There's a woman who is employed by my building to take care of the gardens. I could realistically estimate that she gets paid about $1 an hour. Minimum wage in my country for manual labour positions is little more than that. I certainly choose to pay my own domestic worker a whole lot more but I don't bother myself about the woman who works in the garden. The clothing industry, as you well know, commonly uses sweat shop workers who earn about 8 cents an hour in countries all over the globe. I choose to support only the boutiques that I know use local CMTs that pay well but, to be honest, I don't bother myself about the sweatshop workers in India. There is a man who does the cleaning at a coffee shop I frequent. I know that he is paid less than $20 a day because I have spoken to his employer. I give him excellent tips every time I go there but I don't spend my time complaining about his wages. That those jobs are on offer at those rates is none of my concern unless I choose to take on that work, which I don't because I don't want to earn those wages or do that kind of work. There is absolutely no point in complaining about wages that have no impact on my life. This is precisely how it is on Odesk. $1 rates? So what? I don't want the work or those rates so it doesn't affect me.
There are 80 percent more workers in the world earning below minimum wages than there are workers earning above them. Again, I actively support where I can but I don't spend my time complaining about those below the poverty belt. Odesk is only a tiny section of the global marketplace. There will be low paying clients, mid level clients and high paying clients. The low paying clients are none of my business. I see their ads and move along, as I do in the brick and mortar world. There is no international minimum wage, so there will probably never be a minimum wage on this global platform.
As a person who grew up in the apartheid regime, I have watched friends who grew up in poverty, could not afford an education and received substandard schooling. I have watched them seek out and get university scholarships, learn to excel at their crafts and become great successes in their careers. I have seen this happen several times over. Before they received their scholarships, they were skilled enough only to earn $1 wages. They chose not to complain but rather to do something different to improve their earning potential. There are still people living in the townships who are unwilling to get an education and who earn $1 wages. Does that affect my friend from Lesotho who became an international crime lawyer? No. Nor does it affect my friend from the Eastern Cape shanty towns, who went on to become a brand manager for SA's biggest brewery.
If you're going to complain about Odesk rates, you need, in principle, to complain about sweatshop rates and gardening rates and the rates paid to farm labourers in India. Their wages have as much impact on your earning potential as those $1 Odesk rates do.
