Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Mechanical Turk Sweatshop
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."
Back to the data mines, slave!
...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 have an air conditioner.
They'll only keep enough of us humans alive as they require for tasks they can not complete, and they will only give us enough to survive. I'm just trying to prepare and get my resume ready.
It's not like anyone is checking it. For that amount of money, what more can they expect?
My job of generating posts on /. pays zero dollars per post. The Turks shouldn't complain!
dom
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".
"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!
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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Out of curiosity, has anyone ever come across a MTurk assignment that does pay enough money to be worth the time?
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
I did some work on Mechanical Turk when it first came out. It was kind of fun at first, so I didn't mind the low rates. But when the rates started dropping further and the work wasn't as interesting, I stopped and haven't been back.
... they have a low demand and their appears to be a sufficient supply of people willing to work for less than a buck an hour. Anyone with basic math skills can calculate the hourly rate and decide if there is anything else they want to do that is worth more to them than that.
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.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
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!
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.
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.
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 you could always use a Freelance site for more involved works and better pay..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
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.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
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.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
I've got news for you... I have a degree in Information Systems, and I work for 3 pounds sterling an hour (of course my employer gets a discount rate since I work for them 200 hours a month guaranteed, and it's after-taxes money - Government gets 40% of what I make before taxes since I'm obviously "rich").
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.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
...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.
One thing I don't understand. TFA says "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."
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.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
From http://tjic.com/?p=14713 :
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I learned about the txteagle 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.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
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.
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 workers on mTurk today are "employed" by sweatshops, churning out mostly worthless HITs.
Many of them are probably just copy/paste or random-click scripts.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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 can easily compare loans and ensure you are actually getting the terms you think.
This might be needed for jobs so that they can't couch it in bullshit. They have to evaluate how much it translates to in terms of hourly pay, and people can then decide if it is worth it to do. Perhaps when they look and realize a McDonalds job pays over 10x that they are being ripped off.
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.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
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.
No money is needed for this...someone else had it first. Remember?
Cory Doctorow's excellent book on exactly this topic (I just read it) as well as gold farming and various related practices. Wrapped in a great novel. http://craphound.com/ftw/ Available for free download or real money for paper. A definite "Must Read" for all /.ers
Have you ever been in a Turkish Prison?
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.
Wow, am I the only person who noticed this 5 years ago? TURK is barely meant to supplement your regular income, let alone be a source of stable of income. It's like collecting cans, you have to know that on a consumer level, it will never net you a sizable outcome.
If reports are correct, millions of people are working second jobs tediously tending inedible crops for zero pay.
http://www.farmville.com/
I wonder what the minimum-wage law has to say about that.
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.
I've worked on Mturk since it began in November of 2005 and I've earned $25,000 in all since then. I think the rate of pay is horrible but it's been fun trying to find ways to complete tasks more easily using tools such as GreaseMonkey and custom programming. Out and out robots aren't allowed but tools that reformat the screen for easier reading and clicking and things like that are permitted.
The pay was better when Mturk started but it's been a race to the bottom since then. Still, working from home when I want with almost no responsibility is so appealing that I still do it for the low pay. I can make maybe $5 to $10 per day and spend it on any stupid thing I want without cutting into my regular budget.
Unless something changed, nothing forces you or anybody to access the terms of the mechanical turk. Use it or don't.
Writing a review of the Turk is fine, but pulling in "employment lawyers" is completely pointless.
"Trade unions disagree, saying that anyone undertaking work deserves proper remuneration."
Of course, unions don't like competition; they will try to take advantage of government power to get some competitive advantages for its members. But if you listened to unions, we would also get ride of productivity tools and make free contributions to open source projects illegal.
It's true; turkers can't have nice things. I remember a requester last year offering really easy HITs (5-8 minutes to do it right) for $2 per. Despite the ease/speed/high pay, on the site where the work was being performed there was always a flood of low-quality entries as soon as the HITs were posted. About a week later the PPH dropped to $0.25 :/