Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Inside the Mechanical Turk Sweatshop

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the she-works-hard-for-the-money dept.

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."

5 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Re:as price(labour) goes to zero... by Critical+Facilities · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Mandatory Leonard Cohen:

    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

  2. Go be nice to the Turkers by bbtom · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
  3. MTurk by RWarrior(fobw) · · Score: 4, 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.

    --
    Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
  4. Who decides what's fair? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From http://tjic.com/?p=14713 :

    Chinese factory conditions

    Say that we had first contact with some super (economically) advanced aliens.

    and pretty soon they set up factories here.

    and I was offered a job in one of these factories, doing software engineering.

    The pay is $400k/year.

    The work week is 20 hours long.

    The work environment is far better than I’m used to – great internal decoration, well tended plants, a zen-like water garden near my desk, massages every other day.

    and then left-wing alien “sentient being rights activists” started protesting, because I was being forced to work for less than a quarter of the prevailing wage in Alpha Centauri, and my work hours were twice as long as the legal norms in Alpha Centauri, and I didn’t have every mandatory benefits like “other other year off”, and “free AI musical composition mentoring”.

    and then left-wing alien “sentient being rights activists” wanted to make it illegal for my employer and I to contract with each other at mutually beneficial terms.

    then I would be rip shit that some elitist who had never visited me, or knew of my actual alternatives on the ground presumed to decide that I shouldn’t have this opportunity.

    Which brings me to my core point: Chinese factory conditions may not be the exact cup of tea for a San Francisco graphic designer or a Connecticut non-profit ecologist grant writer but they’re, by definition, better than all the other alternatives available to the Chinese workers (or the factories would find it impossible to staff up).

    Butt out, clueless activists.

  5. Re:*Cracks Whip* by jeffmeden · · 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!