Slavery by any other name

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Apologies to Shakespeare for mangling a lovely speech as presented so beautifully in the eternal love story of Romeo and Juliet.  It seemed appropriate somehow. So what thoughts about slavery then?

What led me to this topic was a website called GetAFreelancer. I somehow got there a few days ago and thought, what a good idea. Maybe I can earn a bit by offering copy writing services. I duly signed up and waited with bated breath for the first projects to drop into my mail inbox.

It took but a few minutes for the deluge to start. I was taken aback by the quantity of mail. Rubbing hands gleefully, I started checking the offerings. I was absolutely speechless. The offers go something like this. 500 word article for $1.5. Or 145 short product descriptions for a budget between $30 to $250. Bid on this!

Now even if people somehow manage to find a trick to write articles very quickly, it still seems an amazing low rate to get paid. It takes me a good two hours to write a blog post with all the links I usually add to the content to make it more interesting.

How would I be able to compile regular European Soccer Reviews for a similar budget. Or how about a Project for WriteSmart for ONLY $4. Their caps. The only way anybody could make a living with this would be to scrape content off other websites. And changing elements to somehow be able to get away with it. Fraud with other words.

Whatever it is, there seems to be a demand as I get about four to six mails of lists of project offers per day. And for GetAFreelancer to continue to send out these huge quantities of offers people must be willing and able to perform these copy writing feats.

Along similar lines of slavery, I also discovered oDesk at about the same time. This is a ‘lovely’ little application that home workers instal on their PCs and the boss, wherever he might be can check on every move you make on your PC.  Hook up a webcam and the intrusion into your privacy is complete.

No chatting on Facebook during working hours anymore. The application takes screenshots of what’s happening on your computer at regular intervals. Sophisticated features analyse your time spent on work, your offline time and levels of productivity and compiles reports to send through. Big brother watches every move you make, even the times you don’t move anything.

It seems to be the most intrusive application I have ever seen. The boss has the luxury, so to speak, of not having to pay office space for his staff, or provide coffee and tea never mind paid leave and any other benefits such as pension or medical aid contributions.

The boss can actually check your work far more effectively than he could ever before in an office environment. He has rid himself of the idea of a permanent staff member and is now able to exploit the worker totally without any benefits in return.

What seems to be happening in the business world is that the benefits that people had and which induced them to enslave themselves to mindless and monotonous jobs are no longer offered. What made people work like robots was a trade off to get safe monthly salary payments with a possible pension to retire with.

Now they work at home, for a pittance and still have the boss lurking, watching, controlling and punishing if things don’t go his way.  If the freelancer does not deliver on some arbitrary targets then they just don’t get any more work. So you could be sick for a day, or have drama with small kids and that would be the end of your freelance work.

In effect, what has happened, is that companies using this service have taken away the previously regular work environment where unions and legislation gave the worker some protection. In its place we find that the worship of the god of profit has enslaved the worker even more. What has been removed are the few benefits that workers had fought so hard for. In its place a slavery of even greater magnitude.