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."
Just give them fake data. (Score:2, Interesting)
Any worth it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:3, Interesting)
Deplorable, noneconomic muckraking... (Score:2, Interesting)
Doubtless any article insinuating a similarity (I'm being friendly - the article asserts an equality) between voluntary acts and "sweatshops" goes -way- beyond hyperbole into the realm of the absurd, and in so doing not only makes a fool out of itself and in so doing tarnishes its publisher's reputation, but, worse, makes light of that to which the term "sweatshop" properly refers.
Are there possibilities for "abuse" within the systems TFA looks at? Sure... The "veteran journalist," e.g., who wrote a requested review, was summarily rejected, and found recourse only in the appeals process to claim his pittance speaks to that aptly (perhaps - more on said veteran later). Needless to say, most rejected would neither suffer the review process nor even consider availing themselves of it in the first place, giving the "employers" free reign to screw the "worker" whenever they'd like. (Possible case-in-point: assume aforementioned review-seeker rejected journalist's article, changed a few words, and just to CYA, resubmitted the "improved" version under a ghost account, which, voila, was accepted. Any system which creates the possibility for such self-dealing, particularly on behalf of only one party, is prima facie dubious).
But sweatshop? Please.
The PC industry has plenty of REAL sweatshops and REAL situations of compulsory labor under unsafe conditions. Let's not let this drivel dilute that fact in our minds.
Had the article _at least_ referred to "transactional spillovers" aka positive externalities, some actual understanding of the parties' motives might have been broached.
The folks utilizing these services might just as well be playing WoW but for pennies instead of status or gold, and at lesser cost to them, to boot. Perhaps it's their distraction. Perhaps the users submit work to projects they find interesting; perhaps they believe there's status in doing so; perhaps it's simply fun. Again, I don't pretend to know.
I don't know the "workers'" motivations, nor do I care to.
All I know is that they're free to leave at any time they want.
And that's a critical distinction seemingly lost on said "reputable journalist..." Perhaps the contractor wasn't wrong in rejecting his first submission after all.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:5, Interesting)
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows [youtube.com]
Go be nice to the Turkers (Score:4, Interesting)
I have used Mechanical Turk once: during my undergraduate studies, I wanted people to test out a survey for a psychology of religion class. I put it up on MTurk for $0.75 each. I got really great results, but the best bit was some of the responses in the "any other comments" field I included at the end. People saying things like "this was really interesting and has made me really think".
I am really not sure about it. It really is a stark contrast to some of the Web 2.0 love-in mentality: for all the high minded discussion of community and openness, you dig down and there is this small army of people being paid sub-sweatshop wages to keep it all going.
The Turkers are doing a really good job in shit circumstances with really shitty pay. Go be nice to them if you can. Give them something interesting to do and pay them a bit more than the standard shit rates they get.
MTurk (Score:5, Interesting)
If you pick your jobs right, you could make as much as $3/hr on Mechanical Turk. I know because at one point it was the only income I had.
3 Pounds per hour? (Score:3, Interesting)
50/3 is roughly 17 hours of work. If you're not lazy, you can achieve that in 2 days. Funny thing is: I work in IT, for a very large and known corporation, and I make just under 3 pounds/h.
Unless something is very broken in TFA, then I might be able to earn slightly more from YouGov than my oh-so-mighty corporation.
Who decides what's fair? (Score:4, Interesting)
From http://tjic.com/?p=14713 [tjic.com] :
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:5, Interesting)
Flexjobs.com you say. Interesting. Now, to set up an Amazon turk job offer to log into Flexjobs and perform some work (paying half of what flexjobs pays) and I can sit back and let the dough roll in! Arbitrage, where would we be without you!
Re:Any worth it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Years ago, but not since. There used to be a lot of transcription work on MTurk. Once I had a good rating as someone who could transcribe a technical speech, there were jobs out there that were worth it to me... but only if I was already interested in the subject matter (transcribing helps me really learn the material).
Things like transcription and translation made MTurk worth it, but soon it devolved into $0.01 per task work, without sufficient volume to make it worth writing a script. I haven't checked for tasks in a long time.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Living wages in virtual worlds (Score:2, Interesting)
*Sigh* There were line spaces when I composed this...
DISCLAIMER: I hope /. readers will apply the knowledge that technology improves over time to my rationale.
