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."

Comments

Re:Right to Work

[DrgnDancer]

It takes a special kind of... well, something, to think that "Right to Work" is good for anyone other than employers. As employer you gain the ability to fire anyone, at anytime, for any reason (up to an including not liking their new haircut or the color of their shirt today), as an employee you gain... the ability to not hand in two weeks notice before you quit? (and you should really do that anyway, to avoid getting a bad reference. It's one of the few things they can legally talk about). Thankfully I work at level now where hiring and firing are controlled by a process (most decent employers in right to work states bind themselves to reasonable hiring and firing procedures to make skilled workers feel reasonably safe about taking jobs with them), but I remember seeing people fired from restaurants and bars I used to work in for essentially nothing. And yes, I have seen the haircut thing really happen.

Re:Guess Wal-mart's not so bad after all

[commodore64_love]

>>>>> Do you not care about those [laidoff Chinese/Maxican/Indian] workers left to starve?
>>
>>No,

As I suspected. Typical anti-walmart kook (aka liberal aka democrat). You claim to despise how WM treats its employees, but then don't give a fuck about the thousands of workers that would be laid off when Walmart starts selling US-only goods again.