writers walking on eggshells the entire duration of their engagement with them. As soon as a writer's account accumulates funds above a certain amount, they become targets for random unfounded accusations. These charges are the pretext for immediate termination of employment, permanent deactivation of a writer's account (leaving no records for reference), and withholding of all funds due to the writer. There is zero room for putting on a defense or responding to the charges. All a writer gets is an email saying "We are sorry..."

These are just but a few of the infamous practices.

Anyone writing for a company guilty of any of these should consider quitting and working for a more civilized organization.

Sometimes, even the legitimate companies abuse writers on a case-by-case basis, depending (from what I've observed) on the personality and degree of vulnerability of individual writers. About 7 years ago, I met another writer here who used the exact same ID on this forum as his company ID, just as I always have. He was as good a writer as I am and we used to back one another up with emergencies as well as protect each other on the company assignment board. We'd alert one another to customer requests for us on the board and if we didn't get a quick response, we'd take those orders off the board ourselves before they could be stolen by other writers who didn't respect the rule about not taking orders requesting a specific writer and then email to let one another (and the company) know that we had the project so that it could be reassigned and moved to the right writer's account afterwards if he indicated that he wanted it. (At that time, only the "honor system" protected those orders from being taken by any of their other hundreds of writers. Later, their system displayed those orders only to the requested writer for a 3-hour period and we often did the same thing for one another as soon as we noticed that a request for one another had just gone public after the 3-hour reserve period expired.)

He continued doing much more company work than I did long after I made the successful transition to independence as a writer and would sometimes either vent to me or seek my advice in dealing with issues with customer service reps at the company. According to him, they routinely assigned him orders that he hadn't chosen to accept and they often demanded (unpaid) rewrites to accommodate customers who changed their specs after he'd already started their orders as well as after he'd completed and delivered their projects. In my personal experience at the same company, they'd always asked me first how many extra pages to charge the client for either of those two situations; and the first time that they ever "assigned" an order to me by placing a customer's request for me on my account that I hadn't chosen to accept was the last time, because I told them immediately and in no uncertain terms that according to their contract, I was strictly a freelance contractor and not an employee and that email notifications of requests for me were appreciated, but that I never wanted any assignment ever "placed" on my account by anybody else unless I'd made the decision to take the order. It never happened again. In the event I received a ridiculous unjustified rewrite request, I simply uploaded the original file to the system to clear it off my account and instructed the customer to contact Customer Service with any questions; and I emailed CS explaining why the request was ridiculous and indicated the appropriate number of additional pages to charge the customer for the request. If the customer paid, the rewrite would appear on the assignment board as a new request for me and if the customer didn't pay, I'd never hear anything more about that project. It never even occurred to me that other writers at the same company might be experiencing a radically different relationship with the same company reps.

What really shocked me was the tone of the emails that he shared with me from the company. The same representative who had always communicated with me only appropriately and respectfully communicated very harsh-sounding demands to this other writer to rewrite orders immediately whose specs changed after delivery and outright threatened him about deducting his entire pay for those orders if he refused. According to him, this was how they'd always treated him and he'd often been forced to do unpaid rewrites on projects for reasons that were completely ridiculous, such as where the customer simply changed his mind about the topic after receiving the project. My conclusion from what I learned from his shared company emails and from hearing his personality the one time we spoke by phone was that he'd made the mistake of setting that tone with them as a function of his personality and by making it fairly obvious that he just wasn't the type of person who was comfortable sticking up for himself or refusing to let anybody take advantage of him.

Incidentally, for PV or JM or anybody else who recognizes the writer involved, he died of an apparent heart attack in June of 2015. His partner provided that info from his email account in response to an email I sent him, coincidentally, 3 or 4 days later, which I subsequently confirmed by finding his obituary published in his local newspaper in WA. I suspect that PV enjoyed the same kind of relationship as I did with the CS rep involved and would be equally shocked by the treatment this other writer experienced from the same company that was always appropriate and respectful to us.

