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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"
"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!
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.
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?
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
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.
Huh? An entirely voluntary, on-line program pays so little that nobody in their right mind would do it, and this is evidence about working wages in western countries?
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.
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/
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.
From http://tjic.com/?p=14713 :
That is a shit definition. 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. The TV example is and always has been a red herring. It's a one-time expense that lasts for years, and would barely cover any of the ongoing expenses. The SUV is even worse, given that in many used car markets that's all that may be available at the time of purchase, and in the US, in most areas, if you don't have a car, you don't have a job. The poor in the US, even if they have the possessions that you point to as evidence that they can't be poor, still lack most of the things that the poor elsewhere lack.
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
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.