Has Occupy lost it's moral authority?
I’m not the kind of blogger that rants. Really I’m not.
But nothing gets me more annoyed than people not being paid for what they are worth, or not at all.
What does this have to do with the Occupy movement I hear you ask? I’m glad you did.
Occupy by their very nature are against corporate greed. They are all about everyone getting a fair deal, about not being exploited.
But like any movement that has morphed into an organised body it has dramatically highlighted the syndrome that any organised body can fall foul of:
“Do as I say, not as I do”
Occupy just launched what could be the biggest crowd sourced logo design ever on 99designs. Here is a sample of their design brief.
At the time of this posting they just had over 1,500 designer have over 8,500 unpaid logo concept submissions.
Now many of you may be thinking, what’s wrong with that? May the best man/woman win!
But imagine if you got a group of painters to come to your house and told them that you will only pay the person that does the best job. How do you think they would respond?
They’d probably all leave. You see, they all deserve to be paid for the work that they do.
Just because an entrepreneurial web development company like 99designs has systematised the ability to do this it doesn’t make it right.
For the Occupy movement, it has to decide whether it wants to do the right thing and not exploit designers. (Note: I’m also a graphic designer and obviously think free pitching is exploitation)
How about you? Do you think designers should be paid for the work that they do? Or is free pitching a good thing?
