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."
This is why "popularity" contests can be cheated (Score:5, Insightful)
as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:2, Insightful)
I shudder to think where we'll be after ten more years of such "innovation".
The rich will get richer, and the poor will get poorer.
Not 'unfair' (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
As these are essentially individual contracts that are not amended at any point, it is easy to see the trade you are making (your time for their money). Although these deals may be bad ones, noone is forced to accept them and so accepting and completing these bad deals is entirely up to the individual. If someone values their time at this low amount, let them!
Just say no ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Simple supply and demand
I'm sure there are many who have either not calculated it, or don't know how. But after working for a few nights and only getting $5, I would think that the only people left that are doing it derive something out of it. Even if it's just an extra $5.
Bug-finding bounties, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did they have to drag $500 bug-finding bounties into this? Quoth TFA:
it's a small fraction of what the company would have to pay a full-time professional.
It's a REWARD, not an offer of employment. There is a "missing cat" poster on my block, but (applying the logic of TFA's author) I would have to be CRAZY to bother searching for it, because the reward is only $25 -- a small fraction of what it would cost for a full time cat searcher. I could never make a living searching for lost cats!
It's not for you (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, if you're in a first world country you can, even without any skills, get $5-$20 an hour, and if there are no jobs open then you can earn $1-$3 an hour panhandling. People in countries like China and India, however, earn wages much lower than our own - the average seems to be $0.50 - $1 US per hour in the manufacturing sector, with some jobs going even lower than $0.50. With this in mind, it seems like $0.60 an hour really isn't so bad.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:5, Insightful)
I shudder to think where we'll be after ten more years of such "innovation".
The rich will get richer, and the poor will get poorer.
Only the American "poor" (where poor is defined as not being able to afford the second SUV or 50" TV). The actual poor people -- you know, the ones in Mexico, China and India who formerly would have had to farm for subsistence or work in mines as they are cheaper than machines -- they will get richer. Why do you strive to deprive them of the opportunity?
Re:Bug-finding bounties, really? (Score:2, Insightful)
Everyone knows it's much less work to kidnap cats systematically than searching for cats at random when the opportunity comes.
So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The article implies that the low payscale is somehow a problem. But no one is forcing you to do the work - it's your choice. If Amazon had to pay more, the consequence is obvious: the work would just disappear.
This is the fallacy of minimum wage laws: low value work is either not offered, is off-shored, or disappears into the black market.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe its evidence that there are some really stupid people out there who volunteer to work in the "sweatshop" of their own house and have deluded themselves into thinking that they'll ever earn any real amount of money with the Mechanical Turk program. OR maybe this money is being earned by folks living in third world countries for whom making $0.60 an hour at home or in a cool computer room is a previously undreamed of luxury.
Seriously... if you can't find better-paying work than this as a JANITOR, then you truly are utterly unemployable and ought to consider yourself grateful to be able to find this kind of work.
Re:Guess Wal-mart's not so bad after all (Score:1, Insightful)
They pay $8 in a nice, clean, air conditioned environment.
So US-centric. Please point me to the nearest Wal-Mart here in Montevideo (Uruguay, South America) that pays those wages, and I'll sign up instantly.
In case you haven't read the FAQ, /. is a US centric website.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:3, Insightful)
NO, NO, NO. That's a debunked myth [ted.com].
The solution to overpopulation is the development of the third world, increasing availability to food and medicine. Easier said than done, of course, but that's the now-obvious goal. Promotion of suffering is neither strategically- and certainly not morally the right approach.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:1, Insightful)
And the stupid neo-Marxist commentators will become stupider
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:5, Insightful)
My point is that over that last couple hundred years we have built up a series of labour laws covering things like minimum wage, working hours, unions, child labour etc. It's not perfect and you can make arguments for and against certain aspects of the system. However, these online employers like Turk or Rent a Coder have the potential to wipe the slate clean. Employers can simply set up shop in whatever country has the most favourable (read none) labour laws
So what will happen in the long term? Will this be the revolution that brings prosperity for all or will it be like the industrial revolution where people were forced to send all of their children to work in the coal mines just to survive?
Re:Well the problem may be they don't understand (Score:3, Insightful)
Right to Work (Score:1, Insightful)
You nailed it, in my state we have Right to Work laws. . .
