Somebody's Making Money, But It's Not The Ones Who Do the Work

It's the new serfdom. This is how it starts, with corporations exploiting desperate or deluded souls willing to let an employer steal their work for the promise of "exposure," until the very idea idea of compensating workers at all becomes questionable.

Ed Kilgore on one free soul who refused and went public: 

Since I allude now and then to the rather straightened condition of the print/online journalism world these days—particularly for freelancers—I just had to give a shout-out to Nate Thayer for posting an exchange he had with a major publication interested in getting him to write a customized version of a background piece he had done on the Dennis Rodman excursion to North Korea.

SNIP

I’m not passing this on to knock The Atlantic in particular, and in fact, this exchange was not at all unusual, as I can attest personally from my own experience as a freelancer. Aside from the particular agonies of the journalism profession, the lesson here is that in any economic context where employers have all the power, and the supply of workers is almost limitless, even the very nicest people on earth (much less those who are not so nice) feel no particular compunction about being unreasonable. This is why in a free market economy we need labor laws, unions, minimum wages, and a social safety net. The Randian concept of individual workers freely contracting with free employers and thereby establishing an entirely objective value for work is often just a cruel joke.

But it's Wonkette that gets to the heart of it: 

We’ll say it again: SOMEONE IS MAKING MONEY. SOMEONE IS MAKING MONEY.

And yet, here we are! Debating about whether or not it is appropriate to PAY PEOPLE FOR WORK. So far, the debate is restricted to paying journalists, writers, artists and musicians, but it will not stop there. For example, your Wonkette is a graduate student at a huge famous prestigious university that you have surely heard of, and to save money these days, they are hiring lecturers to WORK FOR FREE. To save $30,000 per year while the football coach is paid over a million.

The Atlantic has the website BECAUSE IT MAKES MONEY. Alexis Madrigal doesn’t see that, and yet he calls himself a fucking journalist. This is where we are! Welcome to 2013.

There are, however, employers who understand simple economics.

David Atkins on the businesses that want a higher minimum wage.