
Who Makes Below Minimum Wage in the Mechanical Turk Sweatshop? - narad
http://priceonomics.com/who-makes-below-minimum-wage-in-the-mechanical/
======
hooande
Mechanical Turk and its ilk are very important. One of the biggest barriers to
achievements in machine learning and optimization is a lack of processed and
labelled data. A lot of statistical inference is about algorithms and
formulae, but in most cases the key issue is having enough data. It doesn't
matter how fancy your technology is if you don't have lots and lots of clearly
labelled samples.

Mechanical Turk (and crowdflower and a few other services) are important
bridges for this. People can do important labeling and cleaning work for a
cost that's affordable enough to be practical. Right now most of the work is
translation, address finding or quasi spammy tasks. But the service itself has
a lot of potential to do things that impact our lives in the future.
Mechanical Turk workers can improve startups by helping with personalization
and automation tasks, help with science and defense by labeling images and aid
in all kinds of language processing and computer vision tasks that could make
things cheaper and better for all of us.

It's good to see human capital being utilized, even if it is ont he cheap. For
what it's worth, amazon does recommend that people set the pricing on their
mturk tasks so that they come out to something close to minimum wage. Though
I'm not sure that things like this are what the minimum wage was designed for.
Completing online labeling tasks is a far cry from working in an actual sweat
shop. It would be nice if there was some sort of exception for technical piece
work. Mechanical Turk isn't nearly popular enough right now, but in the future
as machine learning becomes more common there will be a serious demand for
these tasks. I hope we can find a way to let people do data preparation work
while avoiding virtual dickensian conditions of a kind of data processing
industrial revolution.

~~~
overgryphon
If this type of work is important, then why does it not provide minimum wage?
For what reason should Mechanical Turk be an exception?

~~~
enraged_camel
Legally speaking, the workers are paid as contractors rather than employees.
They set their own hours and are not under any obligation to accept work they
don't want to do. As such, they don't have to pay payroll taxes and are not
subject to laws such as minimum wage.

~~~
grecy
> _not under any obligation to accept work they don 't want to do_

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

~~~
diminoten
Only a small percentage of workers are using MTurk as a primary source of
income, so I wouldn't agree with the assertion that "things must be pretty
bad".

~~~
grecy
You think that people working for less than minimum wage is not a problem?

~~~
enraged_camel
The bigger point you need to understand is that if minimum wage was enforced
at MTurk, it would significantly raise the prices, and many requesters would
simply stop using the service. This would result in less work for everyone.

~~~
grecy
By that logic, no jobs should have a minimum wage, lest it drive up the price
of having employees and then there would be less work for everyone.

~~~
zwily
That's right. It's the common argument against minimum wage, which a lot of
people argue.

~~~
krapp
Given a choice between fewer jobs in which employees are actually able to
support themselves and more where they can't, the former seems the more humane
option...

~~~
icelancer
How do you plan to enforce a global minimum wage where employers cannot simply
shift labor?

~~~
grecy
If the end goal was not profit, this would not be a problem.

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.

~~~
icelancer
>If the end goal was not profit, this would not be a problem.

I suggest you try your experiment on sentient creatures that are not motivated
by utility. I am unaware of any at this point, however.

~~~
grecy
Humans managed about 200,000 years of doing exactly that.

~~~
diminoten
I find the past 200,000 years of "management" unacceptable and largely void of
progress. Only once sufficient incentive was established in what we now know
as a capitalistic global market did we see humans as a species begin to solve
existential problems at a race previously reserved for science fiction and
fantasy.

------
incision
I've been fascinated by the mturk concept since it launched. I sign in from
time to time and complete tasks that look interesting.

Unfortunately, the service is flooded with $0.02 spam tasks (Register an
account and post ad-copy on a specific forum etc). The highest paying single
tasks routinely involve translation/transcription of Arabic.

The most I made from a single task was about $2.30 for 10 minutes, part of
which was completion of a pre-screening task to demonstrate a certain level of
English reading comprehension.

~~~
sliverstorm
The main thing that keeps me from engaging in mturk is finding tasks! I too
like the concept, but I too do not speak Arabic and will not spam for pay.

There were some transcriptionist tasks that looked interesting, but the pre-
screening task was looking for professional transcriptionist level
performance.

 _Minimum_ qualifying WPM was like 70, and the acceptable error rate per
minute was... zero? One? I'm not _that_ good.

