We can haz minimum wage nao?
Talking about Sexy New Media Startups being as poor as churchmice, here ’s an example – the iconic LOLCat site is that most poverty-attracting thing, being a sexy and new media site. And it would appear its using Slave labour (or something like that) – Gawker:
Cheezburger Network might be the internet’s largest “meme aggregator,” according to Wired, with upwards of $4 million per year gleaned from other people’s pet pictures, supplied to the company for free. But that doesn’t mean the 30 or so employees share fairly in the bounty; as we reported last week, Huh has blogged about proudly offering jobs at Seattle’s minimum wage of $8.55 or slightly higher, at $10.
Those low wages permeate the company, insiders and their associates tell us, with some former workers also describing worker misclassification unpaid overtime.
On the bright side, it sounds like people have fun with their co-workers, as even some detractors tell us, and one employee wrote in to say his experience at Cheezburger Network beat the pants off her/his (other?) minimum wage jobs — not exactly a high bar, but, given the state of the economy, a practical one.
Seemed like it was only right to put up an appropriate LOLCat picture then (hat tip Patrick Hadfield for the caption)