The online business world is different to many other businesses in the fact that it is global… far more global than most of the businesses in your local area.

This also means that the subject of business ethics pops up more often than not, especially if you’re using freelancers – remember, there’s usually (especially for smaller jobs) no such things as a contract, no such thing as minimum wage and few of the other things that would be present in a regular job.

What do you think about ethics in online business, and what situations have you come across?

I’ll give you an example. A couple of weeks ago, I wanted a small job done – nothing too difficult, but fairly menial labour, labour that would take around half a day to do. I did not want to waste that time, as I could use it for more productive things so I looked for someone else to do it. Now I asked around, had a thread posted up at various internet forums, looking for a wage per hour.

Of course, the cheaper the better – that’s what we all look for. However, I was not expecting just how cheap bids I was going to be getting – I ended up with two guys bidding $0.5 and $0.3 per hour respectively.

That means for the full job (which in the end took ten hours) they would have made $5 and $3!

Now… I couldn’t turn them down for being cheaper than everyone else, so I decided to work with the $0.3/hour guy.

He did the work to the best of his ability, which was pretty decent… my conscience didn’t allow me to only pay him $3, so I threw on fifty dollars on top of that. Far more than the job was probably worth in today’s market (even so, that’s only $5/hour) but I felt a lot better than I would have done. His reaction was pretty cracking too :)

Would you have hired the $0.3/hour guy, and what would you have ended up paying him?

I do have a reason for this though… I remember working for such rates. I first tried the whole “make money online” thing last summer and I started out writing articles, at similar rates ($0.004 at the time) only because I didn’t know any better – the people that work at these kinds of rates are probably similar. If you can afford a computer, you should be charging a lot more than $0.3/hour. ;)

Short post today, but just wanted to see people’s opinions on a potentially controversial topic.

I haven’t done this on TUK yet (pretty surprising, hey) but Blog Premiere got redesigned, so introducing you guys to the sexiest looking blogging forum around at the moment… :razz:

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