Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Communication between Terps
You'd think that people that make their profession understanding and transmitting messages would be better equipped to gather and relay information about their own lives and profession. But if you've terped as long as we have you know that Terp Gossip is about as accurate as two cans and a string ... but without the string ... or cans. In one piece of gossip ... or rather ... true fact, since it happened to one of us here in the Terp Sickofit offices (he he, she said office!) Seems one of the (formerly) leading Terp Agencies in the city -- who recently said they couldn't pay their terps -- are now sending out checks. We shall wait and see. Sad stuff, since they were once a great agency. The fact is we Terps are a gold mine. Why we don't open our own coop agency is beyond us. Or why we don't have a system like New Jersey. The Consumer pays less, the interpreters make more. Everybody is happy. What structure would work best? Leave a comment, and tell your friends about us. We want to get Terps Chirping!
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Does it violate fair business practices to bid for a contract that once employed us through an agency?
ReplyDeleteMeaning...is there some kind of mandatory waiting period? Sorry that wasn't clear the first time.
ReplyDeleteI don't know. Depends on the contract. One thing is certain, they couldn't tell you not to ever open a competing company. I think that's all bullshit anyway. Why should any agency have the right to tell us we can't open our own agency. The fact is terps are stupid enough to think "Oh, yeah, I think it's fair that the agency takes 40% of my money for sending out a list of jobs and collecting the money." Guess most of us -- me included -- are just too lazy to do anything about it ... so far. YOU GO GIRL! OPEN THAT AGENCY!
ReplyDeleteNJ terps work for the most part independent of agencies. We book our own work, bill for ourselves and share our work when we can't do the work. We often provide consumers with names and phone #'s of our colleagues.
ReplyDeleteWe do have on our side the division of deaf and hard of hearing, which maintains a database of interpreters along with their credentials. This is a state agency, which also does screening for state level work. I don't know if NYC can implement something similar or if the various rid org... like metro etc could get involved in maintaining such a database to promote job sharing.
For the record, as of 11/09, some of us are still waiting for our 10/31 paycheck........... Guess which agency is now at the bottom of my preference list?
ReplyDeleteThanks, Tsafey. I wish we had something like that here in NYC. We met a woman from the South at the RID convention that said she was working on a website teaching terps how to set up the own coop agencies. We'll try to track her down. Scifiterp, sorry to hear that. We had the same experience with a certain deaf owned agency ... which did finally pay. That's not a good way to keep terps.
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