Never work for piece work unless you were there when Time and Motion evaluated the job. The trick behind piecework is to get put onto an average wage as quickly as possible.
This is how we did it at Royal Doulton - the ex pottery factory at Stoke - on Trent.
We'd start off by testing the clay and then sending half the pallet back as we deemed it unworkable (the tools for the job and all that) This would screw up the figures straight away. When the decent clay came back to us we would take our time making each and every plate. If we dropped any piece of clay or plate, we'd stop all the machines and take the long walk to get the squeegee (brushes are a bad idea in a pottery factory with silica dust everywhere) and pan. We'd spend time cleaning up and then take the squeegee and pan back (we always made sure there was only one squeegee and pan for the whole of the shop
). By the time the end of the shift came we hadn't made many pieces and Time and Motion set quite a high price for each plate (thinking we were so slow we'd never make any good money and it would average out at about union basic pay). However, when it came to working the piecework rate, we'd crank up the machines to full speed, never send any clay back and leave all the mess until the end of the shift (the squeegees for each machine would also make a miraculous return) We were making so much money on the system that they had to abandon piecework and give us all an average wage. This worked out at about £350 a week (this was 11 years ago - so a fantastic wage for the job) and a hell of a lot more on shifts. Now we could relax and do as much as we needed to do just to get to the end of the day.
So, no. Don't take the job. Especially if you have to fork out for your own equipment too - what the heck is that about?
And join a union - NTL are notorious for messing you about.