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Subject:Re: graphics designer needed for logo help From:RÃdacteur en chef <editorialstandards -at- gmail -dot- com> To:voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com> Date:Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:58:45 -0400
On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:17 PM, voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> That's a rather broad brush. I neither work for a big company nor with
> enormous budgets. I am simply a "living wage" advocate, and believe that
> people should get paid for work that they do.
"Living wage" means different things to different people.
To a kid still in school (in which I include "kids" in their
twenties) it means something very different from what it
means to a mid-forties family breadwinner. One still
has a feel for living in cramped shared quarters,
eating a lot of KD or ramen, and taking laundry home
for Mom to do. The other has to provide food, shelter,
clothing, transportation for self and dependents.
Same assertion, substituting "person living in village in
fly-over country" and "person living in NY, NY, or San Diego.
So basically, if you need something done, and can live
with what you get from inexperienced kids, you pay what
that market will bear, and people who have more baggage
and higher expectations in life won't apply.
Nothing forces anybody to apply for a job that doesn't
pay what they think their time and skills and effort
are worth.
As techwriters, we constantly deal with the fallout of
"it's just writing English (or other language). Anybody
can do that." We just - mostly - don't go for those jobs.
If we find ourselves in a financial hard place, we do
take such jobs, because the basics are familiar (we know
what to do, without training) or because it'll look
better on a resume than flipping burgers for the same
pittance until the market improves.
There's no way to mandate a "living wage" for everyone,
regardless of circumstances, training, relevance, etc.,
without legislation. Legislation of that nature brings
the bottom up by:
- raising it out of reach of some people (*)
- pulling the top and middle lower, to "pay" for it
["Pay" means not just direct monetary extraction,
like taxes, but skills-and-experience devaluation
for those who thought they'd paid their dues. ]
(*You can either mandate that anybody, regardless of
qualification must be accepted - in which case
employers stop employing or start piling the task
into the workload of existing employees - or you set
some official lower limits of skill/qualification,
below which people cannot be hired. Remember when
companies used to employ their own janitorial staff?
Regular jobs with benefits - low pay notwithstanding.
Now its all immigrants working as temps or as
"sub-contractors" for hustlers who sell the service
to your company, and your waste basket gets emptied
every couple of nights (because there aren't enough
[paid] hours in the night, or good people can't be
allowed to work longer than X hours before automatic
entitlements kick in), and your carpet gets
vacuumed perhaps monthly and it's your own
responsibility to dust your cube and wipe the coffee
stains.
A lot of that started in jurisdictions where the
minimum wage was raised and only very small companies
(Joe's office-cleaning service) were exempted, or
nobody was exempted and they jumped past the small
company paying low wages stage, directly to one-person
company "employing" sub-contractors in place of
employees. The model persists until inflation
catches up and the legislated minimum is no longer
a problem for any employer, and people go back to
actually hiring regular crew they can depend on. Then
the legislature feels some heat and jacks the minimum
or otherwise tweaks the rules again. And repeat.)
> One more thing to keep in mind when asking for spec work in contests is that
> (if you do some research into it) you as a client are going to be
> responsible for making sure your logo doesn't infringe on anyone else's
> trademark, nor is it ripped off from another artist (or clip art or derived
> from stock photography violating their license agreement), which is what
> happens frequently on the cheap logo contest websites (according to
> information from specwatch.info site)
Very good point, and one of the best arguments for hiring skilled,
experienced people if you can possibly afford to - and deciding
that it's better to afford them now than to have no choice but afford
the lawyers later.
> Off the top of my head, GAG (Graphic Artists' Guild - to which I belong) and
> AIGA are the big professional graphic artist organizations in the US.
Just curious: what sort of entry standards do GAG and
AIGA have? Do they support "living wage" in the
graphic and design industry for anybody who wants
to hang a shingle, or only for members?
</kevin>
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