Does Amazon's Clickworker Platform Exploit Its Workers? (techrepublic.com)

500,000 people signed up for Amazon's Mechanical Turk, one of several online microjobs platforms that "let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe," reports TechRepublic. But though these workers have trouble communicating directly with Amazon, in any given month about 20,000 of them may be active, "part of an invisible, online workforce -- one that is increasingly in demand for their vital role in helping train intelligent machines."

But are these platforms part of a disturbing new trend? Long-time Slashdot reader Paul Fernhout writes: Hope Reese and Nick Heath at TechRepublic ask: "do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered?" The article says: "Just over half of Turkers earn below the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, according to a Pew Research Center study." The article quotes people who believe "it will become increasingly common for computer systems to orchestrate labor." That trend was also was the beginning of Marshall Brain's "Manna" short story.

Comments

Really bad jobs

[gweihir]

I had a look at it a while back, and the only way to get to a salary you will not starve on seems to be to do the jobs so badly and fast that they just barely get accepted. Actually following the description on what you should do will get you paid much lower than that minimum wage.

How to build that Muslim database

[Anonymous Coward]

"You could be tagging faces in a crowd, but maybe something is being built for a malicious purpose or something," she said. "You don't know what you're doing, exactly, because there's no information."

I've seen a few stories how big software are saying they won't build a Muslim database. Well, here's how to do it - and no one will know the difference.

"Your assignment is to pick all the women with hijabs."

Your assignment is to match these photos with names."

"Your assignment is to find the men in their family"

Easy peasy and all for less than minimum wage.

Re:Exploitative by design?

[ThatsMyNick]

I used to do turk when I was in college (years ago). All I did was academic surveys and tests for academic studies. I dont think it was anywhere close to minimum wage, but I had fun and I enjoyed doing it. Some of them will also invite me for follow up studies. I can tell for sure those researchers did not intent to exploit, nor did I felt exploited. It would good beer money.

Uh, no, that's not how it works at all

[rsilvergun]

You couldn't possibly be more wrong if you tried. Same with that drek Forbes wrote. Minimum wage sets a price floor on wages. It does this to stop a race to the bottom while forcing the rich to horde a bit less of their wealth (which has been a major problem in all of human civilization: how to pry money from the 1%'s hands and get the economy moving).

The thing is, work still needs to get done and the merchant class still wants to make money. Warren Buffet said it himself (paraphrasing) that even at 90% taxes he'd still make money. Hell, America's most productive years were when the top marginal rate was 90%. So long as we have a merchant class spreading wealth around benefits all but the ruling class.

Now, we do still have an idle rich and ruling class. We just don't like to acknowledge them (and you can be they don't like being acknowledged). Go ahead. Eliminate minimum wage. Take out worker protections, Unions and all the safe guards workers fought and died for. Welcome back to the time of kings. To the robber baron era. Thanks.