Elance 1

I've been on Elance for about 10 months. So far I have earned a total of $45 on it. No joke.

Basically, Elance has turned the world into a giant sweatshop. I'm an artist who moved to India to do volunteer / charity work. I was thinking that thanks to the internet, I could continue to work for American and European clients while not having to physically be in those places.

I was wrong. Instead of opening up the world and breaking down barriers of distance, Elance has enabled some fairly dodgy people to hire desperate East Europeans / Africans / Pakistanis / Indians / Chinese / etc writers, coders, artists, programmers, designers etc for pay so low it really should be a human rights violation, and I wish I was merely joking or exaggerating about that human rights violation bit.

How bad does it get? Consider this:

A provider asked me if I could paint ten 8.5"x11" color paintings for him, in watercolor specifically. This is quite a bit of work. Even some kid fresh out of art school would charge at least $100 per piece, more if he is experienced and/or skilled. This provider wanted to pay me $50 for TEN paintings like this. To put this in perspective, the art supplies, watercolors, boards / canvas, etc. etc. ALONE would come up to about $50, conservatively.

Sadly, this was far from a unique story. Another time I was asked if I would illustrate a 200 page graphic novel. If you don't know, that's a very serious amount of work that requires someone especially skilled in that niche, which I am. He wanted to pay me $400 for it. That means that I would be writing the script (he only had a rough draft, no actual script); laying out hundreds of pages; pencil, inks and computer colors for 200 pages. Conservatively that would take me eleven months of non-stop, exclusive work, doing only this and no other work. For reference, a comic book artist's rates would START at $150 a page for pencils and inks, no colors. For pencils + inks + colors, the lowest possible rate is $300 or so. He wanted to pay me $2 per page, and that's including pencils, inks, colors and even writing the final script. The best part? I was tempted to take it because I was desperate for work. He ended up saying I was asking too much, and awarded it to another freelancer who charged $200 for it. Unthinkable but I swear it's true.

A fellow freelancer on Elance complained that she was asked to transcribe something like 50 hours of audio tape into text (I also do transcription so believe me, this is a metric ass-ton of work, no joke) and wanted to pay $100 for it. Breaking it down to how much time it would take to get this kind of work done, she had calculated that if she accepted it, she would be working for about $0.20 per hour. That's assuming the audio quality was good, which it wasn't.

The crazy thing is, even if you don't take it, someone else will - most probably some poor starving desperate freelancer in Africa or Pakistan or India. God knows how they can afford to pay for the internet connection / electricity bills / whatnot when doing that much work for that little pay. Even if they worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I can't see how they can possibly feed themselves.

Basically, what I described is what it's like for 95% of Elancers. The forums are filled with people bitching about the same thing. Those that bitch a little too honestly get banned and their posts deleted. There you go.