Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Do I wish I earned more per hour? Sure. But I worry about people who want to "improve" conditions for people choosing to do this kind of work. I cannot take a normal job and have any hope of getting well and staying well. I walked away from a corporate job because it was helping to keep me sick.
For me, this kind of low wage work buys me precious freedom and control over my life. If you take it from me, I am left with what? Panhandling? Prostitution? ...??? I don't know what I would be left with. But people making $100/hour should butt the hell out with their excessively privileged ideas about "good working conditions" and let people like me have some freedom to choose. It isn't like most people actually give a damn how hard life is for me or others like me.
But I agree, Frondo's comment seems to be rife with assumptions.
Also, you are basically assuming me to be incompetent and incapable of bettering myself. That is called prejudice.
Here are things I can do and am doing or have done to improve my income or my situation:
1) Get healthier so I can be more productive. This is my top priority and it is working.
2) Take advantage of the fact that my online income (and other income) is portable by moving someplace cheaper to live. I did this in May. I still struggle to make ends meet every month, but the amount I need to scrape by has dropped by about 20%. My quality of life has gone up substantially in several ways, not just because this area is cheaper.
3) Improve my work process and learn to work the system better. I have been working on both of those things for a long time and they are resulting in me getting access to better paying work and more consistent access to work. At one time, it was often the case that there was abundant work available when I was too sick to do it and a dearth of work on days when I felt okay and wanted to work.
4) Develop my own projects. I run several websites. They sometimes make ad money or tips. It is less reliable, but it is something I often am able to work on at times when I cannot do paid work. This is true in part because I can develop my own projects even without Internet access and in part because I can work on them at times when I am too tired to cope with paid work.
5) Get off the street. I am currently homeless. I left a corporate job and chose to be homeless to get myself healthier. I am somnewhat knowleadeagle about real estate. For a few thousand dollars, I think I could get a tax lien house and get off the street. I think I am well enough for housing to make sense. Having housing would allow me to cook, which would lower my food bill. It would also allow me to have access to the Internet 24/7, which would allow me to work more.
I am not doomed to only make, at best, $12/hour and my life would likely get easier, faster if I didn't have to deal so much with the assumption that because I am handicapped/a woman/insert prejudicebof your choosing, that I will never amount to anything and I should be grateful for idiotic plans, like basic income, that would shunt me off into a permanent, inescapable underclass status.
If you want to help me, here are things you can do in the here and now to help me:
1) Follow me on Twitter.
2) Read one or more of my blogs.
3) Engage me in discussion, either here or on Twitter or by leaving comments on my blog posts. (And a sincere thank you for engaging me in this discussion.)
4) Whitelist my blogs on ad blocker or leave a tip.
5) Promote my work.
6) Answer me in a sincere, good faith effort to help me improve my performance when I ask questions.
Anyway, I have work to do and not enough time.
Have a good day.
I was a little baffled by your initial complaint about people who want to raise the working conditions for people who take ad-hoc labor, like you. You said you "worry" about them, that you can't take a regular job, and so on.
Great, fine, I certainly don't want you to have to take a regular job. I think it's great if you can work a few hours here, pick up a few extra bucks as your health permits, and so on. I have no interest in taking that away from you. I doubt very many people do, unless it's to slough off the work onto people who are more economically hard up than you.
I was, however, baffled by your implication that the way things are now (you making an average of $12 an hour with ad-hoc work, instead of some larger amount) is the best things can be.
I think you're wrong about that, but it is, of course, certainly true if we insist that everything's as good as it can be.
And you're right, there's no magic money solution. Basic income is one, and there's several different models that get tossed around, including just cutting everyone a check (so hey, you make the $12/hour patched together on top of the basic income).
But if you think I'm arguing because I think you're a dumb cripple or whatever, no, get over it, I'm arguing because you typed some otherwise thoughtful stuff and I just don't agree with all of it.
I was, however, baffled by your implication that the way things are now (you making an average of $12 an hour with ad-hoc work, instead of some larger amount) is the best things can be.
I do not assume that is the best things can be. You appear to have done so in your first reply to me and are apparently still doing so. I spelled out in substantial detail how I can and am improving my earnings, both in absolute terms (total take) and relative (hourly wage). You haven't engaged those points at all.
Edit:
I apologize if I sound snappish. It isn't intentional. I am currently mired in an argument with someone else who is, in fact, being very dismissive. It is possible that is negatively influencing my remark here, without me consciously realizing it.
I actually think it's great how much you're doing, outside the patched-together work, to get your own business/content marketing stuff going.
I wish some of the people I knew who were in a similar situation to you (i.e. some disability or another that prevents them from taking regular employ) had your ability to get things done. I wasn't even thinking about them until now, but I just got a linkedin connection request from one of them (and it's like, I know there's no point in them doing it like this, because regular scheduled employ is not in the cards for them, they're just tired of being so poor) and it got me thinking.
