If this type of work is important, then why does it not provide minimum wage? For what reason should Mechanical Turk be an exception?
This is a completely separate discussion than what people need to get by, or what they should be provided. It is far more straightforward to just provide/pay them directly from the government, than pretend that isn't happening and there is no cost by distorting markets and making customers pay anyway, as well as reducing competition.
Seeing exactly what companies do in reaction to not being able to hire based on supply and demand is quite difficult to measure. For example it can hit the poorer people because companies can't economically provide products for them, hence causing the poorer people to have to spend more on alternatives. Sometimes surveys find that minimum wage increases made no difference, but that then turns out to be survivorship bias - you can't survey companies that went out of business or left to go elsewhere.
The real problem is that market distortions are used to sweep under the rug a social policy, and to pretend that it doesn't cost people anything when it certainly does, and the poor/unemployed the most. If in favour of the social policy then just do it directly.
The real reason for contracting is that the paperwork is much simpler. You don't need an HR department. And the guy gets automatically laid off after a few months without the incident reflecting on either you or him, so there's less risk.
There's another side to it where you can hire a "contractor" on an n-month term, but instead of paying the contractor directly you go through a middleman who hires the contractor as an employee and provides (shitty) benefits and takes care of taxes.
The fact they are choosing to do it shows they have no viable alternative, which means things must be pretty bad where they are living
Of course i'm coming entirely from a labor point of view, and i'll grant my grasp of economics is probably naive to say the least.
If the end goal was to produce some goods or services that are of benefit to people, while looking after employees, the environment and the local community, the world would be a much better place.
Of course, the stock market might not grow so fast, but that's just made up anyway. People struggling to buy food on paltry wages is not made up.
I suggest you try your experiment on sentient creatures that are not motivated by utility. I am unaware of any at this point, however.
> The rest make under $20 a week by working an hour or two per day. The most commonly cited reasons for using Mechanical Turk are to earn some extra spending money and productively use time that would otherwise be wasted watching television. One academic study that relied on Mechanical Turk workers filling out questionnaires noted that its American participants were “normally distributed in terms of socioeconomic status, with the average participant having completed some college and receiving a financial income between $37,500–49,999 per year.” This does not match up with the perception of exploited sweatshop labor - the poor who must accept low wages due to a lack of alternatives.
I guess it ought to be illegal for people to choose to make productive use of their time.
Next time, please read the article before parroting your ideological commitments.
> A survey of workers on Mechanical Turk done by Panos Ipeirotis, an Associate Professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, found that the majority of American workers are young, have at least some college experience, and have household incomes between $25,000 and $60,000.
It sounds like the majority of workers are supplementing their incomes, not relying on it.
Assertion based on facts not found in evidence. Just because they take remote jobs that can be done at their whim whenever they want doesn't mean they can't find a viable alternative. In fact, there aren't many jobs where those qualifications are met.
That is why this is slightly different. It is the micro payment for micro work.