That type of treatment mostly depends on the type of person that is on the other end of the conversation with CS. If you're too agreeable, then there's nothing stopping the other guy from imposing an ever more rigorous set of rules for you to follow, knowing full well that you will never complain. If, however, you have a harder stance, the demeanor is likely to be much different. I find that it also depends on the manner in which you came to the company - if they recruited you specifically, or asked you to join (which has happened to me several times), then they are far less likely to even try to engage in this type of behavior. If you applied through regular channels, and did not show some backbone from the get go, you're likely going to experience issues with CS or HR (depends on the company).

My experiences with companies is limited. I spend some time (less than a year over a decade ago) with a company that was notorious for withholding percentages for any little thing--whether founded or not. I've also worked for a company that seemed fair and paid quickly. However, I did notice that there were several times there would be orders for revisions that no one was wanting to take. Often times, the original writer's name would be mentioned in the order details, and I knew that writer was still writing for the company.

While no one wants to be "docked," there are times when it's appropriate, such as in repeated lateness. If a writer knows there will be no repercussion for being late (a day or more) every time, then why would they not take that extra time? In business, there has to be some regulation of deadlines, etc., but those that have abused writers for so long make it hard for the "good" companies to apply deductions for fear they will lose writers who have had those negative experiences. Now, plagiarism is another matter. If you plagiarize, you deserve to lose your gig. Period.

One of the biggest complaints that I have been reading about and hearing about from other writers is the utter disregard of these companies for time zones. Just as the clients do not appreciate text messages and phone calls at odd hours of the night, the writers do not appreciate that either. The problem is that there are companies that disregard the time zone differences between writers and clients because they do not see the writers as workers but rather, as slaves who should be available to work at any given time. I make sure to consider the time zone differences for my writers, regardless of their location. I instruct my client assistants to always pair up clients with writers located in the same state or timezone whenever possible. This lessens the need to figure out time zone differences and scheduling of calls between the two parties. My writers appreciate this consideration since they are able to complete their night's sleep and work on the papers with fresh eyes and rested brains. I always tell them that their sleep is important because a sleepy writer is a useless writer. He will not do a good job because of his cloudy brain and aching eyes. That makes the writer worthless to me, which is why I avoid calling them when I know they could be asleep. Now waking them up from a nap is another story...

It is the job of the writer, not the company to keep track of deadlines. Whichever writer complained about this is a moron, since the entire job they applied for is based on the one thing they are complaining about. I live in Europe, and yet I work, eat, sleep, and do everything on EST simply because 90% of my clients do the same. I have to be available to them or I wouldn't eat....it's really not that complicated to understand. Writers who complain about time zones either don't take their job seriously, or simply don't understand it at all.

I've previously been a part of an academic writing company that used to do this. I had to apologize a multitude of times for not picking up the phone. I also had to explain to them that they cannot demand me to be awake when it is four in the morning in my timezone. They ended up almost forcing me to shut down my account even though I had been an active contributor for a year already. These types of companies should always be avoided by freelance academic writers. I do also agree that while there are reputable companies, some simply try to hide the fact that they have caps for their payments to writers. Meaning that when writers reach a specific threshold, they start to give out notices for mistakes that were supposedly done so long ago. I'm glad to be out of these companies. Respect has to be given both ways.

On the other hand, I do also believe that some writers also have to not overburden themselves with a lot of work that they cannot accommodate to. They should have track of their schedule. While it's a freelance career, it should still involve a level of self-responsibility.

One of the other complaints that the writers whom I absorb from other companies often complain about is the sudden removal of an order from their active work list. This is an action the company does often without an explanation other than "client requested the transfer", only to have the writer see the very same order back in the order list in a few hours. Now, the writers who complain about this practice are the ones who often write well and have climbed the ranks at the company. They have to be paid more per page, which makes the company uncomfortable for some reason. Rather than letting the good writers complete the order, the company would rather assign the paper to a mediocre writer, who can probably get the job done at a lower quality scale and cost per page to the company.