Amazon’s Online Sweatshop
Zittrain emphasises the ideas of both the amplification of low paying work and new opportunities for people with niche skill sets to capitalise online (2009). Mechanical Turk utilises Crowdsourcing, a mass collaboration that trusts “the world to do the right thing (Zittrain 2009).” Intense global competition has driven wages so low that people labour for hours on repetitive tasks, turning employment opportunities into online sweatshops (Mittchell 2010). This is fuelled by Timeless time, defined by the use of new technologies in an effort to annihilate time compressing years into seconds (Castells 1999, 405).
It’s these idea of Timeless time and the addictive nature of Mechanical Turk that are constructing digital sweatshops. With 16 years of journalistic experience Mitchell from PCPro tested writing a blurb about an online retailer for $4.25 on Mechanical Turk which took 30 minutes and was rejected as it “didn’t meet standards (2010).”
There are steps being taken to improve Turkers rights by reporting neglectful employers and there is a Turker Bill of Rights (Drysdale 2011). Rates for performing certain tasks meant that Turkers were only making sixty cents an hour (Mittchell 2010). This form of New Media work needs improving as workers are unaware of employers and outcomes of their tasks, samkcb206 explores this issue of ethics further in their blog.
Reference List
Castells, Manuel. 1999. “Chapter 21: An Introduction to the Information Age.” In The media reader: continuity and transformation.398-410 Edited by Mackay, H and O’Sullivan, T. London: Sage Publications. Accessed April 20, 2012. https://cmd.library.qut.edu.au/KCB201/KCB201_BK_272673.pdf.
Drysdale, Rhea. 2011. “Increase Your Productivity through Crowsourcing.” Rhea Drysdale, January 7.
accessed April 22, 2012. http://outspokenmedia.com/online-marketing/increase-your-productivity-through crowdsourcing/.
Mitchell, Stewart. 2010 “Inside the online sweatshops.” Accessed April 21, 2012. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/360127/inside-the-online-sweatshops.
Zittrain, Jonathan. 2009. “Jonathan Zittrain: Minds for Sale.” Accessed April 22, 2012.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3h-rae3uo&feature=youtu.be.
I think it’s pretty interesting what Zittrain was saying about Microworkers, that they can now have people who live in property do this mircowork and earn some cash. It would be interesting to see if it actually achieves anything, or if it’s just slave labour.
It just goes to show how much the power the commissioner of these micro jobs really has. To be performing a task for 30 minutes and not getting paid for it seems pretty unfair to me. Zittrain talks about this concern, but I do believe it is a two way relationship between the commissioner of the work and the worker.
The issue of ethics when it comes to employer honesty on Turk is a very real one. If work can be rejected for “not meeting standards” than the simple solution is to require extremely clear standards.
I don’t think, however, that the pay rate is anything to get too worked up about. Many of the people who use Turk do it out of altruism, with the money they make being an added incentive instead of their primary goal. The people who do use Turk for their main income are primarily in countries where the exchange rate means that that sixty cents an hour probably goes further than it does in America.
And hey, there’s always the option of not doing the work if the price isn’t right. If this was true slave labor, we’d take what we could get, but the reality is that there are a million alternatives to Turk if you want to make money on the Internet.