My first flying position was flying C206's doing static line dropping. I had an Oz commercial licence with the bare minimum hours and then i moved to the UK where I scored a job with a large Skydiving Operator. I had only 370 hours total when I got the job.
I hear many stories of shoddy operators but with my outfit, they let me run the C206 the way I like. I could put as much or as little fuel in it, refuse to go up if the weather was crap etc etc. In that respect, there was never any commercial pressure to break any rules. After only around 4-5 months of doing it (it was only weekend work) and 40 hours later, I was offered a job on F27's flying freight. You would never get that sort of opportunity in Oz but most of the Captains in the airline had started doing parachute ops so I guess they could all relate to it.
I have to say you do learn alot about "flying" from doing meat bombing and there are occasions where you scare yourself senseless.
Pay was £20 a day whether or not it was one lift or 10 lifts. It was really enough for the fuel (the DZ was 97 miles from my place) and a bite to eat. (roughly 50 bucks a day)