@Petra R wrote:
@Luce N wrote:
@Petra R wrote:
@Anthony H wrote:
There are reasons there are minimum wage laws and Upwork's policy of allowing wages as low as $3 per hour is actually pretty disgraceful.
$ 3 an hour is actually many times the minimum wage in a hell of a lot of countries. So you think it is "disgraceful" to allow people to feed their families by working online for many times more than they could ever hope to earn in their local economy, when such jobs don't affect you either way?
Petra, I'm not so sure that getting a $3 dollars an hour job once in a while allows many people to feed their families. This could just be a myth. Did you read the information about minimum wage in Hong-Kong in the beginning of this thread? I can tell you that having minimum wage in France sucks, people can only survive on minimal wage because the rest of the citizens (taxes) pays for the state to help them survive. In my opinion, paying someone minimum wage when that person deserves more and you could afford to pay more is unethical. The excuse that it is the minimum wage is a bad excuse.
When Upwork introduced the $ 3.00 minimum rate the main outrage (by far) was from freelancers in countries where doctors earn less to little more than that because it meant they lost their jobs and yes, with that they lost their ability to feed their families.
Whatever we in privileged Western countries think someone "deserves" is irrelevant unless we ourselves are happy to put our own hands in our own pockets and pay them.
The alternative to doing data entry from home for $ 3 an hour for so many of those people is not being paid $ 5 an hour, it is being abused in some sweat shop for $ 0.25 an hour and earning less than $ 3 a day, or nothing at all, with no "Social Security" to even things out.
Why not let people decide how they want to live and work, rather than taking away their choices altogether?
I find it as distasteful as the next person when people in low cost countries are used to create profit for those who are already lucky by priviledge of birth, but when all is said and done my priviledged sensitivities must not result in someone literally being unable to feed their kids becaue I self-righteously declare that I don't want them to earn a living because I want them to earn more when realistically taking away what they are happy with but I don't agree with means they end up with nothing at all...
Petra, many, many kudos to you for this post.
However, low minimum wages are not equal to low living costs. While I agree that working for $3 an hour is vastly better than not working for anything, most contributors to this thread are thinking in terms of what a dollar would buy them in the US or Europe, which I surmise, is not much.
The fact is that what a dollar could buy in the US is totally irrelevant to those in the so-called low cost countries. I can only speak for my own country where the newly-introduced minimum wage is 20 Rand per hour, which might sound like lot, but isn't really since at today's rate of exhange, 20 Rand works out to $1.67.
Now, since my local grocery store does not accept US dollars as legal tender, I must pay in my local currency, which as we have seen is not worth much compared to the dollar. So what can my 20 Rand buy? As it turns out, not much. I could for instance buy a loaf of bread for 15.60 Rand, about half a kilogram of potatoes for 18 Rand or so, or about 200 grams of ground beef, without getting any change.
I would not have enough to buy half a gallon of milk, nor would I have enough to buy a luxury item (to about 60% of the population) like a burger- without fries and a soft drink.
The point of all of this is that people in my country cannot possibly live a comfortable life on a wage of $3 per hour, and I expect that neither can millions of people in so-called low cost countries elsewhere.
However, since $3 per hour means the difference between starving and eating maybe once a day for millions of people, I cannot understand why so many people in "rich" countries are so outraged by Upwork's $3 p/h minimum rule, and especially when those rich countries have well developed welfare/social security systems/structures that function as very effective safety nets.
I really wish people would stop thinking in terms of what a dollar would buy in the US, and begin to recognize the fact that there is no such thing as a "low cost" country. Sure, some countries may have a lower overall cost of living than the US, but to be morally ouraged because $3 do not buy much in the US, when those three dollars mean the difference between going to bed hungry, and then to go to work/school still hungry the next day, is just wrong.
