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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!
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
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.
...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.
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.
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.