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."
*Cracks Whip* (Score:5, Funny)
Re:*Cracks Whip* (Score:4, Informative)
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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:*Cracks Whip* (Score:5, Informative)
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>>>I earned less than $2 USD.
Yeah it's pretty sad when stealing pays better than legitimate work.
(I kid)
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.
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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?
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What did people do before the industrial revolution?
Lived as serfs [wikipedia.org]
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Nobody is forced to work at McDonalds or any take job that pays minimum wage or any job period. Labor laws exist to prevent the wealthy from exploiting the desperate. At least that is why they were created, you can argue their current status as a political issue to get voters though.
The other side of the coin however is that they can afford a computer and Internet access already so they probably have other income in which case you can argue it's not exploitive.
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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
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This is why "popularity" contests can be cheated (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is why "popularity" contests can be cheate (Score:5, Funny)
...so easily. "Vote for my video to win me $5000" "Hmm, pay $100 to mechanical turk slaves, and I get a huge number of votes for a lead"
I was going to mod you insightful ... but then I decided you weren't paying me enough.
Just give them fake data. (Score:2, Interesting)
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For that price, they could have everything done three times, or hell even 5, and check for agreement.
as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:2, Insightful)
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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.
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?
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Because that's what life does, it scrabbles and grabs and claws for every drop of resources it can get so it can reproduce more, I'm honestly amazed you don't get this.
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Unchecked population growth exhausts resources in short time.
This is the base of Darwin's thoughts.
Perhaps famine and pestilence will kick in to correct the insane birth rate of third world.
If not, we will see a new age of all-out wars.
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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.
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THIS. We should be spending as much as possible to industrialize the world and bring the whole thing up to first world standards. Women who don't have to worry about farming and their 10th child dying tend to have less children and put off having children longer.
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If wages for MBA-toting advertising executives and investment bankers were being driven to zero as well, then at least it would be fair.
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Have you seen how much our living standard has been raised in the last 50 years? Holy crap. House sizes have exploded, families have 1 car per person, 1 TV per person, and go out to eat more often than not.
Surprise surprise, not every house needs a den, a dining room, a living room, and a breakfast nook! Nor does eve
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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 descriptio
Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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, t
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Most of the studies I've shown have shown mixed overall results on both ends (developed and less developed) from so-called "free" trade, with the far more consistent effect of increasing the gap between the ri
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]
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Not exactly mandatory, and much cruder, but: Jarvis Cocker:
Well did you hear, there’s a natural order.
Those most deserving will end up with the most.
That the cream cannot help but always rise up to the top,
Well I say: Shit floats.
If you thought things had changed,
Friend you’d better think again,
Bluntly put in the fewest of words,
Cunts are still running the world,
Cunts are still running the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=monyiOsoKxg [youtube.com]
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Median household income has increased dramatically in the last fifty years. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer.
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This does not require a citation. It's well documentation that the gap in wealth is growing.
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.
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This is just part of a larger, decades-long trend of driving the price of labour to zero all across the economy. A working wage in western countries no longer even assures you a place in the middle classes. I shudder to think where we'll be after ten more years of such "innovation".
MOD THIS GUY UP!
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!
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Although these deals may be bad ones, noone is forced to accept them
Well, his [wikipedia.org] record company contract was quite lucritive. I don't thenk he had to be forced.
Well the problem may be they don't understand (Score:2)
Perhaps they think it is a better deal than it is. Perhaps we need a law that says for all jobs, you have to specify what the equivalent hourly wage is based off of expected pay and work house and so on.
Things like this are done with home loans for the very reason of banks trying to pass off complex loans with poor terms. As such there is a page that every loan doc has to have which specifies the amount, the interest rate, the terms, and so on. It all has to be spelled out in a specific format, so that you
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Guess Wal-mart's not so bad after all (Score:2)
They pay $8 in a nice, clean, air conditioned environment.
Around $20 if you're a manager. That certainly beats 0.6 per hour for this data mining stuff.
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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.
Well... to be fair... (Score:2)
You won't be making any actual money in Montevideo from mTurk either.
Money is paid to USA and Indian workers only. Everyone else gets to use their earnings as gift certificates at amazon.com.
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And for anyone interested here [fastcompany.com] is a story about this. Glad to see there is still a company here and their willing to stand up for their workers rather than sell them out for the bottom line.