~~~
pc86
70 seems like a fairly reasonable rate to select for. If you've been touch
typing for any measurable number of years I would think you'd at least be in
the 70-80 range.

~~~
sliverstorm
I don't know about you, but while I can type at 70WPM for typing tests, I
generally can't sustain it for long periods of time, and my error rate
increases.

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leot
Concerns are misplaced for many reasons.

1) no supervision

2) no dependency on any particular employer

3) ability to choose what to work on

4) ability to choose own hours

5) intrinsic trade-off between job compensation and the speed at which the job
will be completed

6) no requirement that the worker be doing the task exclusively -- the could
be watching TV, or chatting with a friend, or playing a video game

7) No possibility of employer coercion

Here's another scenario: say you were paid to watch ads. Should that be
subject to minimum wage laws? Well, clearly not: we're routinely paid $0 for
the ads we're subjected to.

~~~
e12e
I'm not sure it's accurate to say that we're not paid to watch ads -- we're
not paid a salary -- but often we're given something else. Eg: substantially
reduced prices on magazines, newspapers, tv etc (compared to if the sellers
were to attempt to maintain a similar margin without ads).

Personally I'm in favour of higher prices and less ads and product placement
-- but to say that we're not paid to watch ads sounds a little disingenuous
(while technically true).

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karolisd
Like Airbnb takes advantage of a previously untapped supply of places to
sleep, like Uber takes advantage of a previously untapped supply of driver's
time, Mechanical Turk takes advantage of a previously untapped supply of
people's minds. But is it as profitable?

Why isn't there something that makes it super simple for me to take surveys on
my phone while I wait somewhere? I'd rather answer some marketing questions
for a quarter than play Dots as I wait to meet a friend.

~~~
ctdonath
Looks like there's an opportunity to sell an app for this. A key for
leveraging the untapped brainpower is presenting Mechanical Turk work in a way
akin to many successful games: optimize the interface to a mobile device, make
it "instant on" with pre-filtered options (no/minimal login & other
logistics), just present the next task as something to do in a minute or so
(or skip in a second). Sell that for a buck or $5, pushed as easy for a buyer
to earn back fast. Crack for intellectuals?

~~~
FLUX-YOU
The desktop interface ought to be optimized as well. You could even go as far
as bringing together multiple sites like M-turk to keep your filtered job
queue full (standardized API, anyone?)

It should also be possible to write something to check a bunch of bitcoin
faucet sites and present tasks as they come available (though I suspect that's
less than honest work, heh). Many of those have timers, which are easy to
predict, and video watching can be put in the background so you can do things
in parallel.

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danielharan
Exactly right: concerns about minimum wage are misplaced when the workers are
foreigners. CloudFactory in Nepal pays workers about $1/hour (disclaimer:
visited them, think they're cool, no other affiliation). Terrible for US
workers, more than being a high school teacher in Nepal.

What concerns me more is how all these systems are difficult to use and built
for humans to complete tasks. The next revolution should be letting
programmers use AIs.

~~~
sliverstorm
_The next revolution should be letting programmers use AIs._

Because the only thing stopping them from using AI is that they aren't allowed
to?

~~~
Zircom
I think he's referring to how mturk and other things like it don't allow the
use of AIs, it has to be an actual person.

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mkoble11
While on the subject of mturk, you might find this useful: "Running
Experiments Online Using Amazon Mechanical Turk"
[https://sites.google.com/a/cognitivescience.co/knowledgebase...](https://sites.google.com/a/cognitivescience.co/knowledgebase/resources/crowdsourcing-
participants-and-work-using-amazon-mechanical-turk)

Found it the other day via Steve Blank's amazing list of startup
tools/resources:

[http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-
entrepreneurs/](http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/)

------
ck2
I don't think it's just companies online who use "independent contractors" to
dodge minimum wage. I believe I've seen it firsthand at Walmart where certain
staff are replaced by contracted workers.

Next year the big scam is going to be everyone only works 29 hours. Because at
the 30th hour the corporation has to contribute towards health care.

~~~
acheron
Not sure how the 29-hour thing is a "scam". More like a "completely
foreseeable consequence and understandable policy".

~~~
zzzeek
how do you explain the fact that this was not observed with Massachusetts'
very similar health care system?
[http://www.urban.org/publications/412583.html](http://www.urban.org/publications/412583.html)

~~~
ck2
That PDF shows nothing about full-time vs part-time downgrading. It only shows
employment numbers were not reduced.

In fact by reducing everyone to 29-hours, they could in theory claim to hire
MORE people, while carefully saying nothing about them making a living wage or
the state paying for their insurance vs the employer.

That PDF is actually depressing when you look at the graphs, uninsurance was
only reduced by a little over a third for all that change in policy.

~~~
zzzeek
> That PDF shows nothing about full-time vs part-time downgrading.

From the text:

"To capture potential changes in hours worked in response to health reform, we
also examined trends in full-time and part-time work over time."

