Equipeople Ltd - Portarlington, Ireland

I had a very bad experience of Equipeople when, in 2012, at the age of seventeen I was a student at a host family living on a dairy farm that they had screened and put me in contact with. The contract specified a 40 hour week with at least sundays off.

What I arrived to was a room in the otherwise uninhabited, and as such unheated, part of their home (this was in early january mind you) I found out very quickly that I was expected to work 17-18 hour days with my only breaks being breakfast and lunch, and that I was in fact not allowed any days off whatsoever. After a week of attempted negotiations with my hosts i called Equipeople requesting a transfer to another family, they obliged only after attempting to negotiate with my hosts themselves, they too failed in their pursuit and my request was granted, when the master of the household found out about my transfer he was very angry and threatened not to pay me, he did not, his wife slipped me an envelope containing 30 euros of 100 promised as I was boarding the bus away.

My next host family consisted of a father and son, once again, I was not informed that the father suffered both parkinson's disease and developing dementia, or that his son was rapidly deteriorating into alcoholism and stress related medical conditions. The father worked only occasionally for reasons perfectly understandable, and his son, who became my de facto host, often suffered depression and sudden mood swings during he was liable to emotional abuse.

I was told, by another student who had also been there, that the son going off to the pub for an evening and not returning until days later was not unusual. I too experienced this occurrence and was often left as effectively in charge of a farm of almost two hundred cows in the middle of calving season, for as much as a week at a time.

When a high ranking Equipeople official showed up to routinely check up on the situation, I told her of the current conditions and was encouraged to bear with it the last month till I could go back home, when I asked of my previous host family I was told that they would not be removed from the company's list of host families as they had been hosts for a very long time.

I would not ever recommend Equipeople, as my experience is that they care very little whether or not terms of contract are upheld even remotely, and do not keep proper track of students or host families besides what is written on CV's mailed to them by such.