The perils of microtask work
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Technology has opened many new opportunities for corporations and for everyday people.
However, the pace of new opportunities is way faster than the ability that governments have to regulate the new opportunities. It would seem that companies, entrepreneurs, and silicon valley have realized this and are using it as a business strategy. If I had to sum up the business strategy, I would say "Find a regularity system that can be exploited by rapid innovation".
While it's always been a business strategy to exploit legal loopholes, I think the difference is that companies exploit an entire regulatory system which is harder to update and takes longer. Airbnb, Uber, Mechanical Turk, are all examples of exploiting a regulatory system by creating a product and then quickly scaling it up to mass adoption before the practices introduced can be outlawed.
Once something has been massively adopted it's difficult to stop completely.
While the word exploit seems inherently negative I'm not trying to make judgment value, I think it's the correct description. I don't have a strong opinion about any of these companies or exploiting regulatory systems.
However, I do think that democracy needs to find a way to keep up with the forces taking advantage of its inherent systematic boundaries, such as being slow to react. I'm not sure what needs to change but I think when you have many US citizens participating in completely unregulated labor markets there is a problem that needs to be solved.
> Once something has been massively adopted it's difficult to stop completely.
> ...
> However, I do think that democracy needs to find a way to keep up with the forces taking advantage of its inherent systematic boundaries, such as being slow to react. I'm not sure what needs to change but I think when you have many US citizens participating in completely unregulated labor markets there is a problem that needs to be solved.
I think the solution is that it be made very clear to the companies pushing the regulatory boundaries (and their fans) that they should be prepared to have their business models destroyed when the regulatory environment catches up.
Call it "Creative Destruction 2.0."
All the services we're talking about have both real utility and (for the most part) unplanned costs and impacts.
The Taxi Medallion system is/was horribly corrupt and inefficient. Uber (for all their faults) is an improvement in terms of safety, convenience and less discriminatory practices.
Similarly, AirBnB isn't defacto a horrible presence in cities (tons of great experiences), but hosts should abide by neighborhood norms, pay hotel taxes, etc.
In many of the other countries Uber has presence it has done damage to a sector that was not horribly corrupt or inefficient. Yet the workers and governments still have to react to rule breaking that effectively treats everywhere on the planet as some US city with a broken and corrupt taxi system.
In the UK I would call Uber a very marginal increase in convenience (all taxis have apps if that's your preferred method), but absolutely and demonstrably significantly worse in terms of safety, discriminatory practices, and worker's incomes. So overall I don't think it is too harsh, at least here.
Are the workers informed? Much like the question of whether Uber drivers properly factor in the cost of maintenance, it's possible that workers do not have the right expectations of what they will earn, so articles like this are helpful in adding context and information. Let it get around that these tasks make you less than minimum wage.
Do the workers consent? Obviously they consent in at least some sense, so comparisons to slavery (as in the comments to the original article) are overblown. These workers are free to seek other options. However, it's also possible that they are correctly concluding this is their best option, due to lack of opportunity in their area, health reasons that make them immobile, etc. In that case, then two cheers for MTurk for improving their lives, to at least some extent.
Is any job better than none to an unemployed person? Maybe — but we need money to live, and labor laws exist precisely to prevent employers from exploiting that.
While it's certainly true that if these jobs were forced to pay a reasonable minimum wage there would be some less work to do, most of the world has already conceded the point that pure supply-and-demand is not an acceptable way to negotiate wages - we agree that some minimum wage is useful to protect those without other options.
If I weren't already off-topic, this is where I would veer into advocating for basic income.
I would love to see the data, but in my experience of growing up in a very poor neighborhood, getting a foot in the labour market is the difficult part; once you are in, moving up is relatively easier.
I'm not saying the minimum wage or automation are bad, but it's simplistic to claim wage levels and employment have no relationship.
So if we agree that at some level of the minimum wage, businesses would not be hiring someone because they cannot pay them below minimum wage - then why do you think this is not happening to some people at the current level of minimum wage?
> Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a close room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employment, I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntary! Let us look a little at this remarkable form of human freedom. Do we from mere choice leave our fathers’ dwellings, the firesides where all of our friends, where too our earliest and fondest recollections cluster, for the factory and the Corporations boarding house? By what charm do these great companies immure human creatures in the bloom of youth and first glow of life within their mills, away from their homes and kindred? A slave too goes voluntarily to his task, but his will is in some manner quickened by the whip of the overseer.
> The whip which brings us to Lowell is NECESSITY. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be sup- ported, a brother’s ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? When a man is starving he is compelled to pay his neighbor, who happens to have bread, the most exorbitant price for it, and his neighbor may appease his conscience, if conscience he chance to have, by the reflection that it is altogether a voluntary bargain. Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his task by the whip of the over- seer or the wages of the Lowell Corporation. In either case it is not free will, leading the laborer to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question.
These hidden costs are almost identical in the world of independent freelance work. Similar for "gig" workers as well. An Uber/Lyft driver told me he aims for 10 hours per day, which usually takes an extra 4 hours (14 total) of unpaid relocating, waiting around, etc.
My hope is that people view this as the cost of autonomy, but I fear most people aren't pricing it in.
But I mean those costs have always been part of the reason freelancers are more expensive than employees (the other being the increased flexibility).
What seems to happen now is that, increasingly, free lancers are cheaper, which suggests that employees are paid above the price they could expect, if there weren't rules about minimum wage.
