Chutzpah

I’m absolutely amazed at some of the writing jobs that get posted at the various freelance marketplaces: companies looking for highly educated and experienced people for a pittance; individuals looking at 5pm for someone to proofread and copyedit their badly written, 300-page paper by 8am tomorrow; or buyers looking for people to spam blogs and forums or churn out low quality, high quantity articles in the interests of raising their PageRank a little.

Today, I saw an ad on oDesk that had even the cynic within me appalled. A “publishing company” (*snort* no comment) is looking for a writer to churn out 4 short stories a day and a minimum of 20 short stories a week for approximately 5 weeks — for $3 an hour or what amounts to $6 per story (and you get nothing if you don’t churn out at least 20 a week). The company in question keeps all of the rights to the stories.

Let’s face it: It’s a sweatshop for writers, a piecework slave factory of creativity. The buyer is also looking for a virtual assistant to spam social networking sites in the interests of getting people to sign up on the buyer’s sites, again paying only a pittance for the effort, so it appears they’re just chintzy all around. I expect that $3 an hour might be an adequate sum of money in some parts of the world, probably the same parts of the world where manufacturing sweatshops exploit a desperate workforce. Imagine my surprise at seeing a Canadian place a $3 an hour bid on the project. I think that might be more shocking than the fact that the job was posted in the first place.

I wonder at the companies paying $1.50 or $2.00 an hour for someone “with excellent English” to edit documents. You’re not going to get someone with a professional level of understanding of English for $2 an hour. You’re just not. At best, you might find a non-native English writer (or mediocre native English writer) in an economically depressed area to take advantage of. But remember the old adage that you get what you pay for.