First, I feel the need to avoid pointless responses by clearing up that child labour and slavery are two different things. When we speak of child labour that in no way hints at slavery; merely the option for a child to *willingly* enter the full-time workforce (which many, many would do) before, say, their mid-teens as regulated by most governments.

Read your own post again, and see how much of it cannot be copied and pasted to compose an argument of equal strength for legitimizing child labour. That’s all that needs to be said.

Supply and demand are neither judge nor jury, they are dispassionate market forces which must be kept in check. Alas, profit needs absolutely no encouragement to be prioritized over qualities of work and time (life). The profiteers will say to hell with the world for their own love of money, whether a major corporation dumping oil instead of recycling it, or the one lucky designer per project on 99designs, who have cost any number of peers dearly and directly.

And actually you inevitably devalue something by continually underpricing, i recommend a thesaurus or dictionary as well as the AIGA Ethics and Pricing Guidelines Manual. Unless you are a crap backyard designer in which case you will need none of these.

My understanding is that once you become PRO you don’t need these intermediaries between yourself and your client. As for “de-valuing your trade”, you devalue a trade by bringing bad name to it, not by charging less money.

However consider this…

You’re working your way up to be a “PRO” – But lets say you get your big break and you’re now ready to be out there on your own finding clients and being paid a decent price for your work.

But you’re finding it hard to find work, because the clients you are trying to work for are looking at 99designs and thinking – Yeah this guy is good, and he has experience. But I could put up a competition and get a lot of different entries, and I’ll probably find one I like.

So yeah, in your situation it does sound good, but think of where it’s going to leave you in the future. You’re de-valuing your trade to get to a possition where you no longer need 99designs to get work/experience. But by the time you’re at that point nobody wants to hear from you because they prefer to spend a lot less money on 99designs.

So it’s a catch 22 situation, in the short term it seems like a fair thing as an individual. But in the long term of your career you might be turned down work because clients would rather look to 99designs for cheaper work.