One of my main gripes is how they change your contract with them whilst it's ongoing. I started with them in 2006 and signed a contract but that was the only contract I've ever seen or signed and the amount of times I’ve been on ships where they change things like the rate factor, the goals, the commission structure, and it's never in black and white. [Rate factor refers to a percentage of sales on which the auctioneer earns commission, depending on the ship he is on, typically less than 100% - this rate factor has been dropped in the new Park West auctioneer pay scheme, but there are other changes such as commissions being calculated on only 50% of gross sales, etc., etc.]. You could be on a ship and send them an email about a situation and the only reply is "Please call me next time you can. Please call me." It's always verbal. So if something happens...say you were told your goals would be $40,000 and you get on the ship and in your data it said your goals are $60,000, you send them an email, "You said it was this when it's this" - "Oh give me a call, give me a call," you call them and it's, "Yea, we'll change that for you, we'll change that for you." This would be with individual fleet managers.

There's always promises about goals and targets and all this kind of stuff but it was never actually what it was.

I'm still waiting for my last paycheck but the paycheck I had before, I noticed my commission was 6.5% and we were told "Your commission will never, ever go below 8%." Obviously it's verbal so when it comes to black and white you haven't got a leg to stand on.

The reason I fell out with them personally is I started asking questions. They don't like people asking questions.

At the end of February 2009 they sent this big email out, basically saying all these people had changed position - this person is now going to be doing this, this person is doing that - and I questioned what was going on, what was happening. If you're employed by a company you do get concerned about all the stuff that's being said on the Internet and all the court cases and so on - it's your livelihood at the end of the day, you've got bills to pay, you've got responsibilities and stuff - and they didn't like it.

They didn't like people mentioning stuff that was going on.

The biggest problem I've experienced with the staffing is that everyone is promised a carrot. They're promised so much and when push comes to shove and they don't get it, what do you do?

Auctioneers aren't making enough money a week to pay for their outgoings. You need to earn (after deductions) enough to pay for your associate, steward and auction help. That's how auctioneers start getting negative statements.

What upset me the most was the money side of things. It's how you were promised so much and never given anything.

When I quit it was, "Oh no, this guy is not going to work for us any more, we don't want to pay him this money, so what can we do?" Last week I got an email saying, "Your statement will be released when the inventory is accounted for."

It's sad that the company's come down to where it has but it's bad management and greed that's done it in my opinion. If you're a multimillion dollar company that's successful, why change it? Why try and get more and more and more?

In the old days the auctioneer would get 4 or 5 helpers, pay them $10 an hour, do three auctions a week, his outgoings would probably be $7-800 to run the auctions and the shows and get everything running how it should be. Obviously with cutbacks and not making the money, auctioneers were employing two or three staff to do the auctions and then making the associates work for two helpers to set everything up so their outgoings would go down to about $2-300. They'd still withdraw all the money they could in advances and live off that money.

That's how I lived on the cruise ships for the last year. I'd live from cruise to cruise and advance to advance because they weren't paying you or they'd just screw you over over something.

Once you go in the red with them, once you get a negative statement, you might as well just leave. You're better off to leave the company. Once you go into a minus you're never going to get it back into a positive.

The standard of auctioneer has dropped. When I started, the auctioneers could be managers at a decent level in a big company. They could work at Wall Street or in banks, do a decent level job. The people that are coming through now, they'd be lucky if they could get a job in Walmart.

I've seen artists down there doing their signatures on the works and seen others doing the embellishment on them.

Artists I've met at conferences have been quite open about the fact that they don't do their own embellishment. They'll have other artists do them.

On the certificates of authenticity, from working in the art world now, I see that whenever a work is authenticated the certificate will show the number of the work on it. For example a work that is numbered 17/50 on the art will have a certificate that will say the same as marked on the art work. If not then it surely must be questioned as a) you don't know how many there are in the edition, b) what are you authenticating? [PW often do not include a series number on their certificates of authenticity for a limited edition item.]

I assumed what they told me about the art work was true and sold it on that basis.

Salvador Dali

I was on an a ship when we had the email about pulling the Dalis off. I spoke to Miami about this and they said, "We've got to get them back off to make sure they're all authenticated again." My gripe was, weren't they authenticated in the first place? If not, why are we selling these things?

They made this big hoo-hah about having Bernard Ewell coming in and authenticating these things, that's why we can sell the things - surely that's not having much faith in your product if you're then doing a repull.