> uninsurance was only reduced by a little over a third for all that change in
> policy.

this reduction occurred on top of a trend of great _increases_ in uninsurance
nationwide at the same time:

> Between 2008 and 2010, Massachusetts, the four comparison states, and the
> rest of the nation all experienced sharp drops in employer-sponsored
> coverage, reflecting the impacts of the recession. However, it would appear
> that health reform mitigated the effects of the recession in Massachusetts
> on employer-sponsored coverage to some extent, as the level of employer-
> sponsored coverage in Massachusetts, which was below that of the four
> comparison states prior to health reform, moved above the level in those
> states after health reform and has remained at a higher level.

------
jgh
Last time I checked you could do pretty good with the audio transcription
tasks if you have the knack for it (minimal stopping/replaying parts). The
surveys usually aren't worth it but sometimes you'll get one that's only a
couple of questions..

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jrokisky
I did Mturk for a few months while traveling. Occasionally I was able to make
~7.00 an hour, but the average was closer to 2.50. The work is mind-numbing
and underpaid.

~~~
pc86
If it's mind-numbing, doesn't that by definition mean it's not worth paying
very well?

~~~
e12e
Standing watch is mind numbing, but can be associated with risk - and isn't
always paid terribly low.

------
nawitus
Has anyone made an AI that can complete some of the tasks?

~~~
shurcooL
I wanted to, but they specifically forbid this.

As the article mentions, the tasks are supposed to be those which cannot be
easily automated and require the attention of a human.

~~~
nawitus
What's the reason to forbit automation? If they cannot be automated, then they
won't be.

~~~
xlevus
Mturk can be used as a source for automation training.

If you start writing bots to do the tasks, you're now the mostly-blind leading
the blind.

~~~
dasmoth
That could be addressed by having an optional meatbags-only flag when creating
tasks.

~~~
jiggy2011
I guess it may also be for quality. For example it's not inconceivable that
one could write an audio transcription bot that is quite good and may be good
enough for a lot of tasks, but still not as good as a human and may fail quite
badly at complex tasks.

Once the market gets flooded with bots, the buyers will work out what's going
on and start to lower their offers to cover the risk of getting a bot
transcription. Then the real humans leave.

And of course, if a task can be fully automated then amazon would prefer to
integrate it into their cloud offering and take all of the profit themselves.

~~~
nawitus
Amazon has to deal with the quality of human workers, too. It shouldn't matter
who is behind the work.

>And of course, if a task can be fully automated then amazon would prefer to
integrate it into their cloud offering and take all of the profit themselves.

And that's what Amazon should do if they could.

~~~
jiggy2011
Humans are more likely to care about reputation than bot herders who can
trivially flood the market with programs which will work 24 hours a day. As
soon as you allow bots, it becomes 99% bots very quickly.

You would also get people doing some work themselves to build reputation up
and then swapping in a bot.

It would be quite interesting to build a dedicated market for bots. Just let
people upload scripts with a documented input/output format and then pay the
developer a royalty each time it is run.

~~~
nawitus
From Amazon's perspective it doesn't matter if the user is a bot or a user. An
user can also work themselves to build reputation up and then start doing low-
quality work to increase pay. If you can't create a market for humans, you
can't create a market for humans and bots.

~~~
jiggy2011
The selling point of MT is that you can get human tasks done, if bots chase
the humans out they loose that. It's similar to marketplaces like etsy in that
regard.

~~~
nawitus
Who are "they"? Amazon shouldn't care if the turks are humans or bots, they'll
make the same dollar in any case. The people who create tasks for turks
shouldn't care either: they just want stuff done.

The point of MT is that it's a market for jobs that cannot be easily
automated. If someone can automate the task then so be it, it doesn't matter.

The point of MT is not a market place for "tasks that can only be done by
humans", it's a market place for "tasks that can't be automated easily,
therefore everyone and everything should have an opportunity to complete the
task by any means what-so-ever. if you can only complete tasks on drugs then
so be it. if you can only complete tasks by writing a bot so be it.". The
seller just wants task to be completed cheaply.

~~~
jiggy2011
The advantage of listing a job on MT vs finding a program to run is that you
know it is at least reviewed by a human being who cares somewhat about their
reputation within the system.

Once that guarantee goes away you affect the value of all transactions within
the market. What is commonly known as a "Lemon market effect".

------
n3rdy
You may not make minimum wage recycling cans either, so lets shut down those
bottle and can returns too!

------
cm2012
You can do minimum wage if you write proper english for some of the
description stuff.

~~~
nfailor
that was an underpaid job ten years ago when it was called technical writing.
barely above minimum in mturk is a sad direction.

~~~
sliverstorm
The saddest part is the consequences. The quality of technical writing has
fallen dramatically over the years.