If you were to shut down MTurk I don't think the people who rely on it for money would thank you.
Regulation should be introduced to fix specific issues, not just because there aren't any yet. Especially if it's filling an important financial gap for people with low incomes.
If working for MTurk isn't their best option, they'll pick one of their better options. It follows that, for people who do work on MTurk, MTurk is their best option.
It follows where an option at the margins causes problems it may need to be regulated to prevent abuse of those in dire straits or need. As already seems clearly necessary for things like Deliveroo etc.
Abuse of that nature is how we got a lot of our more civilised food, consumer and employment regulations. It's how we came to the hard-fought idea of a safety net that this generation is trying to shred.
Piecework is usually awful to workers. When you consider that minimum wage is about $0.25, chiseling workers out of such a small amount of money seems pretty awful.
If we really think that someone is too incompetent to make a choice and remove the choice from them, then don't we have some duty to help them out?
For example, I want a child to go to school, not a job, and think them too incompetent to make the decision of which is better for them. In removing the option to work, I then have a duty to support them if they were needing the job to live (which is done by specific welfare for children or their parents).
But calling that a "choice" is like saying the mafioso holding a gun to your head is giving you the freedom to decide to follow his orders.
Which makes it society's responsibility, through regulatory mechanisms, to improve the workers options.
UBI is an example, but there are likely others, for example, a sovereign wealth fund as found in Alaska and Norway.
That's what YC is doing: https://basicincome.ycr.org/
They have 100s of millions to experiment with ... the average person does not.
> Every one advocating for UBI could ...
Advocacy (and voting) are the most power tools for shaping the future direction of society. It's very effective as a way of bringing change, and we have many examples in recent history of this being true. If it weren't, you wouldn't see huge amounts of money being given to Super PACs to advocate for political positions.
> start transferring them a portion of their income every month...
This is a rehash of the very tired, and baseless, cliche against higher taxes that says that those who support higher taxes should write a check to the IRS.
It's a fallacious argument, because redistribution only has societal impact when operating on a society-wide scale. The most significant example of this, the Great Society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society) wasn't built on voluntary contributions to the government.
Individuals of normal means making marginal contributions does little to move the needle on the relevant societal problems in any significant way, whether those problems are infrastructure, poverty, health care, education, etc. These things, if they are done at all, have to be done at a societal scale, and that means via government methods of finance.
It would be nice if their government made up for the gap, but int he real world we have to deal with the possibilities they won't. So one has to deal with the ramifications of their choices that shouldn't and wouldn't happen in a good world but do happen in our world.
No, I flat out reject that notion. The fact that one must have a job to survive in this world removes the ability to chose "not having a job". The illusion of choice does not mean that all employment agreements are purely consensual, and as such there need to be many safeguards in place to prevent exploitation.
Yes, but hunger, not Amazon, is the one holding the threat over the person, and as of yet we have not found a way to change these fundamental aspects of nature/reality. You aren't going to remove threat, you are going to just make it become realized. Think of how some areas where child labor was reduced but the reasons behind children working weren't fixed resulted in children turning to far more dangerous and illegal labor that would near universally be considered a far worse option than sweat shop work.
The fact that the only reason people work for MTurk is because they're desperate for money is hardly a criticism of MTurk. If anything, it's a criticism of everyone else in the world for not providing better ways to make money.
For example, the only reason homeless people queue up to get food from soup kitchens is because they're desperate for food, but that doesn't mean soup kitchens are bad because the queues can be long. (Hypothetical; I don't actually know if queues are typically long).
You're right that nobody had advocated any specific action and I merely assumed that everybody who was against microtask work was in favour of shutting it down. My mistake.
Did you read the article?
> For example, the only reason homeless people queue up to get food from soup kitchens is because they're desperate for food, but that doesn't mean soup kitchens are bad because the queues can be long. (Hypothetical; I don't actually know if queues are typically long).
Are you really drawing a comparison between skirting minimum wage laws and providing free food for homeless people?
The other economist, startled, said, "what are you doing?"
The first economist said, "I'm picking up that $20 bill."
The other economist was bemused. "There can't possibly be a $20 there to pick up. Why, someone would have already picked it up!"
The first economist straightened up, and considered carefully the words of his colleague. Convinced that it must be his imagination, he nodded, and the pair of them walked off.
Also, the systems themselves certify high-performing workers over time, who then become eligible for higher-paying microtasks.
Did you miss that bit? The point of the comparison is to highlight the obviously fallacious reasoning that underlies the idea that someone's participation in something means it's beneficial to them.
Who are the "parents" in this case?
Elsewhere in this thread, the entire concept of employment regulation is called into question. The history of employment law goes back to child labor regulations. So if you reject all employment regulation, you also reject child labor regulation. This is a very fringe argument that is a nonstarter with basically everyone. If, on the other hand, you don't reject child labor regulations, then you accept the premise that employment regulation is sometimes necessary, and now we're just haggling over the details.
What we need to do as a society is to protect the unsophisticated from scams that they are entirely unprepared to spot and avoid. Like bringing workers over from other countries, taking their passports, and basically turning them into slaves.
Compared to that, this is far less wretched hive of scum and villainy. But even wretched hives are better than no hive at all.
Can we please do a little better than this? Actually learning something is more important than satisfying oneself with glib dismissals, which inevitably draw others into a sad cloud of dullness.