Shockingly low wages for skilled labor

This has become a really interesting conversation, and I don't know quite where to reply -- it may be that this is the kind of discussion that works best if we're all together in a room and talking all on top of each other. So I'm going to jump in where my name came up.

It's pretty obvious even in the forums that there are widely varying levels of comfort with English and skill in writing, and that certainly  should be reflected in the pay scale. Higher quality is worth a higher price. Particularly in terms of SEO and SEM, both human and search engine visitors respond better to good, well-written content. My clients get measurable results.

Also, as Abel says, people like me who have clients outside of oDesk have other factors to consider. I don't want to discount compared with others in my area and distort the market. My rate at oDesk is my "agency" rate, and it's cheaper than my private rate, and I can explain what the differences are to private clients so they can choose to hire me through oDesk if they want a lower rate with a different level of service -- but I obviously can't work for rates that are absurdly low compared to my private rate. Nor would there be any advantage for me in doing so.

And here's what seems to me to be a significant point that hasn't really been discussed: more expensive writers clearly have a choice. That is, someone working for $2 an article, and certainly a native speaker working for that kind of rate, must not have other options. They may be very valuable in some context, but in the marketplace, they're not. I'm expensive by oDesk standards, and I have lots of work. A buyer has to see that I must be providing a good ROI, or that wouldn't be the case.

For fixed-price assignments, I charge my usual hourly rate and make a good estimate for how long the work will take me. Sometimes I'm cheaper than low-priced providers on fixed-price assignments, not because I discount, but because I know how long it takes me to do a task well, and it's often a shorter time than a less expensive provider with less experience. Nobody's going bankrupt by hiring someone like me.

I hope this doesn't sound tremendously arrogant. I'm not claiming that people who charge more are by definition more valuable. Plenty of people in my field charge way more than I do, and I don't necessarily think they do a better job than I do. They often have higher overhead, higher costs of living (I'm in the rural part of the U.S. and I work out of my home) or have been in the business longer than I have.

I'm working right now with four different excellent graphic artists, and they all have different rates. One owns a company, with the overhead involved in that, one is a fulltime IT guy who does graphics for creative fun, one lives in the Philippines, and the other is an art teacher picking up a little extra money. Their circumstances, not their skills, are different.

It's just the market: if you're doing a good job, and you have plenty of work, you can choose not to work for low rates. As a buyer, I would take that into account.