The secret lives of Google raters
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
* Google raters are subcontractors for contracting companies, among which one is Leapforce.
* Google flaunts new contract requiring takers to use employees instead of subcontractors.
* Leapforce decides to employ raters, but at much reduced salaries and no benefits.
* Raters who work mostly from home are the losers in the equation, and have a hard time finding other work.
This seems like the future of the gig economy. Same work load, less pay, less security, less employee power.
The gig economy is just a big scam on taxpayers shoulders. Companies get the benefit of low paid workers and low or not-at-all taxes. And the rest of the society has to pay the burden of increasing poverty. It is a kind of Tragedy of the Commons, one rips the benefit while the whole pays the cost.
It is fueled by the mentality of "at least they have a job". Having a job is not a goal in itself, the goal is that people are able to support themselves in a reasonable way. Having a job is a means to that end. People will be better with a Basic Income, waiting for a better opportunity that brings more value to them and to society. Once you land on a low paid, a-lot-of-hours job it is hard to get out of it. And companies that depend on this kind of jobs are inefficient and have no incentive to do things better.
All things being equal, companies would aim to spend the same TOE (total cost of employment), on each worker regardless of if they are a contractor or a employee.
A contractor being paid $15/hour has to pay self-employment tax to cover medicare and social security. A company who hired the same worker, would only do so at say $14/hour to make up for the taxes that they now cover.
The goal of contracting isn't to pay less, it's to handle jobs that are irregularly distributed so you aren't literally paying people to sit around.
The only cases where you'd choose to employ part-time instead is if a workers' presence is physically required (e.g. Starbucks), or near instant time is extremely important (e.g. not Uber).
If the regulation say that some class of employees will get some expensive benefit, the most rational response might be to make sure you don't have any employees classified that way.
* Google raters are subcontractors for contracting companies, among which one is Leapforce.
* Google flaunts new contract requiring takers to use employees instead of subcontractors.
* Leapforce decides to employ raters, but at much reduced salaries and no benefits.
* Raters who work mostly from home are the losers in the equation, and have a hard time finding other work.
This seems like the future of the gig economy. Same work load, less pay, less security, less employee power.
A few points to further counter balance your Cliff notes:
* Raters get paid from $13.50 to $17.50 per hour for work from home and are upset about the cut in hours because this is significantly more than they can make anywhere else.
* Raters are now going to become employees and thus the employer will be paying Social Security and employer taxes, saving the employees somewhere on the order of 50% in income tax liability. Unless their pay is cut to compensate, their per-hour rate is going to go up in this change. And it's worth repeating, they don't have any benefits now so aren't losing them.
* Employment status also brings unemployment coverage and disability benefits in case they get fired or become disabled.
Side note:
I hope for Leapforce's sake and that of their contractors/employees that they got Google's blessing before making their CEO so available and transparent on the relationship with Google. I just don't think I'd ever give the press much access to me on the record talking about my largest (or maybe only) client without vetting every word with the client first. Even if everything in the article was already well known by labor regulators, I'd be very concerned that articles like these paint a much bigger target on my back.
Granted, I was in the privileged position of only having it as a side income while studying so I never expected any job security to begin with. In that context it was great though.
Mechanical Turks exist across industry. From a governance perspective, that manual processes exist is a huge problem for control of operational risk, but when outsourced to a service provider, who knows? This is where strong policies need to exist.
Example (a system I was to come to hear of): Outsourced signature recognition system. Three years paying a team of 5 developers that created nothing (that worked even coherently). Manager announced system successful, with XUZ maintenance costs for database, etc. These maintenance costs were 6 people on 24 hour staggered shifts looking at scanned copies/images of signatures in (near) real-time. Ideal solution didn't exist, so use management skill and create a budget that covers this up. Indeed, this is fraud, but 'back in the day' apparently; probably less than 8 years ago.
Only after 'working' effectively for 4+ years was this discovered via internal audit.
The fixed costs are even greater for people who are not currently raters. The amount of time it takes to pass the entrance exams (based on the 160-page manual) will now have to be recouped with about half as many paid hours per week.
This will have the same effect on new rater signup that plummeting gas prices have on hybrid vehicle sales.
The reason that the people that one rater's referred didn't pass might simply be a cultural difference between the rater's locale and the locale of whoever designed the "right" answers.
For example, if you assume the test was written by people in SV it would not be a stretch to imagine a bunch of people failing because they (for example) failed to flag content that included the confederate battle flag as offensive.