You have the Right to Work, as long as you show up and do a good job. If you fail, you get canned, no questions no answers. If you don't like the job your doing? You have the right to leave. Unhappy with the treatment you receive? You have the right to not subject yourself to it. Basically the employer has to tell you up front what the deal is, you as an adult free thinking human have the choice to do it or not. As long as the pay is above minimum wage (piece work for super low pay does not count here that goes with the do it or not thing) and the employer isn't telling you after you accept the job that you can't wear a bra to work or you have to stay late and 'walk his dog' then anything goes.
And guess what? It works. Because of the laws I have actually gotten some side jobs that otherwise would have been illegal, and having not worked in 3 years side jobs are keeping the roof up.
Re:Guess Wal-mart's not so bad after all (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Terry Pratchett summarised this very nicely as the 'Sam Vimes boot theory of economics'. In his story, you could buy a pair of decent boots that lasted ten or more years for $50, or you could buy a cheap pair that lasted a year, maybe a bit more if you replaced the soles with cardboard, for $10. A rich person would simply buy the expensive ones, but someone earning $38/month couldn't afford to. Over ten years, the poor person would spend twice as much on boots than the rich person and still have wet feet. There are lots of examples of this. Supermarket multi-buy discounts on non-perishable goods are a good one. Whenever the shampoo that I use is on a buy-one-get-one-free deal, I buy six months worth of it. Someone who uses the same shampoo but can't afford this up-front cost ends up spending twice as much as me. Because I have more money, I get to spend less. I've just bought a house and the monthly expenses related to it (including mortgage interest) are about 2/3 of what I was paying in rent before, for somewhere much less nice. If I hadn't saved the money required for the deposit, I'd still be paying more per month and enjoying a lower standard of living. Renting somewhere as nice as my current house would cost 3-4 times as much as I'm paying as the owner, and when I've paid off the rest of the mortgage this difference will be more pronounced.
In a capitalist society, the people who control the capital get to accumulate wealth.
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:3, Insightful)
Welcome to the new industrial revolution where you're not entitled to minimum wage because you're working online as an "independent contractor" for a foreign company.
But....no one has to take the job. I can see how an argument can be made that these grossly underpaid jobs break the laws protecting workers. The number of jobs being offered is minuscule compared to the number of real world jobs.
Besides, low and unpaid positions are always being offered on craigslist in several categories, notably, media production and web design. How many people actually answer these ads? Probably very few and those that do probably never actually show up for them.
There's always trying to get something for nothing, but the market decides what the prevailing wage will be, not some cheap piker on mechanical turk or craigslist.
Re:Who decides what's fair? (Score:3, Insightful)
Translation: because a sweatshop is better than living in a ditch, it's okay to run sweatshops.
There's your moral relativist anti-humanist rant in a nutshell.
Clue to right-wing suckers: money is not life.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:1, Insightful)
When the industrial revolution occurred the country was still relatively poor. Sending nearly the entire family to work at that time was often a necessity. The prosperity that Capitalism and the emerging industrial technologies brought, created enough wealth that families no longer had to resort to having their children work to help support the family. It is a myth that improper laws such as minimum wage and child labor laws were the cause behind the societal change
Re:Who decides what's fair? (Score:3, Insightful)
Translation: because a sweatshop is better than living in a ditch, it's okay to run sweatshops.
In short, yes. If you've got a problem with that, offer something better. Agitating for the so-called sweatshops to be closed without replacing them with better labor conditions can only result in driving the sweatshop's former employees back to "living in a ditch", or whatever they were actually doing before they decided to go work for the sweatshop. Do you think they would be working there if there was already better work available? You are not helping them at all by arguing for the prohibition of the best offer of employment they have.
Re:Who decides what's fair? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Do you think they would be working there if there was already better work available?"
Possibly not. The way in which supposed free-market magic breaks down generally involves either (a) force, or (b) unequal information. Therefore the answer will be "no" in cases where:
(1) The employer has the employees in lock-down or forced labor situations.
(2) The employer has the employees in ongoing debt due to company-store/lodging requirements (effectively same as above).
(3) The employer can make threats or political pressure on the employee's family members.
(3) The employer prevents the employees from finding out about better work, possibly by hiring illiterates, or prohibiting free speech (meetings, discussions, phone calls, informational pamphlets, etc.)
In these cases, you need some kind of outside legal regulation body to put an end to human-rights abuses of this sort. (Or else violent overthrow from within, generally a much less desirable outcome with much lower odds of success.)