Verbit/Vitac are funny because they'll simultaneously lay people off while they are short-staffed. We have been on mandatory overtime for several weeks in a row. I'm not sure why they think this is acceptable or normal. They want to work with a skeleton crew of offline captioners and they just won't hire any new ones. I checked their job openings every day and will continue to check regularly. They even told us "perhaps we'll need to hire more captioners soon" and still, their job openings page never reflected that. 100 people and two managers who were both great people were laid off a month or so ago because they were too senior and accumulated too many raises. All this company cares about is $$$$. Yair Amsterdam thinks AI will be able to replace us which is funny because he definitely doesn't know how bad the AI generated captions are. In fact, whenever I was given an AI generated transcript to work with, it slowed me down and created more work because they needed so many corrections. The human-made transcripts were significantly better.
The manager who hired me was laid off as well as 100 or more other employees, and that occured in March (when the CEO gets his bonus). It was clear to me that the people who were laid off were older and accumulated raises over time which is why they were laid off. This company only cares about $$$ and it will be their downfall.
I encourage other captioners to quit and start working for themselves. Cleaning houses, pressure washing, landscaping, pet sitting, and other trades will all pay you better and you won't be forced to work mandatory overtime.