It’s tempting to view these types of job mills as unethical and exploitative, but until collaboration tools improve, this type of “click”-work is the only kind which can be trusted to essentially unskilled and untrustworthy anonymous laborers. The rates are just a product of having access to a global workforce and the trivial nature of the work. Also, the iterative trial and error lessons learned from these firms will certainly train the industry on how to manage a virtual workforce better. For all the sweatshop analogies, workers and job posters still have the choice of which firm they go to – there just aren’t many right now.
Graphic and web design jobs are actually fairly practical - most of the freelance jobs I’ve done have been people whom I’ve never spoken to outside of e-mail. Although the rates are often very low for creative work, customers understand that they get what they pay for and both parties can still chose not to participate. For a logo design job, you may want to pay 20 people a one-time throw-away fee of $75 just for creative diversity, rather than paying one professional $1,500 and rolling the dice on whether you’ll like what they come up with. You can still take the top 3 from those to the professional and say “can you do this right?
Before too long, many of us will be working from within virtual worlds for many virtual sources at a time. Most of those sources will be other independent contractors just like us from within chains of divided labor that span the globe. “Working online” will mean putting on a head mounted display and casually, visually conversing with your design and development team in a quick scrum session in a virtual space to mock up some ideas with a 3D ‘whiteboard,’ divide up the work and knock out a contract. Or you can join a guild of professionals with high standards and a good reputation and score decent contracts, just like design houses today minus expensive office space and the associated geographic limitation. The key is that these organizations will be comprised of independent, willful laborers from all over the world whose efficacy stands on their work quality and ethic alone, self-organized through online venues like forums and virtual words with next-to-zero operating expenses.
Even today, I could organize a group of graphic designers, copy writers, another web developer or two, a couple of account managers, a project coordinator, a headhunter, a contract hunter and an accountant and we could all just meet periodically to review bids and commit to a monthly project or two. It would be supplemental income for all of us. You could add a really decent collaboration system that lets us voice/video chat with a whiteboard and host a web-site complete with a forum and customer login interface with just a little FOSS savvy. You would only need a $7/mo hosting account to run mediawiki, phpbb3, wordpress and a few external services like openerp and gmail. There are paid services you could upgrade to when the revenue kicks in.
END DISCLAIMER. To say that the technology doesn’t exist to implement this stuff is frankly a cop-out. A /. audience should understand.
I can’t wait for the Metaverse to be born (although I think it will be augmented virtual, not immersive virtual); being a gargoyle sounds like my kind of gig.
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:3, Interesting)
A used SUV or a 50" TV costs essentially nothing compared to what the poor in the US really need. Education. Health care. Housing. Quality food. Security.
Good, if you think welfare is a better definition than ownership of "stuff": The poor in the US have access to free schooling (mostly decent, at least compared to India), free libraries with internet access (and thus the Wikipedia and OCW) and needs-based scholarships to universities. They have access to guaranteed free healthcare in any hospital emergency room. Food stamps. Dozens of different federal, state and municipal programs that aim to provide shelter. If the willingness to help yourself is there, then outside help is available.
While even such a life might represent shockingly bad living conditions to you, one has to be extremely irresponsible, extremely unlucky and/or mentally handicapped to become really poor in the US in an absolute sense like "the poor elsewhere" -- i.e. malnourished, sick and without shelter and sanitation. Now compare that to the situation of 3 out of 5 people who did not win the geographic lottery and were born in impoverished parts of Asia, Africa or South America -- even the most gifted among them will have fewer chances than the laziest imbecile in the US or Europe. This is not fair, neither is economically efficient.
Re:Guess Wal-mart's not so bad after all (Score:1, Interesting)
but then don't give a fuck about the thousands of workers that would be laid off
Typical pro-walmart kook. "If walmart doesn't hire them for their sweatshops at 10 cents a day, whatever will become of them?" Bullshit, you don't give a fuck about the workers, you just want your cheap slave-produced (yes, they're slaves, more on this later) goods. What will become of them? I'll tell you exactly what will become of them. They'll probably end up starving to death trying to meek out an even more pitiful existence. And I'm ok with that, because that blood's on your hands, not mine. You wanna know why? It's because of you pushing your invisible skydaddy belief of "OMG SUICIDE IS WRONG AND YOU'LL BURN IN HELL FOR IT".
I know it may sound harsh, but sometimes suicide is acceptable. By telling people that they should cling to life at all costs, and then providing them with a 10 cent a day sweatshop as the only "valid" alternative to trying to meek out a pathetic life off the land, you are essentially condemning them to slavery.
BTW, if you don't believe in an invisible skydaddy, then you have no reason to oppose suicide under such conditions. However, since you do not appear to acknowledge suicide as an option, clearly you still cling to such fairytales.