Notes from the New High-Tech Underclass
There are people working for less than half of the federal minimum wage now-that's if they're having a good day. These people are American citizens and they are not serving time for felony convictions. One of them is me.One of them could be you."Working online from home," sounds good at first, and while scams abound, there are jobs that actually will pay you. However minimum wage laws are circumvented with 'independent contractor agreements,' and your actual earnings can be paid be piece rate.
What this means in real-world terms is that each little piece of information I process pays me .03 (yes that's right folks, three cents). I'm good; the data may take anywhere from four seconds to two minutes to process but I can average it all out to about four queries per minute, er...that's twelve cents a minute or 7.20 per hour.Well that's not so bad is it? I mean, it's more than minimum wage in some states, right? It's more than federal minimum wage, which is 6.55 per hour, and set to increase again to 7.25 in July of 2009.
Of course, that figure applies when traffic is coming in at maximum volume. Traffic varies throughout the day; Even when things were good, when I averaged the fast times out with the slow times, my career average was about 2.85 an hour.
The problem is that due to system glitches, random variations in traffic, and a poorly explained change in corporate policy that seemed to alienate a large percentage of the customers, traffic dropped in the last three weeks, and with it the income of all the piece-rate workers, including my own. Now I think I'm averaging something like .56 per hour, with maybe 1.80 coming in at peak times.
Yes, I would rather do this than ask the government for anything at this point, thereby giving them yet another excuse to pry into my personal life, and I've been looking for a "real job." However the rate of unemployment in my area is so high that the number of people on welfare has increased by 10% since the pre-election market crash; it looks like I may be doing this for a while.
- "Working online from home," sounds good at first...
- Even when things were good... my career average was about 2.85 an hour.
- ...whatever your political ideology may be, the fact remains that systems will fail...
Comments
Nice advice, the scams are way more in number than real jobs.
Lou Dobbs pointed out the other night that it would have only cost them a little over $200 Billion to simply pay off everybody's mortgage.
I'm working on becoming so self-sufficient that I will be off the government's radar for the most part. The only thing I will have to pay taxes on is the money I make online, which will be next to nothing.
Dan, you make some great points. I'm sure a place like AC would love to pay more, but the sheer volume of contributors prohibits them in many ways. If you are looking for some more places to write online content I can help you. Message me if you want the links. Most of them you may have already heard of.
Cahotek you are so right, and decentralizing E-commerce could work. Actually, outside of rural America and the third world, the net is one of the few remaining places where you can set up your roadside stand or pushcart without having to lawfully pay off at least three local bureaucrats. The defense of net neutrality and limiting the control of global corporatism on E-commerce would be vital to any such project.
We need to resist any further attempts at 'enclosures' in cyberspace vigorously.
Interesting article.
i very much agree..i work a few places and do on average 6 articles a day.. sometimes more... to those various sites. I am single mom doing this trying to survive.
Good article here- I'm continuously amazed at the number of folks willing to work for the online slave market rates that they are. Even when you consider what you earn from AC, on a per hour basis, that's at best $5-6/hour (and that's before taxes)- unless you can crank out more than one article per hour. Yep, it's time for the nerds of the world to unite!
Andi Caldwell
(Guest)
(Guest)
11/26/2008
Very thoughtful piece. I agree.
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