I’m pretty sure it’s got to be a new version of the video, without the now “bitter defrocked apostate” Anderson – or his bizarre reference to jumping off a bridge (possibly penned by Miscavige). I can’t readily find anything specific about it, but there are reports that Scientology is now hiring outside actors for some of its productions to avoid the problem of having to pull them when members involved “blow.”

“If you leave this room after seeing this film, and walk out and never mention Scientology again, you are perfectly free to do so. It would be stupid, but you can do it. You can also dive off a bridge or blow your brains out.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientation:_A_Scientology_Information_Film

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuyFPkYedZk

Article about Anderson: https://www.tampabay.com/news/scientology/larry-anderson-star-of-scientologys-orientation-film-wants-his-money-back/1067720

Ummmmmmmm………doesn’t Corn COB have ” a parent or guardian who is a rabid antagonist of Scientology.” …????????? Just askin’…….
btw…….WHERE’S SHELLY ?

Wynski, good point that hours worked needs to be take into consideration as well. That points to another uncomfortable truth: Scientology’s wages and hours for the majority of staff, would have been illegal for any normal business.

For reference, minimum wage in the 1970s went from $58 for a 40 hour week at the beginning of the decade, to $116 at the end, largely due to high inflation:

“The minimum wage went to $1.00 an hour effective February 1967 for newly covered nonfarm workers, $1.15 in February 1968, $1.30 in February 1969, $1.45 in February 1970, and $1.60 in February 1971
….
The minimum wage increased to $2.00 an hour in 1974, $2.10 in 1975, and $2.30 in 1976 for all except farm workers
….
The minimum went to $2.65 an hour in January 1978, $2.90 in January 1979, $3.10 in January 1980, and $3.35 in January 1981. The amendments eased the provisions for establishments permitted to employ students at the lower wage rate and allowed special waivers for children 10 to 11 years old to work in agriculture. The overtime exemption for employees in hotels, motels, and restaurants was eliminated.”

– https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/coverage.htm

Thanks for confirmation DW. $50 – $100 wk was NOT a living wage even then. Considering you would have worked 70+ hours/week you average less than a $1/hr.

I made more in Jr. HS during summer flipping burgers.

Ohhhh my…. I didn’t know the name Clive Rabey until now. So, I found this video.
https://www.davidmiscavige.org/videos/clive-rabey-on-david-miscavige.html

He must have really scrubbed himself well before making the video because I suspect he normally is discolored from being so far up DM’s arse.

Peacemaker – I started as the reception and letter reg for the Dallas center when I was 16. If that’s high up the food chain then you and I have different food pyramids.

😉

Ending up making good money wasn’t happenstance or good luck – it was the result of almost a decade of never having time off, scrimping, saving and working my ass off to get the money and skill set to start my own Mission. If spending 8 years of 60-90 hours a week busting ass isn’t hard work then I’m not sure what is.

I did hear weird things about some missions but none stuck with me. No doubt there were plenty of folks doing their own thing, just like now and just like the 1950’s. Never heard about sex cults though – did I miss anything?

I recall the whole Riverside credit union deal but don’t have a lot of detail. Bent was (and is) a friend of mine dating back to the UK and no doubt mistakes were made, but that guy is not even close to mean. Opportunistic? Perhaps. I thought the originator of the whole credit union thing was Carl Barney though. Maybe I’m wrong. It was discussed by all of us during meet ups or at Flag and I found a local friendly credit union in the central Valley and used them as a finance tool. Similar to how a car dealership has favored banks and credit unions to send deals to. Nothing illegal happened and while his standards were a bit shaky, his rates were favorable so mostly it was a win-win.

The whole tire thing is fascinating. I think that’s maybe a difference between me and many people I knew. I’d have just left staff and done that. Making a grand a week even in 2019 is decent enough to save a few bucks. No way I’d have stayed anywhere for $20, anytime.

What mission did you work at?

Huh. Well I was staff at a variety of Missions and Orgs from 66 until mid 1973 when i opened my own Mission. The worst pay was Saint Hill where I was CC supervisor and got 11 Pounds a week. Prior to that in Dallas and St. Louis I remember something like $50 to as much as $100 depending on bonuses. Alan Walters paid okay. When I came back from the UK I took over Boston for him and averaged between $250-400 a week.

ASHO, from the end of 68 to mid 69 was maybe $80 a week as non-tech staff.

When I audited at Omaha or Vegas I had a contract with a set amount per hour logged so if it was a 25 hour week I was probably getting $10 an hour.

