Friday’s post about WME cutting assistant wages got me thinking. Nine dollars and fifty cents an hour is really low – like, really, really low. Even Lilit and I were paid more at our former crappy assistant jobs.
So I did a little digging to find some better-paying jobs. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to find them.
- Take orders at In-n-Out for $12 an hour, or you can flip burgers for $13 an hour.
- Mop floors for $12 an hour as a janitor at a hospital
- Bag groceries at Whole Foods for $10 an hour.
- Work for MTV as a production assistant for $14 an hour.
- Be a prison cook for $23 an hour, or about $46K a year.
So there you have it. Oh, and by the way, the average hourly wage for an administrative assistant in their first years on the job is
$11.67.
(Posted by Ashley)
Here’s a delicious assistant blind item, via Crazy Days and Nights:
This A list comic movie actor is looking for a new assistant. The pay is six figures which is extremely high for an assistant. The reason it is so high? Well first of all there is travel 70% of the time and you have to deal with one of the most obnoxious, irritating, pains in the asses in the business. Our actor has tried to offer less money in the past but they all quit after a few days. As it is he can barely hang on to them for long.
Six figures is not unheard of for a celebrity assistant, but it’s much more likely to be the amount of money somebody earns if they’ve worked for a given celebrity for a couple of years and have proven indispensable, not for newbies. I have heard some stories about assistants making six figures who were called assistants but were actually drug dealers or full-time ‘escorts.’ That said, this A-list comic actor (any guesses?) has got to be one hell of a pain in the ass. I wonder how many of the assistants make it long enough to collect half a dozen of those inflated paychecks?
April 28th is Equal Pay Day. I’m not sure exactly whether the day is supposed to be about “celebrating” the fact that men and women are allegedly being paid equally or about bemoaning the fact that men still make more than women for doing the same jobs. I’m going with the latter, obviously. Marie Claire has some sobering stats that we should keep in mind today:
- For every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 78 cents. That number has climbed 1 cent since 2006.
- Fresh-out-of-college women make $15,498 less per year than the boys; over a 35-year career, they’ll make $210,000 less.
- A 25-year-old female PR specialist makes the same as her male colleagues; 20 years later, she’ll make about $35,000 less.
- She-EOs make $303,000 less than their male counterparts.
- Male primary-care physicians make 22 percent more than lady docs.
- Male IT workers make 11.9 percent more than geekettes.
- According to the American Association of University Women, at the current rate, we’ll reach pay equity in 2040.
Woo, what a fun holiday! Time for some Jager bombs in the break room!
