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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"
It's not like anyone is checking it. For that amount of money, what more can they expect?
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!
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.
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 :
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
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. (That last bit can, and often is, taken way too far unfortunately.)
What I cannot stand about Walmart is that the quality of the goods is crap. Name brand products sold at Walmart are often manufactured to a lower standard of quality specifically for Walmart. Be it clothes that will fall apart faster, TVs that will break sooner, or other goods that don't function at all even fresh out of the box.
Unfortunately people are used to shoddy quality and think that having to replace a product every few years is normal. Not that any of the other US stores has helped any, Costco is one of the few places you can walk into, close your eyes, pick up something to buy, and be pretty sure you'll have acquired a good quality product.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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
Working one of these jobs for one hour would give you a very good idea of how much you could expect to earn, and it's not as though someone could even yell at you if you quit after fifteen minutes on the job. I fail to see how something with a maximum potential downside of "you just wasted an hour of your life" needs to be regulated.
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
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
*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.