A woman on TikTok says she made $20 for a 14-hour work day at her first job at a dude ranch when she was 16 years old.
The woman, known as Carley (user @shinebaby01) on TikTok, shared a video detailing what the job was like. Her video received about 378,000 views as of Monday.
In the video, Carley says the dude ranch is a local business that everyone in her hometown speaks highly of. When she was 16 years old, she wanted to get a summer job and she saw an ad in the newspaper for a job at the ranch.
Since it was “supposedly a really nice place,” Carley applied to be a ranch hand. The job would require her to milk cows, clean out chicken coops, buck hay, cut firewood, wrangle horses, help the ranch chefs cook dinner for the guests, wash dishes, clean and basically do everything, Carley says.
Management told Carley the ranch pays minimum wage and instructed her to come in the following Monday for her first day. They said they’d speak about details at the end of the day.
@shinebaby01 Ooooh trying to find a job when you’re young is so fun. Not. #ranchhand #ranch #job #work #16yearold ♬ original sound – Carley
“I was like ‘Great. You’re gonna love me,’” Carley says in the video. “It was basically everything I wanted to do, like I loved being outside, I loved doing ranch hand things. I just needed something to make money on all summer. I figured I would really enjoy it.”
That Monday, Carley showed up to the dude ranch at 6:30am and immediately got to work, she says. She recognized her first red flag when she realized the horses used for horseback rides were “very inexperienced.” The five-year-olds taking horseback rides were getting bucked off on the trails and Carley would have to chase after the horses to catch them, she says.
Throughout the day, the TikToker “did all the things” at her new job and was polite and hardworking, she says. She even took out her facial piercings because management told her first thing that “people don’t come here to see that.”
Carley says she “hopped through all their hoops” and was loving the job. She was there until 8:30pm, meaning she worked a 14-hour day.
“I loved the long hours. I was 16, I had the energy, I wanted the money, I was there,” Carley says in the video.
At the end of the day, Carley approached her manager and reminded her that they planned to work out details at the end of the day. The manager reached into her personal wallet, pulled out a $20 bill and handed it to Carley, the TikToker says.
Viewers couldn’t believe the end of the story.
“Minimum wage for ALL that?? Nooo,” one viewer commented on the video.
In reply the comment, Carley wrote, “Yeah except minimum wage was a lie lol she actually just wanted to pay me $20 a day.”
Some viewers questioned the legality of having a 16-year-old girl work a 14-hour day in the first place.
“Um well legally you can’t work more that 8 hrs in a day if you are under 18,” one user said.
A second user wrote, “How’s it legal to have a minor work 14 hrs straight to begin with.”
In a highly requested second TikTok video, Carley says the manager told her “this is all I have” after handing her the $20 bill. Confused, Carley told her that she didn’t need to be paid right in that moment and asked what the usual pay period was. The manager told her “that’s not really how this works here.”
@shinebaby01 Part 2. And that’s on finding local work in a small town…suck #ranchhand #ranch #work #farm #16yearold #dontworkforfree ♬ original sound – Carley
So Carley asked her manager how it did work, since she didn’t want to be paid $20 for a 14-hour day of hard labor. Plus, the TikToker notes she had to pay $13 in gas just to get to the job that morning.
“She goes on to tell me how basically they ‘hire’ workers that come from other countries and just want to be there for the experience. And so they live in the lodge, and they do all the work for free, and they just like to have the ranch hand experience,” Carley says in the video. “And that’s what they wanted me to do.”
Carley says she explained to her manager that she lived locally and had to drive 45 minutes to the ranch, and she had no intentions of working for free. The manager told Carley they really liked her and would love to see her again tomorrow because they were going to be shoveling gravel all day.
Trying to politely avoid confrontation, Carley told her manager that she couldn’t work for the ranch if they were just going to hand her $20 out of their wallet every day.
“And then she basically told me if I wasn’t willing to work for free or 20 bucks a day that I needed to go somewhere else because I’m ungrateful. And that I should just be grateful for the experience that I’m getting,” Carley says in the video. “Like no honey, I already live on a farm. I’m getting that experience at home. Thanks.”
The Daily Dot reached out to user @shinebaby01 via TikTok comment.
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