$10 is about £5 in england, thats enough for a decent sandwich.
I know people that work for £5 an hour, it's probably the bog standard hourly rate in England. If you wanna work 9-5 every day 5 days a week then £5 an hour adds up, but lets face it, no one wants to work in a dead end job.
I do freelance work, I've never worked for anyone else though so I couldn't compare, bearing in mind I attend college full time (even though it's only 18 hours a week...).
I've just "reconditioned" a HTML website for a woman, didn't change the layout or anything, just editted/added text and changed some pictures and I got £150 for it, it took me about 8 hours (she gave me a file with about 20 pages of handwriting and CD's with images on...). You can see it here
http://www.guardamarapartment.co.uk, I was wanting more like £200 for the job, so I milked it and told her I charge £20 a year to host it, and told her I want 2 years upfront, I knew she would accept that so it adds up to £190. Bearing in mind her website is about 20mb and wont get hardly any traffic at all, I just put it on my space and pointed the domain to it.