Wow. Shouldn't there be a 'minimum gig fee' for this type of work? I mean many tasks may take a few seconds for a few cents, but if you work a solid hour and only earn $1 gross income, that seems extremely exploitative (even if the recipients are in Burundi).
If the entity offering the microtasks (gig) don't see enough interest in their tasks, they can raise the bid.
I think that's extremely fair. Let the market dictate the price per task. How do you know what the right price should be?
But for this type of task, that might be performed in poorest parts of the world, $1/hour may be a livable wage for very unskilled labor. So I'm willing to withhold judgement on that.
I do not see how the market forces can do that.
In the USA there is a lot of non-livable paying jobs that need to be complemented by public spending. For a person that has nothing, a salary that is not enough to pay for their basic needs is better than nothing. That creates a race to the bottom.
You get the lowest price independently of if people that do the job can make ends meet or not.
I don't think anyone with the power to dictate would accept a dollar an hour.
The right word for this is exploitation. Google and Figure Eight directly contributing to income inequality.
Exploitation occurs when you prevent the buyers or sellers in the market any ability to move. So if these buyers have no other opportunities or ways to change they can be exploited, if the sellers don't have any other buyers they can be exploited.
Neither Crowd Flower (Figure 8) nor Mechanical Turk "exploit" workers because the workers have a choice of tasks, and the option to add skills to open up other tasks. Nor can the workers "exploit" the people offering jobs because they cannot prevent another worker from taking a job at an offered price, even if they personally wouldn't take the job at that price.
What it does do though is allow workers who have a lower cost of living and expense rate to bid lower (or take jobs that pay less) and still cover there costs.
That said, if you aren't constrained to only doing mechanical turk or figure 8 things, then you have the option of doing something different, or adding in other resource streams. You you trade off the time vs money aspects of different work situations to achieve longer term stability. That doesn't apply of course to people who have extenuating circumstances that cut them off from any other revenue stream and that makes them vulnerable to exploitation.
[1] "Scarcity: Why having so little means so much", Sendhil Mullainathan
If that $1 per hour provides you with a better income than your peers with less physical labor, then this doesn't sound exploitive at all.
That's a strangely oppressive, i-know-best-what's-good-for-you position.
Because wage slavery exists and you can't shrug your shoulders and say "well, they're choosing to work for peanuts so it's fine!".
Just because something is legal does not make it right.
I've seen it rationalized all kinds of ways like "engineers are high value and hard to recruit, so they need big salaries and perks, but an HVAC technician at a datacentre doesn't" but it all falls apart when you consider that nearly all white collar professionals at Google get generous salaries, benefits and bonuses, even those in saturated fields like law, marketing or HR and a trade worker at a datacentre actually is directly working on Google's business.
I see quite often shifting the blame to employees. Does not make more sense that is the powerful companies that are expected to do the right thing instead of people with children to feed and mortgages to pay? It is way harder to do the right thing when your family wellbeing depends on it. Even worse when you need thousands of employees acting in a coordinating way to get any effect at all.
As a 'closer to home' example, IBM now has more employees in India than anywhere else. Here [1] are the Glassdoor figures for IBM India. The average compensation for a "software engineer" is $8390 per year - about $23 per day. If we assume an 8 hour work day that's less than $3/hour. Bump that up a bit because of time off/holidays and the average real compensation is going to be around $3.50 an hour. And that's for a software engineer at IBM in India, which is a 'less undeveloped' nation than many others. $1/hour for mindless tasks is already not looking so bad.
I'm not a fan of globalization, but for different reasons. It may be arguably exploitative of less developed areas, but it also has a negative affect on more developed nations as well. IBM can hire a dozen software engineers in India for the price of one graduate in e.g. America. There's a reason they're shifting their labor to India. This is completely fine, yet then they turn around and continue to rely on the US as the primary market for their products. E.g. in the case of Figure Eight they source their labor from the poorest places on this Earth and then turn around and sell the 'product' to Google, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, American Express, etc. [2]
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To clarify one thing, I do not think engaging in these practices is morally wrong. My objection is of a social/economic nature. I think these practices are a net negative on the countries where these companies' sell their product while sidestepping their labor standards and wages in creation of that product. In other words this is a practice I would engage in as an individual concerned for myself, but simultaneously lobby the government to work to curtail as an individual concerned for my nation.
[1] - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/IBM-India-Salaries-EI_IE354...