Its critics see a throwback to something more Dickensian, where the lack of regulation and accountability keeps workers in the dark and on the defensive. I tagged blurry, surveillance-looking photos of construction workers on job sites according to whether they were wearing hard hats or harnesses 1 cent per photo. That works out to 97 cents an hour. But hourly wages are not everything. Lamont said. Katie Boehm of Pittsburgh turned to turking in after her husband, who has diabetes, lost his job and insurance coverage.
Her own health issues keep her from working outside the house, and turking seemed like a lifeline. Boehm, 40, said. Amazon claims a turking work force of half a million, but independent researchers say the number of active turkers is smaller.
The vast majority of turkers are believed to be in the United States — at least three-quarters, researchers say — with India a distant second. Mechanical Turk was created to solve an in-house problem. The name was a homage to a contraption built by a Hungarian nobleman , featuring a bearded mannequin in a turban, that dazzled Europe with its chess-playing expertise. The moves were actually executed by a magnet-wielding human hidden beneath the board. Mechanical Turk opened to the public in with considerable fanfare.
One requester I talked to has found MTurk quite effective. For a year, Ryan Schefke, the founder of a Texas company called Lead Liaison, has used turkers to transcribe business cards that salespeople collect at events. Multiple turkers transcribe the cards to yield 99 percent accuracy, and the turnaround from the moment a customer scans a card is 10 to 12 minutes, Mr.
Schefke said. A turker is paid 3 cents per card. Many major corporations have availed themselves of Mechanical Turk.
The New York Times Company has used turkers for at least three data projects. MTurk also has big fans in the social sciences. Over 50, academic studies are conducted using MTurk each year, according to Leib Litman, a founder of CloudResearch, a company that helps researchers use the platform. Turking is not always low-paying. Amber Smoot is good at turking. When the script catches a task that pays a dollar or more, her computer blasts a snippet of operatic rock and she grabs the HIT and sets it aside until she has a bunch.
She spends a lot of time on message boards that offer tips to rookies. But there was one place where Milland knew she could get work immediately. Rather, it had built the website as a way to integrate human intelligence with code—as a service for programmers. An entrepreneur once pitched me an app that—through his proprietary system—would provide accurate calorie estimates for meals based only on a photo. Sure enough, shortly later, I found a posting on Mechanical Turk for the company that asked workers to label the food.
The technology was humans. But it looked like magic. She also took on more complicated tasks. It was a matter of doing the work quickly and sticking with it for a long time.
No matter where Milland was in her house, if she heard the alarm go off, she would run to her computer. There were thousands of other Mechanical Turk workers competing with each other to grab the high-paying work, which was assigned to whoever could claim it first.
Milland would sleep in her office so that she could listen for the alarm to go off at night without waking her husband. When she spotted good tasks, often through her alarm system, she used an automated tool to keep her queue full with the maximum 25 tasks that could be assigned to her at one time, and then worked furiously to finish them and grab more before they were snatched by other people.
The first was that people often asked the same questions, and Milland had compiled a spreadsheet of answers that made these common questions quick to answer. She could get through a batch of several hundred in about five minutes. Each question might only pay pennies, but this bonus was significant.
It meant that Milland never wanted to miss a batch. Her routine was to listen for the alarm, complete the batch in five minutes, take 10 minutes off, and then get back to work when the next batch of questions dropped.
Today, more and more jobs are done at a computer, designing new products or analyzing data or writing code. But technology is also enabling a new type of terrible work, in which Americans complete mind-numbing tasks for hours on end, sometimes earning just pennies per job.
Largely unregulated, these sites allow businesses and individuals to post short tasks and pay workers—in cash or, sometimes, gift cards—to complete them. A recent Mechanical Turk listing, for example, offered workers 80 cents to read a restaurant review and then answer a survey about their impressions of it; the time limit was 45 minutes.
These are not, by and large, difficult tasks—someone with just a high-school education could complete them easily. And they may seem like one-off jobs, done for money on the side by people with a surplus of idle time. But a growing number of people are turning to platforms like Mechanical Turk for the bulk of their income, despite the fact that the work pays terribly.
A Pew Research Center survey found that 25 percent of workers who earned money from online job platforms like Mechanical Turk, Uber, and TaskRabbit went on these sites because there was no other available work in their area. I talked to one such woman, a year-old named Erica, who performs tasks for Mechanical Turk from her home in southern Ohio.
Erica asked to use only her first name because, she says, she read on Reddit that speaking negatively about Amazon has led to account suspensions. Amazon did not reply to a request for comment about this alleged practice. The only other work she was able to find was a hour-a-week minimum-wage job training workers at a factory how to use computers. In the county where Erica lives, only about half of people 16 years or older are employed, compared to 58 percent for the rest of the country. One-quarter of people there earn below the poverty line.
But there are other reasons she makes so little that have to do with the nature of the platform. The tasks that pay the best and take the least time get snapped up quickly by workers, so Erica must monitor the site closely, waiting to grab them. Requesters use Mechanical Turk because they can farm out menial work on the cheap and get that work done quickly—with hundreds of workers each transcribing one minute of an audio file, for example, a final product can be returned in short order.
Other sites like Crowdspring, which is an online marketplace for graphic design and other creative services, and Snapwire, a photo-crowdsourcing site, allow companies to get creative work done at a low cost. On most of these sites, requesters hold more leverage.
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