Open letter to workingmums.co.uk: please stop promoting MLMs to mums
Dear workingmums.co.uk,
This open letter is a public appeal for you to cease promoting MLM companies to mothers.
We’ve noticed that, among genuine job opportunities on your website, there are adverts for MLMs. And not just one or two. These are your current “Latest Self Employed Jobs”, at the time of writing this letter:
As you can see they are all MLMs. MLMs also feature heavily in your retail, sales, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and medical, recruitment, marketing, advertising and PR, and more jobs categories.
Some MLM ads are open about their company names, others, like the ad below from “One of the largest Health and Wellness Company’s in the world” [sic], attempt to hide their brand:
Others attempt to disguise themselves even further by simply describing themselves as a ‘work from home opportunity’.
The truth is, none of these are genuine opportunities for mothers – or anyone. In-depth, independent research into MLMs published by the Federal Trade Commission in the US (you can read it here, and we highly recommend you do) has revealed that an average of 99.6% of participants in MLMs lose money.
That means that only 0.4% of the women (and men) who respond to the ads on your site have any chance of making any money.
To date, no MLM has proved that they differ from the many MLMs investigated in the report we link to above.
So we ask you to reconsider your policy of allowing MLMs and mystery ‘work from home opportunities’ to advertise on your website.
It’s easy to be duped by MLM companies – they can appear very respectable (we ourselves have promoted them in the past before we knew how damaging they really are). But we hope that now you are aware, you too will cease promoting them.
If you continue to do so, it can only mean you are happy to take money knowing that you are participating in the recruitment of mothers who will most probably lose money and friendships. (You can read more about the damage MLMs do in this article.)
We hope that you will join the movement of ethical businesses and organisations campaigning to rid the world of this predatory business model. If you would like to discuss this further in private, we’d be delighted to speak to you.
Yours sincerely, Talented Ladies Club
Photo by Mitchell Orr
