Business ProfileforWorking Solutions

When I signed the Independent Contract with Working Solutions to work for Turbo Tax as an independent contractor, I understood that there would be a $25 onetime fee (for vague reasons that older contractors never had to pay before our new team) and that there was a $100 stipend with Turbo Tax if you completed the nine-day training from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and worked 200 hours. However, nowhere in this contract did it say anything about working two hours with the public and doing FREE public work. The trainer justified this as OK to do because it was during "training" hours, but that's bypassing training. That's REAL work, not webinars (with screeching HR reps) and learning how to use the system (from blurry videos with wrong answers not fixed). I refused to do two hours of unpaid work for Turbo Tax even if the other 70 would. That's 140 hours that Working Solutions keeps in their pocket. At $0.25 per minute, that is $15 per person and $30 for two hours. And with 70 people doing this "for training," that means they can cheat us out of $2,100 that Turbo Tax paid.I was offered the chance to just sit in a breakroom for two hours and NOT help other trainees, but that made zero sense. If the ultimatum to get the $100 was to ban me from helping them (requiring that I stay on mute and neither talk nor chat AT ALL), then they were basically forcing me to be a slacker. And now I'm blocked out of the *** email address but oddly not blocked from Vyne. Still, when I asked about an alternate program since I couldn't agree to their ultimatum with Turbo Tax, the HR department and the placement consultant have gone completely silent for a week. I'm left to believe that they're not only blocking me from trying other programs to earn the time I lost for nine days WITHOUT KNOWING unpaid, public work was a requirement. If I had seen the two hours of UNPAID, public work in the contract, I would have never spent eight days training for Turbo Tax via Working Solutions.