Customers of controversial startup Rev are demanding the transcription company's CEO raise wages for its underpaid contract workers

Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

• Customers of the controversial startup Rev launched a petition demanding the company raise wages. Rev slashed base pay for some audio files by 33% in mid November.
• Rev is a startup that employees 100% contract labor to carry out the transcription work.
• Contractors told Business Insider that they make less than what the company advertises, due to working extra time to parse together low-quality audio and understand complicated topics.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Controversial startup Rev slashed base pay for some audio files - and now its customers are taking a stand.

Rev, a gig-economy transcription service that uses contract labor, announced it had decreased pay by 33% for easy files, while increasing pay by 45% for harder jobs. Contract workers felt the company was not transparent enough in the pay decrease, and felt the service already paid them too little.

Customers of Rev started a petition on November 11 calling for Rev's CEO Jason Chicola to pay freelance workers fairly for the time they put into transcribing. The petition is looking for 600 signatures, and has gotten over 500 at the time of this article.

After a viral Twitter thread detailed the pay decrease, many customers called for Rev to increase wages or pledged to stop using the service entirely.

"Stop using @rev until they pay workers fairly," tweeted Molly Lambert and host of the Night Call podcast.

Business Insider spoke with more than a dozen former and current contractors for Rev, who all said they were paid less than what the company advertised. On its website, Rev advertises paying transcriptionists $0.24 to $0.90 per minute of audio.

But contractors say that figure does not take into account the time they spend researching difficult topics in audio files, double-checking the work, and parsing bad-quality audio. When considering the total labor put into transcribing, multiple contractors estimated they earned $5 an hour. One said she received just $0.20 per minute at times, and another said she spent 20 hours working on a two-hour long presentation for a graduate pharmacy college.

"It's so difficult to put in so much work and see so little outcome," Lilia Dronyayeva, a former Rev contract worker from Texas, told Business Insider. "You have to be so well versed in such a broad variety of subjects - you have to be able to memorize hundreds of things. It's a hard job."

Business Insider reached out to Rev for comment on this article. Rev could not get answers to some questions raised regarding pay in previous reporting.

Read Business Insider's full investigation of how Rev treats its freelance transcriptionists and captionists »