How Microwork Preys on Despair (and Other Reasons to Avoid It)
For example, driving an Uber or delivering groceries for Doordash, registering on the micro-relief site sounds pretty tempting: if you have the internet, you can make money doing simple tasks on your computer. But, as is often the case, working with a microprocessor is not an easy task, because of which it is tried to be presented. Here’s everything you need to know.
What does microrough really mean?
Microworking is a series of micro-tasks that sociologist Antonio Casilli defines as “fragmented and low-wage manufacturing processes”. Companies break large projects into small tasks that anyone with an internet connection can do, and then hire people to complete them for very little money, usually through a third-party recruiting organization. Mega-corporations use private firms like Samasource, while smaller companies find employees through custom platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Fiverr, and ClickWorker.
The nature of the microprocessor is, to put it mildly, very diverse. Sometimes it’s as easy as clicking on an ad to drive traffic; sometimes it is more difficult, such as transcribing audio or formatting files. This is often the case for billion-dollar corporations such as Google, Amazon, Netflix or Meta / Facebook / Instagram, which are hiring microprocessor contractors en masse to generate and analyze data for machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence products. Workers are paid a flat rate for each task they complete, not the time it takes to complete it.
This is nothing new; people were paid on an individual basis as long as there was paid work. Microwork simply makes these tasks as easy as possible and makes the workers who perform them completely invisible – both to their employers and to each other. This invisibility is so ingrained that anthropologist Mary L. Gray and others call it “haunted work.”
He pays less than the federal minimum wage.
The most important thing to know about micro-relief is that they are paying for it in trash. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), one of the most popular platforms, allows requesters (hiring organizations) to pay workers as little as one cent ($ 0.01) per job . Going over this minimum is expensive: Amazon charges a 20% commission on every cent paid to employees, but for tasks requiring 10 or more jobs, their commission goes up to 40%.
Unsurprisingly, this results in low wages for the vast majority of workers. A 2017 study of 3.8 million tasks completed by 2,676 AMT workers found that their average hourly pay was just $ 2, with only 4% earning more than $ 7.25 an hour. In 2019, the same researchers looked at the demographics and salaries of 1,238 AMT employees . They found that workers in the United States earned an average hourly wage of $ 3.01, while workers in India earned just $ 1.41.
These wage gaps reveal the open secret about micro-production: inequality is in it. Firms that do large contracts find candidates through “impact sourcing,” which is a good way to say they target people in dire economic situations, including refugees, because they are easier to underpaid. In a 2012 Harvard Business Review article on working with microprocessors, this is inadvertently disguised.
In fact, getting paid is a huge pain in the ass.
In addition to low wages, microtechnical work requires a significant amount of unpaid labor just to get paid. Workers have to go through messages until something decent appears, get the job done, submit it, wait for approval, and then wait for the money to arrive in their account. If their work is not accepted – or the platform suspends their account, which is quite common with AMT workers – they are out of luck.
You’re on your own – that’s the point
The most insidious aspect of the firmware is how it keeps workers in the dark in every possible way. Many work contracts are such that they do not know who their colleagues are or even what project they are working on – they can train an algorithm for a billion dollars for pennies an hour and have no idea. Here’s how author Phil Jones described this unique predicament in an interview with Brazilian Digital Labor in October 2021 :
[M] Workers in countries such as India, the Philippines and Venezuela – countries where most of this work is outsourced – are in controversy. On the one hand, they have enormous potential power to cause serious disruption to these platforms by organizing strikes. However, they also do a very fragmented kind of work, with often working alone at home or in internet cafes, often shackled by nondisclosure agreements and the threat of closing their accounts.
As it currently stands, there is no good way to go about micro-plugs, but that doesn’t change the fact that people need money to live. If you or someone you know is planning to register on one of the many existing sites, it is best to contact other employees. Join forums or subreddit for your platform of choice, and if you are already using AMT, install the Turkopticon script . (This allows workers to report fraud and questionable employers.) Don’t try to go it alone — collective action is the only way out of this mess .