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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.
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BTW, if you want good
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Walmart is the payday loan store equivalent for consumer goods.
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.
Any worth it? (Score:3, Interesting)
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No. Every once in a while you see ones for $1-2 per task, but then you realize each task is something along the lines of writing a 3 page research article.
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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.
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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 fo
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!
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Everyone knows it's much less work to kidnap cats systematically than searching for cats at random when the opportunity comes.
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.
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Yes but it's a highly irregular paycheck and you aren't necessarily guaranteed a steady rate of .60/hour. Adding in to the fact that in some cases for these services you have to accumulate 50-100 bucks in order for them to cut the check (plus who knows how ungodly long to get the check) the worker isn't really winning in this deal.
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I know of a few who go into some shops daily to convert their change into bills. I've never seen anyone come in with less than $40 by the early afternoon.
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"Panhandlers in Toronto reported a median monthly income of $300 from panhandling..." (source [www.cmaj.ca])
300 / 30 days per month / 8 hours per day = $1.25 per hour
So I think $1-$3 is a reasonable range. I'm sure skilled panhandlers can get more, but most of the people on the streets aren't exactly skilled in anything.
Except it's not for them either... (Score:2)
Unless they are from India.
Only USA-ians and Indians (dots, not feathers) actually get paid. Everyone else gets amazon.com gift certificates.
Meaning that they get paid in CDs/DVDs and books as amazon.com does not deliver most other items outside of USA.
Intriguing option only if you have loads of free time, no credit card and possessing a thirst for cultural artifacts like books, movies and music.
I.e. - if you are an underage second- or third-world kid.
As a result from such paying practice most Indian worker
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How do you get anything over $8.55/hr in a first world country without any skills?
The local supermarkets have been advertising shelf-stacking jobs for over $10 an hour. That doesn't take much in the way of skills.
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I've seen "no prior experience required" security guard positions offering more than $15/h.
that high I have seen min wage + bring you own gun (Score:2)
that is high I have seen min wage + bring your own gun and that was just after some broke in and beat some one up.
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...
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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 reque
YouGov (Score:2)
Google Answers was a lot more interesting when it came to it.. there were potentially some decent rewards if you did the work, but it went the way of a lot of Google products (i.e. canned). But then I suppose
"Sweatshop"? Seriously? (Score:2)
I think the mass exploitation of impoverished workers for manual labour to produce consumer goods is a bit far from a scheme that lets net-connected Westerners with a lot of free time elect to earn a few cents for clicking around some web sites. It barely even compares to a gold far, for christ's sake.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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)
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Er... yeah, seriously... you're being taken for a ride. Minimum wage is nearly double that and a legal requirement. I assume you're either a) lying, or b) taking into account your net profit after tax, which is something else entirely. Either that, or c) working in "IT" for less than you can get at McDonald's, sweeping the streets, giving out leaflets or licking envelopes. If you are genuinely working for a large and well known corporation, time to name and shame them.
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Who decides what's fair? (Score:4, Interesting)
From http://tjic.com/?p=14713 [tjic.com] :
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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.
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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 bes
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.)
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.
Make it an MMO (Score:2)
People will happily pay 14 dollars a month to grind shit out in an MMO like WoW.
This is just a grind where the player makes money instead of paying it out. Granted, it's a low amount but you're still coming out ahead.
Find a way to attach XP and make a game out of it and suddenly the appear of MT goes back up again.
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oops. appear/appeal.
Forgive me typo Nazis, for I have failed the party.
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
$.60 is more than enough to cover electricity (Score:2)
A computer takes 200W or so, that means it takes a kWh every 5 hours. A kWh costs about $0.15. So you're paying $0.02 - $0.03 in electricity per hour. Which means $0.60 is far more than enough to cover electricity.
It's a terrible wage though.
It's called a free market (Score:2)
They know what the rates are, and they're happy to work at those rates. No one is being forced to do anything they don't want to do.
Nothing else is relevant.
That's nothing. (Score:5, Funny)
If reports are correct, millions of people are working second jobs tediously tending inedible crops for zero pay.
http://www.farmville.com/ [farmville.com]
I wonder what the minimum-wage law has to say about that.
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Help me out here. I'm not seeing a downside.
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I'll pay you 25 cents per post to push my own personal agenda...