Let's say, it's not you I'm worried about, it's more for them that I'm concerned. $12 isn't much, but you're already doing stuff to do better. If my friends could do better, though, given their constraints, their lives would be a lot better off for it. Maybe a basic income isn't the answer, but an extra hundred dollars or two a month would go a long way toward improving their quality of life.
I am angry and frustrated and I feel it is taking too long and I don't really want to do this anymore. I spend a lot of time cussing at the sky about how hard it is, how unfair it is, how I deserve better and so on.
But I also know what my fate was "supposed to be." I am supposed to be getting about $100k in medical care annually while I steadily deteriorate. My ability to be productive is supposed to be declining, not improving. I am supposed to be either dead or dying a slow gruesome death from problems that doctors do not know how to fix.
You might consider checking out my websites and possibly forwarding selected links to the people you are concerned about. I have a homeless blog. I have a food blog where I talk about using food as my medicine. Those might be the most immediately relevant to your concerns.
There are things disabled people can do to exercise agency and get small gains in the short term that can be gradually leveraged for larger gains down the road. But they have lost hope. So do not talk to them about big gains down the road and do not talk to them about the scope of their challenges. It only makes them depressed. Instead, if you find an article with concrete small, doable solutions that can benefit them in the here and now, share that in a non pushy way. Then be patient. It may be months before you see evidence of results. But if you get into the habit of forwarding them useful bits periodically, it can slowly change.
I apologize if I am overstepping my bounds. I woke up with a fierce headache. Trying to be helpful is a longstanding habit and it is sometimes the wrong thing to do.
Have a good day.
Is there no welfare for people who aren't able to make a living in your country?
I have cystic fibrosis. I am getting myself well when doctors say it cannot be done. Having CF does not qualify you for disability. You qualify based on having allowed infection to eat away enough of your lungs so as to have reduced lung capacity below a certain threshold. Based on my last x-rays and the fact that it no longer hurts like a bitch to breathe, the hole in my left lung appears to be gone. So I will never qualify for disability. I am too competent.
The issue is, conservative Government parties point to people taking welfare without meeting the requirements for it as a significant issue that costs countries large amounts of money. To solve this problem, Governments set up welfare departments to be all but adversarial, with near-constant - and, worse, unpredictable - changes in requirements forcing a lot of mental effort to be taken just to keep proving and re-proving that you can't work, and welfare agencies taking the default stance that any individual taking welfare is likely to be fraudulent.
The result is that keeping up with the welfare system is often as stressful as a full-time job in itself, if not moreso as you're very aware that society and your Government both think of you as someone who they'd really prefer just died.
Of course, as those most affected by the discrimination against those on welfare are generally the people with the smallest voices - unemployed or low-wage workers, those with disability, and often further minorities - it's not going to change in a long time.
Having a handicap does not mean I am some worthless piece of shit with nothing of value to offer. Furthermore, I had food stamps for a time. Someone dropped the ball and they were not renewed in January. I reapplied. Someone else dropped the ball and I was told I would need to reapply again. I decided not to, in part because going to the welfare office makes me so ill, in part for other reasons that I don't care to go into both because it is not actually anyone's business and because I am currently under time pressure to try to make enough money this month. My expenses were higher than usual at the start of the month and I am fond of eating every day.
I would see it as a game where the goal is to try and make as much money as possible with as little work. I can also see that unemployed people might enjoy it just as a way of feeling like they're doing something worthwhile.
Certainly, since I don't need the money, I'd much rather earn $3 an hour on Mechanical Turk, sitting at home and picking and choosing what I feel like doing, than $7.25 an hour in a minimum-wage job.
You don't need the money, so the money doesn't come into it. It could read:
> I'd much rather -- sit-- at home and pick-- and choose-- what I feel like doing, than -work- a minimum-wage job.
The important piece here is not what the people who have time to waste are doing with job gamification, but the reasons why some people are investing significant amounts of time in a sub minimum wage system and presumably why this group has a large crossover with those using it as a primary income source.
Complete speculation suggests to me that this group contains a non-trivial amount of people who are somehow "locked in" by transport, mental illness, or caring requirements yet need to earn money and are more than willing to work.
I am very concerned that there are people cornered into living like this at sub-societal standards. This is not ok yet I am unsure as to how to find out if this is the case.
The only ones that seemed appealing on the surface were these audio transcriptions. I type over 100wpm and 9 minutes of audio took me over an hour to transcribe. I got like $2, and never even bothered withdrawing it.
If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum wage, I'd be shocked.
Since most of the tasks pay even far worse than transcription, and there's a significant unpaid time investment acquiring the tasks and getting them approved, and most people probably try a few tasks before leaving and never even ask for a check, I'd guess the average payout for people working on Mechanical Turk is much less than a dollar per hour.
I've always wondered how it's legal.
If you rush through easier tasks you can complete them in a few minutes doing a good enough job to get paid.