We got an email saying, "Please call Miami." So I called Miami next time I could and they said, "Don't sell the Dalis any more, we're going to slowly but surely start sending them all back to Miami." I asked, "What's this for?" They said, "We've had problems on the web and customer problems with these so what we're going to do is stop selling them till it gets resolved and then we're going to start selling them again."

I asked. "How long is this going to take?" Because looking at it from an auctioneer's business point of view, Dali's were a good way of making money. It's an easy sell because people know who he is, and it's pretty attractive to look at. If you take them off, what are you going to sell to make your targets? The reply was, "We've got to take them off, we don't know how long this is going to take." It was a bit of a shock.

What I'm seeing is that the majority of people who cruise don't know where you can buy a Dali or a Tarkay from and they certainly don't know how much these things cost. The average person coming on a ship, if you tell them how much these things are worth, they're going to believe it.

They used to take a percentage out of the art and show it as shipping so the art was less and the shipping was more. Here's an example. An $18,000 cruise, $16,000 was art, $1,200 on shipping and handling, and $165 was sales tax. The $1,200 for shipping has been taken off the art total.

You wouldn't do an offload every cruise. You do an offload once a month. That would be for three or four cruises. It's going to be different in the States from Europe. Shipping from Europe is going to be much more expensive. They take out the same percentages. If you're on a ship out of Miami you basically go to Miami, dump it off in the port, they'll send one of their wagons to pick it up. That's not going to cost $1,200.

The cruise lines got greedy a long long time ago. Auctioneers at one point were making more money than the captain. Nobody on the ship was earning as much money as them. Their commission went huge and through the roof. No other concessionaire on the ship was paying this much commission.

The biggest problem they've got is the money on the ships. The whole Holland America thing and the whole Disney thing is the cruise ships aren't making money any more. In the old days the small ships could make $100,000 a week. In the bigger ships, the sky is the limit. Now the big ships aren't making $100,000 a week. The Disney ships they never made any money on.

Over the years they would never ask auctioneers on the ships what they thought was the right way to do things. They'd never ask for advice or what's going wrong or how could they make it better. They always thought they were one step ahead of the game at head office. These people may have worked on ships but not for a few years. The cruise industry has changed hugely in three years.

The cost of cruising now is under $100. The clientele has changed. There's more ships out there. It's changed dramatically. They didn't really adapt and change with the times.

A very, very good friend of mine has been with Park West for five or six years now and she hasn't had a positive pay check in 18 months. You're working for free.

I did the math the other day. My last contract I sold $350-360,000 worth of art; I've not been paid $1 the whole time I was on there.

They get someone new in, there's two months before you get a paycheck anyway, by the time you get the paycheck after month three and you've been screwed you just walk away.

As long as they can sustain a turnover of 250 staff a year, which in the current climate here in America isn't hard to do because people need jobs, they'll always get the catchment of people going through for the jobs.

Their marketing for the job side of it is pretty enticing. When I started it was "Do you want to earn a serious amount of money?" Then it was, "Do you want to earn a serious amount of money and see the world?" That sounds pretty cool.

Now they don't mention the money, it's just the travel. "You can go to South America, to Europe etc.," that's how they market now.

I've found a lot of auctioneers that have stayed on have not done so for the money but for the lifestyle. You can live and go to some amazing places. The people I know now who are still working for Park West are there just for the travel. They really don't care about the company, they don't care about making money, they know they can't make money, they're there now because they want to see a few more places and then call it a day.

If you want to go and work on a cruise ship you might as well work in a shop. You're guaranteed $2K per month. You don't work when you're in port because the shops are shut and you're going to see the world. You're told straight up what's going to happen. There are no false promises and so on.

The New York Times article hit when I was on a cruise and that one article probably cost me $40,000. People read the New York Times.

And Detroit News getting involved. In days gone by Park West and the Detroit News were like Adam and Eve, everywhere they went together. It was like bread and butter, they were this one incestuous family and now they're running out of friends.

There are many things I didn't understand in the old days such as, If you're the world's largest art dealer and you're as big and cool and super amazing as you you say you are, why aren't you in some of the bigger art magazines? Why are you stuck to the cruise ships?

You don't say, "We sell art, but we don't want to get involved in the art world."

You have to have competition or there's no market.

If you set your own prices and so on, you have no one to compete against so you set the market.

The fact that you have worked at Park West actually can be a strike against you when you go to get a job in the established art industry. You mention the Park West name and people know what is going on.