Inside the Mechanical Turk Sweatshop 267
Barence writes "PC Pro has investigated the appalling rates of pay on offer from online services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, YouGov surveys and affiliate schemes. One Mechanical Turk task the writer tried involved finding the website, physical addresses and phone numbers of hotels for a travel website, for only $0.01 per hotel. The details often took more than a minute to locate, which equates to a rate of around $0.60 an hour, barely enough to cover the electricity bill. Meanwhile, filling out surveys for YouGov generates a maximum income of £3 an hour, and you could end up waiting more than a year for your cheque to arrive, because the site only pays out when you reach £50. 'The result is often that those who carry out online or casual work do so for surprisingly low rates of pay, with no job security or protection from unfair terms and practices,' an employment lawyer told PC Pro."
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:4, Informative)
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:4, Informative)
The only thing I ever did for them was looking for Steve Fosset's plane / crash site. And that was quite obviously not for the money.
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:5, Informative)
I've got news for you... (Score:5, Informative)
You think filling out YouGov forms or whatever (hadn't heard of them before) for that same amount of money isn't a good deal?
I live in Montevideo, Uruguay, and yes, I believe I will eventually make better money, but over half the programmers here make less than that.
Re:3 Pounds per hour? (Score:4, Informative)
Funny thing is: I work in IT, for a very large and known corporation, and I make just under 3 pounds/h.
Time to sue, then. http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/nmw/ [hmrc.gov.uk]
Also, you ignored the part in the story where YouGov doles out surveys very slowly. Yes, you could make £3 an hour - if they gave you enough work.
Re:3 Pounds per hour? (Score:2, Informative)
But you only get surveys when they give them to you, not when you want them. This is where the year comes in. RTFA (carefully)
txteagle alternative (Score:3, Informative)
I learned about the txteagle [txteagle.com] service this weekend at a TEDx event. txteagle crowdsources services to mobile phone users in developing nations. While these small amounts not mean much to those of us in the US, for people in developing nations earning less than $5/day it can have a huge lifestyle impact.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:2, Informative)
For the same reason there are few manufacturing and textile jobs left in the United States and that service jobs (you know, those jobs that are making up more and more of the U.S. economy) are paying less and being shipped over seas as well and you see that their gain is our loss. It is a zero sum game. When they gain opportunity, we lose opportunity. It is as simple as that. Do you suggest that we hurt ourselves to help them? Oh, and your description of American poor shows you have no experience with the American poor. I live right up the road from them, and was one of them, so I actually know what it means to be poor in America.
Re:Guess Wal-mart's not so bad after all (Score:2, Informative)
And, meanwhile, Walmart is busy demanding lower prices from its suppliers, lowering quality and causing jobs to be shipped overseas which is destroying the American employment base. Just ask Snapper mowers, who stopped selling to Walmart when the "lower price" demands resulted in Snapper having to choose between jobs for Americans and being able to afford the price demanded by Walmart.
Walmart is helping to destroy America.
You are forgetting one other major problem with Walmart: The lower quality goods they sell do not last long, and require replacing much more frequently. This means people who can only afford to shop at Walmart end up spending their money in a continuous cycle of wasteful consumerism that is sub-optimal.
A lot of what Walmart does is good: They force suppliers to be organized, on time, track the movement of goods with accuracy and precision, and find ways to reduce waste from their manufacturing processes. (That last bit can, and often is, taken way too far unfortunately.)
What I cannot stand about Walmart is that the quality of the goods is crap. Name brand products sold at Walmart are often manufactured to a lower standard of quality specifically for Walmart. Be it clothes that will fall apart faster, TVs that will break sooner, or other goods that don't function at all even fresh out of the box.
Unfortunately people are used to shoddy quality and think that having to replace a product every few years is normal. Not that any of the other US stores has helped any, Costco is one of the few places you can walk into, close your eyes, pick up something to buy, and be pretty sure you'll have acquired a good quality product.
Re:Any worth it? (Score:3, Informative)
If you have unique skills perhaps. You will somewhat often see "Translate this paragraph from English to Japanese" (or something similar) posted for $2-$5. Of course, if you actually had the knowledge to do that it would take all of 5 minutes to do it and then you'd be done. The demand just isn't that high.
Mechanical Turk, Low Wages, and the Market for Lem (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look at this (very related) post, which explains why the wages are low (spoiler: spammers)!
Mechanical Turk, Low Wages, and the Market for Lemons
http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/07/mechanical-turk-low-wages-and-market.html
Re:Just give them fake data. (Score:1, Informative)
Control questions weed out most fakers, and majority-rules payout gets the rest. If a turker puts a lot of false data into a cheap batch of bulk HITs the best it will do is lower her approval rating to the point where she doesn't qualify for most assignments.
A low approval rating and too many requester complaints will get a turker's account suspended.
3 Words "For The Win" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's not for you (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen "no prior experience required" security guard positions offering more than $15/h.
I've worked those jobs. When I was in college I thought it sounded like a great idea...
The pay rate advertised is only after your 6 month "training period" is completed -you make about half during training. In order to get the job you must complete a (short) class and get a "guard card" issued by the state -the costs of the class and state fees are deducted from your paycheck. You must also purchase a uniform -which is also deducted from your paycheck. Oh, and the $15 an hour job is for armed guard, which requires another (longer) class (deducted from your paycheck), and another state permit (fees deducted from your check), and a gun (also deducted from your check). If you don't go for the armed job, the pay rate is around $10 per hour.
With all the deductions and the lowered pay rate during "training" I owed my employer money for several months. Still, it wasn't the worst job -once you got past the idea that I was being paid to stand around (typically overnight at construction sites) with a target on my chest in a situation where it was expected I might need a gun to defend myself...
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:5, Informative)