Look at the transcriptions / translations for Farsi and languages from the Middle East. People are making plenty of money.
Still, the ability to login and earn even $5/hour at arbitrary times of the day may be desirable for a segment of the population that's perhaps a bit asocial and chooses an RV lifestyle.
So I offered $1 per post to write 50-100 words summaries of the news. Depending on the content a writer could add four to eight posts an hour, getting faster at it as they improved their skills. We had about 50 writers on the program, but could easily have had many more. We were overwhelmed with people wanting to join the program and had over 1000 people on our waiting list.
At first, But the $1-per-post program attracted a whole different community: mainly women, many of them minorities, who like to work-at-home. We actually saw this as a big plus because they were no-nonsense about doing the work, and gave diversity to the content, something Wikipedia struggles with. We paid out in Paypal and some people would literally do some work so they could get some food for that day.
I think too many companies think of crowdsourcing as a way to get cheap work, but it's really good to get diverse workers.
After paying out $20,000 for 20,000 posts we changed to a revenue-share system, where writers earn more as the site grows. That presents a different challenge: finding writers who will put in work now, with the hope of a bigger payout later.
It's unfortunate, but that is the nature of the broad term "work from home", especially on the internet. I think tech-savvy individuals have, in parallel, been constantly telling individuals that such keywords are usually scams.
I found no difference at all between the output of minorities and white writers. A bigger and more rigorous sample would have given more insight. It's interesting because Wikipedia is known for its gender gap: 90% of its writers are young, white, highly educated males. So therefore most people think that Wikipedia-like content can only created by those kind of people. Instead, I found I could create almost exactly the same content by restricting the format and the users actions, irrespective of the class of person adding the information. In fact, as the site stands it was created maybe 70% by women.
[1] http://help.newslines.org/knowledge-base/add-a-movie-post/
We can see the effect of the gender gap on Wikipedia in the content too. Topics like porn stars, games and politics are overrepresented, while other topics that women would be more interested in, are neglected.
It is weird how corporate success demeans those at the bottom. I mean ... you've just exposed "the great exposure" fallacy.
"Work hard enough and we will start to include the carrot."
I see no difference between an investor putting in $1000 in cash, and a contributor investing $1000 of their time, because all we would do with the investors $1000 would be to pay the contributors. In the case where the investor adds cash, as the company grows the investor gets the long-term rewards, while the writer just gets paid $1000 and has no long-term position. However, when the contributor invests their time, we don't need the investor. Instead, the contributor gets the long-term reward for their work as the value of their content rises. So rather than consigning contributors to a fixed wage and giving the benefit of their work to investors, we allow writers to invest in their own future. Of course, that all depends on whether they think the business will grow so that a decent amount of revenue can be shared.
As I pointed out above, many of the work-at-home workers need to get instant cash so this system doesn't work for them, and the Wikipedia people will work for free (the fools!). Our challenge is to recruit people who are willing to treat their participation as an investment. But if it works, they will make a lot more money than they would in any other system.
Certain problems were quite interesting, involving OCR and fuzzy pattern matching on google rankings, and I'm sure certain ones would make good research problems. It was fun for a few days, but even when scripted the amounts you would make were minuscule.
""" Why is the country set as United States?
At this time Mechanical Turk does not support Requesters from countries outside the United States. """
I seriously doubt the following statement in the article is still true:
"The users of Mechanical Turk are still early adopters, which explains why so many workers are closer to the median US household income of around $50,000 than to the poverty line."
I did some survey work on MT back then, it was fun for a few days, then became incredibly mind numbing.
A more recent article on MT (probably posted already to HN):
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/408680035/mechanical-turk-work...
What? That's actually pretty good...
If the person can touch type or if there are major pauses during the recordings (which happens a lot during lectures), you make $15/hr. If there are enough pauses, you can do two at a time and get $30/hr.
30 minutes spent transcribing a 4 minute audio clip would not be unusual.
I transcribed a few college lecture fragments at one point just to figure out what it's like and i was able to type while listening as I could understand the accent right away.
While giving out Turk tasks, I noticed some people are about 100x more efficient than others depending on the task.
Americans are not ready for what is going to happen to the labor market when minimum wage goes to $15 an hour.
Lots of `informal' employment, I'd guess?
American's spend several hours a day watching TV. What if the service gives people a distraction that they are mentally active in? There might be several advantages other than monitory performing these tasks over passively sitting in front of a TV.
Would this website work if they required a clear picture of the work provider, and a brief resume?
I have a task I need done, a value that it's worth to me to have it done, and all I need to know is "can you do it?" and "are you willing to do it for what it's worth to me?"
Desperate humans are cheap, I would say. And until we have a completely global market place for labour, there will always be a large disparity between what we think an individual is worth, and how little an individual is willing to work for due to their local circumstances.
As usual, I fault the governments that promise but don't fix, election after election.