You never sign anything with us.
There are two companies in this, and one of them is yours. Even Steven holds your agreement, holds your yes, and is where your money comes from. Tacit Source is the other one. We hold the software, we keep the list, we do the counting, and we deal with the machine companies. Between you and us there is no piece of paper at all, and that is on purpose.
Even Steven is the one you sit down with. We are the one the machine companies sit down with.
Two companies, two jobs, and a fence between them. Here is what each one does, in the order you would meet them.
Your agreement, your yes, and your money
They are the ones who come and talk to you before anything is recorded. They tell you what is recorded and what is not, in plain words, and they ask for each yes on its own rather than in a bundle. They hold your agreement. They hold the record of your days. They pay you. The day you want it to stop you say so to them, and it stops.
The software, the list, and the count
We look after the software that keeps your entry a thing of its own. We keep the list your name would sit on. We do the counting, hour by hour. And we are the ones a machine company, a kit outfit or a company that owns machines deals with when it wants to license a way of working. We never ask you for a signature. We never send you a bill. There is nothing here for you to sign and nothing here to join.
It is worth being blunt about what that means when you have a question. Anything to do with your own paper — what was recorded, what you said yes to, what you are owed, whose name is on it, what happens the day you stop — sits on Even Steven's side of the fence. Bring it to us and the honest answer is the same every time: that one is theirs, and we will point you back across. Nothing on this page is us trying to get you into a conversation with this company.
Even Steven lets us market what it holds, under a licence written between the two firms. That licence is between them and us. You are not a party to it, you are not asked to sign it, and nothing in it can change what you agreed with Even Steven. Your terms are on your own paper, with the company that gave it to you.
So that neither company can quietly mark its own homework.
Read "two companies" on a website and you are entitled to think it is shuffling. Sit with it for a minute and it turns into the plainest protection in the whole arrangement.
Start with what the split is actually about, which is the hours. The hours are the money. Every hour a way of working runs on a machine is an hour a company is charged for and an hour somebody is owed for. Get that count wrong and you are short, and unless you can check it against something you would never know you were short.
Now put both jobs inside one company. The same outfit that owes you the money is the outfit doing the adding up. Nobody has to be crooked for that to go wrong. It takes a tight month, a figure rounded the easy way, and a set of books that nobody outside the building ever opens. If the number came back low, you would have nothing to hold it against but the word of the company the low number happens to suit.
Split in two, it does not work like that. We count the hours and we bill the company running the machine. Even Steven owes you your share of what comes in, and Even Steven reads our count to work out what that is. Two companies, two sets of books, and they have to agree with each other. A figure that suits us does not suit them, and they are the ones your paper is with.
The company that counts the hours and the company that owes you the money are not the same company.
Underneath both of us there is a third mark, and it is the one that really settles it. An hour does not start because a computer somewhere decided it had. It starts because a person on the crew running that machine found a name on a list, chose it, put their own name against the choice, and cleared the machine to work. That happens out where the job is. Both companies count from that one row, so an hour cannot be billed at one figure and paid at another — there is no second set of books to move it into.
None of that asks you to trust either company's word about itself. It is set up so the figure has to survive being read by somebody it does not suit.
The short list, so you know where the fence runs.
A fence is worth nothing if you cannot see it from where you are standing. Here is ours, from your side.
Never with you
- Ask you to sign anything. There is no paper between you and this company, and there is not meant to be.
- Send you a bill, take a cut off you, or ask you for money for any reason at all.
- Stand between you and your employer. What happens where you work is not ours to be in.
Never with your record
- Hand your days in the seat to a machine company. The recordings stay with Even Steven, and what goes out to a machine carries none of them.
- Sell your entry to be read, studied or looked over by anybody.
- Give anybody a report on how you work. Not an employer, not an insurer, not anyone. That is a refusal, and it goes into what we sign.
If you take one thing off this page, take this. Your paper is with Even Steven and it stays with Even Steven. We are the other company, doing the part you would never see — the software, the list and the count — and doing it where somebody whose interest runs the other way is reading the figure. Two pages on this site carry the rest of it in the same plain words: what we do with it once Even Steven has it, and who runs it at the machine.
Your paper is with Even Steven. Start there.
Your agreement, your yes, your name, your money and the day you stop are all theirs to answer, and they answer in plain words. Ask them what a record of yours would be, and whose it would be.