
ChaCha Makes Its Crazy Business Model…Profitable - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/31/chacha-makes-its-crazy-business-model-profitable/
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adamhowell
"... thanks to tens of thousands of part time guides who work from their homes
for an average wage of $2.50/hour. It’s not much, but they do it voluntarily,
so they must think it’s a reasonable deal."

This is ridiculous, how long until crowdsourced pay becomes regulated?

Taking advantage of people b/c they allow it under their own volition doesn't
make it right. This is why we have minimum wage.

People who let themselves be taken advantage of like this aren't using the
same judgement and resources to make their decisions as those who know better.

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lsb
I think you're forgetting why unions and minimum wage and child labor laws
came into being. It's because people were locked into their seats at the mill,
working 10-12 hours a day, and fired when they got sick.

Now, you have people working in the comfort of their climate-controlled home.
A homemaker used to get bored to tears taking care of kids, feeling utterly
dependent on a spouse for income. Now both parties can feel productive, and
each gets the work best suited.

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adamhowell
Minimum wage had nothing to do with bad working conditions. Bad working
conditions brought about standards in work safety and unionization -- not
minimum wage.

Now, you're right about child labor and minimum wage being connected. Minimum
wage was first enacted in Australia and New Zealand for the sole reason of
preventing businesses and the market from unfairly exploiting workers --
expressly women and children -- by paying them non-living wages.

As far as I can tell we have the same exact thing happening here. Just because
a woman is working from "the comfort of [her] climate-controlled home" doesn't
make $2.50/hour fair.

(Also, I should state that I'm only concerned here w/ US employees being paid
$2.50/hour. I think offshoring/outsourcing is another topic entirely.)

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lsb
1\. Homemaker != woman. Highly correlated, but don't assume.

2\. Contractors can either work per hour or per job. And if both people agree
on a job and a price, and each job is slightly different, and you don't know a
priori how long it's going to take, how do you reprice the jobs?

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adamhowell
Oh, definitely, I only used "woman" to tie together my previous sentence a/b
the beginnings of minimum wage.

In a perfect world Chacha should have to readjust their per search payment
until their average hourly wage was minimum wage. Several hundreds or
thousands of people doing contract work online from home shouldn't escape the
kinds of regulations other businesses have to meet.