It’s all decent pay but that doesn’t mean everyone got decent pay – I have to say though while I may empathize with people getting $20 and working 80 hours I have no real sympathy. For one I would have never, ever done that. Secondly, if some threat was made I would have told the threatener to go fuck themselves. My take is the bulk of the “we got paid bad” complaining is self inflicted. Maybe not if the person was a child Scn like many on the Remini show, but for a grown adult to submit themselves to that level of abuse is a red flag that there are other factors in play – if a person is willing to be abused they can always find someone willing to do the abusing.

Part of what I perceive as an animus toward Mission Holders — and that Miscavige leveraged well to gain emotional support among his cadre of bullies — was that successful Mission holders were actually successful and the SO seemed to have conducted a 3rd Party effort to brand us as dilettantes and even SP’s. I drove nice cars, had nice motorcycles, owned a nice house and paid full price for Flag services. I had clean suits and felt no guilt whatsoever for the 80-100 hours a week and years of savings I risked in order to start a Mission that generated millions of upline dollars, hundreds of Org and Sea Org staff and made Scientology look excellent locally.

I did have 2 1/2 year contracts when I spent money to train a staffer but every one I contracted got the training.

Looking back and also reading this thread I see that a lot of people felt taken advantage of and I get that pain ensued. But either the staff were individuals with free will in a free nation or they were dogs tied to an Org waiting to be fed their evening gruel. Most Org people at the time were not starving that I saw and while many had BO and didn’t own homes they generally appeared to be industrious, cheerful and driven. So I guess not everything comes down to money.

6-figure personal incomes were not unusual in Missions that sent tons of people up the Bridge and had a thriving Div 6 where new people flooded in and the cherries were separated from the pits.

Also – don’t forget, if a Mission like Fresno generated say $300,000 revenue for ASHO AOLA and Flag then $45,000 came back in the form of FSM commissions. We literally had to compete with the real parasites and vampires, free agent FSM’s haunting the classrooms and HGC’s in Los Angeles looking for people to select for services that they literally had zero influence and zero effort in creating. It was bloody war toward the end of the 80’s and I still loathe those thieves.

No. She is very visible. Just totally brainwashed. May also be waiting for return of LRH.

DW, interesting anecdotes. It indeed did seem to depend on where you were, when, and who you were – it sounds like you were lucky to be high up on the food chain.

To add another twist, several of the small missions, like one I had some dealings with, were sort of little cults of their own, with all sorts of dysfunctions and abuses. Some of it was probably illegal sexual misconduct then, and certainly would be now.

By the mid to late 1970s, it seems that even Corydon’s supposedly booming Riverside mission was relying on more Sea Org-like tactics for dealing with staff, and abuses and fraud (including the criminal activity prosecuted by authorities after a raid in 1979). Besides the typical moonlightighting to make ends meet, and there are accounts of staff even having pay docked or being coerced into taking out loans as part of the credit union scam (which several other missions were involved in) when mission GI was down:

http://www.forum.exscn.net/threads/riverside-mission.115/

The dirty details from insiders start on page 2, such as:

“I was at Riverside from around 1977 – 1979 or so.
….
I remember going to treasury to get paid for the week, and walking away with, like, $22 or something. So on weekends we would go out and pull tires from under mobile homes out in the Mojave desert and bring them back to the factory in Hemet to make enough money to make ends meet, so we could afford to work those 12-14 hour days the remainder of the week. You could make $500 in a day if you found a good mobile home park. We’d ignore the “No Soliciting” signs, and when we struck pay dirt, would load up my pickup truck with tires, stringing them over the hood and cab when the bed was full. You’d come back filthy from rooting around in the crawl space under those mobile homes, in all the dirt, bushes, dryer lint, and black widows. I remember Jeff Kovak, or his assistant sitting on the stairs at the Mission on Friday nights, lending cash out to people so they could go pull tires at 10% interest for a weekend.
….
Then the police raid came, on account of the fraudulent loan apps. I remember driving boxes of stuff out of the building. Everyone was in a panic. It was in the papers. People from LA Guardian’s Office came in and took over to clean up the mess. I think the Mission had about 800k in reserves at that time. The fraudulent loans were paid off with that money, as I recall. I didn’t know Bent or Mary well. What little I did know of Bent, he seemed like a nice guy. He talks about some of this in his book. But the true nature of what was going on with the registrars and the loan mess, I’m not so sure he really explains that fully, as I remember it.” http://www.forum.exscn.net/threads/riverside-mission.115/page-2#post-3081