{"id":3020,"date":"2011-05-25T20:08:17","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T00:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=3020"},"modified":"2011-05-25T20:17:36","modified_gmt":"2011-05-26T00:17:36","slug":"exploitation-and-amazons-mechanical-turk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2011\/05\/25\/exploitation-and-amazons-mechanical-turk\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploitation and Amazon&#8217;s Mechanical Turk"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2011\/05\/MechanicalTurk.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3021\" src=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2011\/05\/MechanicalTurk.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"487\" height=\"181\" srcset=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2011\/05\/MechanicalTurk.jpg 1325w, https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2011\/05\/MechanicalTurk-300x110.jpg 300w, https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2011\/05\/MechanicalTurk-1024x378.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 487px) 100vw, 487px\" \/><\/a>Since 2007, the US federal minimum wage has been set at $7.15 an hour, yet workers on Amazon&#8217;s Mechanical Turk\u2014many of whom live in the US\u2014make an average of $2 (according to the estimates of Mechanical Turk researcher <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.umd.edu\/hcil\/soh\/tutorials-workshops.shtml#t1\" target=\"_blank\">Alex Quinn<\/a>).\u00a0 As illustrated in the above image, Amazon, itself, encourages businesses (at least implicitly) to pay workers (or &#8220;turkers&#8221; as they are called) less-than-minimum wages.\u00a0 Moreover, to even qualify for these low-paying tasks called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), turkers are often expected to complete unpaid training sessions that can last for up to an hour.\u00a0 Also, because turkers receive micro-payments for each task and because the time to completion for each task is rationalized to the second, turkers receive no pay during normal periods of rest during the workday.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Mechanical Turk is a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Crowdsourcing\" target=\"_blank\">crowdsourcing<\/a> platform that allow anyone to recruit laborers for short online tasks, which cannot be effectively completed by computers.\u00a0 For examples, turkers might compile contact information for various businesses, sort through images and tag offensive ones, or participate in university research experiments.\u00a0 Because of the piecemeal and spatially-disembedded nature of the work, it is virtually unregulated.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Can we simply dismiss this subversion of labor laws\u2014as some commentators have\u2014on the grounds that &#8220;$2 an hour is a decent wage in India?&#8221;\u00a0 Even if we are angered by this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CBsQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fijoc.org%2Fojs%2Findex.php%2Fijoc%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F250%2F125&amp;rct=j&amp;q=fuchs%20mechanical%20turk&amp;ei=gJjdTZTeOcTf0QHKnNHrDw&amp;usg=AFQjCNFMvBA7DZpDUtqg1KtKDJGYMy4_XA&amp;sig2=7cPd6K4sVclWShwJPIj2rA&amp;cad=rja\" target=\"_blank\">exploitation<\/a> of turkers, is it even possible to regulate an international platform of this sort?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since 2007, the US federal minimum wage has been set at $7.15 an hour, yet workers on Amazon&#8217;s Mechanical Turk\u2014many of whom live in the US\u2014make an average of $2 (according to the estimates of Mechanical Turk researcher Alex Quinn).\u00a0 As illustrated in the above image, Amazon, itself, encourages businesses (at least implicitly) to pay [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":563,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[10707,1336,10708,2704,143,8495,10709],"class_list":["post-3020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-alex-quinn","tag-amazon","tag-christian-fuchs","tag-exploitation","tag-labor","tag-mechanical-turk","tag-turkers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/563"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3020"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3038,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3020\/revisions\/3038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}