Pros
You get to work from the comfort of your home with flexible hours. Your heart feels a little warm when you get to help others with limited English proficiency and you know you just made their lives a little easier.
Cons
1. No training. Once you get the one-hour orientation right after you are hired, you are on your own. The rest is all self-study. 2. No career advancement opportunity. No matter how many commendations you get and how long you work for the company, you will always be an over-the-phone interpreter with no raises. 3. Extremely poor compensation compared to other companies in the industries. No vacation, no health insurance, no retirement plan, no bonus, NO BENEFIT at all. Pay-per-minute is extremely low compared to how much the company charges its customers. On the company website as of Dec of 2010, you can open an account and have an immediate access to an interpreter, just get your credit card ready and be prepared to pay $3.95 per minute. On the other hand, if you are the interpreter, consider yourself extremely lucky if you get paid close to 10% of the $3.95. There is no pay raise after you are hired. I worked for the company for close to 10 years with many commendations and not a single complaint from clients. The only thing I experienced was pay cuts. After the first 4 years at the company, my pay rate got cut by 1/3, unheard of in any other workplaces. A couple of years after that, my call volume was cut for more than a half when the company hired a bunch of cheaper interpreters only to handle customer service related phone calls. The only calls that got routed to me were the more complex medical, legal calls etc., but still no raise. Since I only got paid for time spent on the phone, once the volume dropped, my pay went down along with it. 4. LLS only cares about its bottom line and doesn't care much about its employees at all. They lay employees off not due to lack of business, they do it simply to increase profit. Once the company is able to find someone cheaper, even just by a nickel, you will be let go immediately. And they manage to do it in a very poor taste, without any common courtesy. They will simply call you the week right before Christmas and tell you that "because of 'overstaffing', you are laid off effective immediately, and please do not log in to work after you hang up the phone." No notice in advance, no severance pay to dream about. Your income just got cut abruptly to zero. You are left on your own to scramble to find a job right before Christmas.
