Slave labor jobs in the horse industry
Warning: this is a pissed off post, stop reading if you are easily upset.
Working with animals takes a skillful and knowledgeable person that has a caring attitude.
I just got ticked off by the job I just saw on Craigslist (posted below). Read that and then see my comments below……………
Stable Hand/Stall Cleaner/Groom/ Etc. (XXXXXX) I removed the city but it is in Oregon
Date: 2010-09-23, 2:05PM PDT
Reply to: job-6auut-1969948538@craigslist.org
I am looking for a stall cleaner, horse groomer, rider, and overall barn clean up person.
This cleaner should be willing to work double duty the first week, as the stalls were rented out to another party and they have been evicted from my barn, while leaving a mess of the stalls to clean.
The barn needs to be pressure washed (almost done with this myself), and stalls cleaned to start with.
Fresh bedding needs t be laid out once the stalls are cleaned. Water buckets and feeders need to be cleaned out.
Once the barn is back in clean condition, I will need someone to clean stalls every other day and put fresh bedding down.
The horses should be taken out of their stalls, groomed, legs hosed off, and blankets put back on them.
There are a total of 7 stalls, but not all have horses in them yet this year.
Job duties for example: Monday, Wednesday, Friday are:
*Take Horse out of Stall
*Clean Stall
*Put fresh Bedding Down
*Groom Horse & hose its legs off & Put Blanket back on.
*Put Horse Back in the Stall
*Feed Horse (Alfalfa & Grain-following written instructions carefully)
*Fill up water bucket
*Make sure all the supplies are picked up, and barn is tidy.
If you choose to ride, we will need to plan time to do so, but we have Paints & Friesians that need ride time, along with any new horse we purchase.
We do not have a lot of time to ride, so this could work out to be a fun thing for someone with horse experience.
We require that someone have at least basic horse knowledge, or/or farm knowledge, as this might turn into a full time after hours (if in school) job.
We have one thing we want to be known up front: We will not allow anyone to purposely injure or harm our horse or animals in any way, so should this happen; your job will be terminated.
This includes slapping, spurring or whipping any animal here. Our animals are all very people friendly, so this should never be an issue.
We also want someone who can “farm sit” while we go away for vacation. This is something we can discuss at a later date though.
Pay is $10.00 per day Payable on the 11th and 26th of the month.
Ok, me back in now and here are my comments:
$10.00 A DAY!!! Are they out of their fricken minds? The amount of work probably equals to at least 1 hour per horse per day. So if they had 4 horses that would be 4 hours and $2.50 an hour.
I have done professional stall cleaning and bedding down of the stalls at a commercial boarding stable. I took care of 17 stalls and paddocks. It took me about 2 hours for that chore. For grooming out a horse and hosing off their legs and taking off and putting back on a blanket might take only 30 minutes a horse if I rushed it. But then they want feeding done as well as cleaning up the barn!!!!! Talk about slave labor. Of course they hint at the very end that they would want a child after school to do all of this. Hell no.
