
Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk? - xacaxulu
http://priceonomics.com/who-makes-below-minimum-wage-in-the-mechanical/
======
Mz
I have never gotten into Mechanical Turk, but I do freelance work online. My
"hourly wage" depends in part on how together I am. I am medically
handicapped. Some days, I am fairly together and can make around $12/hour --
not dissimilar form what I was making at a corporate job after a few pay
raises. On a so-so day, it can take me forever to complete tasks, lowering my
"hourly wage." However, I still need the money, even if the hourly wage is not
great. (Edit: On a bad day, I typically do not work. And I don't get fired for
missing a lot of days. This was a constant worry at my corporate job.)

Do I wish I earned more per hour? Sure. But I worry about people who want to
"improve" conditions for people choosing to do this kind of work. I cannot
take a normal job and have any hope of getting well and staying well. I walked
away from a corporate job because it was helping to keep me sick.

For me, this kind of low wage work buys me precious freedom and control over
my life. If you take it from me, I am left with what? Panhandling?
Prostitution? ...??? I don't know what I would be left with. But people making
$100/hour should butt the hell out with their excessively privileged ideas
about "good working conditions" and let people like me have some freedom to
choose. It isn't like most people actually give a damn how hard life is for me
or others like me.

~~~
capisce
> If you take it from me, I am left with what? Panhandling? Prostitution?
> ...???

Is there no welfare for people who aren't able to make a living in your
country?

~~~
santaclause33
Welfare in the US (ssi in his case, since he has a disability) is a
pathetically small amount, and a headache to get.

~~~
Mz
_She_ has a disability. And I do not qualify for ssi.

I have cystic fibrosis. I am getting myself well when doctors say it cannot be
done. Having CF does not qualify you for disability. You qualify based on
having allowed infection to eat away enough of your lungs so as to have
reduced lung capacity below a certain threshold. Based on my last x-rays and
the fact that it no longer hurts like a bitch to breathe, the hole in my left
lung appears to be gone. So I will never qualify for disability. I am too
competent.

------
hugh4
I can see some appeal to making a miniscule amount of money in my spare time
on Mechanical Turk. I mean, I already spend my spare time doing pointless
tasks such as solving crossword puzzles and commenting on things.

I would see it as a game where the goal is to try and make as much money as
possible with as little work. I can also see that unemployed people might
enjoy it just as a way of feeling like they're doing something worthwhile.

Certainly, since I don't need the money, I'd much rather earn $3 an hour on
Mechanical Turk, sitting at home and picking and choosing what I feel like
doing, than $7.25 an hour in a minimum-wage job.

~~~
chjohasbrouck
I tried Mechanical Turk years and years ago. At that time there were really no
tasks available that paid an amount that could consistently get you anywhere
close to minimum wage.

The only ones that seemed appealing on the surface were these audio
transcriptions. I type over 100wpm and 9 minutes of audio took me over an hour
to transcribe. I got like $2, and never even bothered withdrawing it.

If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum
wage, I'd be shocked.

Since most of the tasks pay even far worse than transcription, and there's a
significant unpaid time investment acquiring the tasks and getting them
approved, and most people probably try a few tasks before leaving and never
even ask for a check, I'd guess the average payout for people working on
Mechanical Turk is much less than a dollar per hour.

I've always wondered how it's legal.

~~~
iopq
I've read some articles about it and most people who make $5 an hour or more
tend to choose tasks efficiently that they can complete quickly without
spending too much attention on.

If you rush through easier tasks you can complete them in a few minutes doing
a good enough job to get paid.

------
sparkzilla
I run a crowdsourced content site that is a kind of Wikipedia for news (see my
profile for link). When we first started we wanted to attract Wikipedia
writers, who write for free. Those writers are mainly young, white Americans,
like the Mechanical Turk writers mentioned in the article. But they wouldn't
come over, because they like fighting on Wikipedia for free.

So I offered $1 per post to write 50-100 words summaries of the news.
Depending on the content a writer could add four to eight posts an hour,
getting faster at it as they improved their skills. We had about 50 writers on
the program, but could easily have had many more. We were overwhelmed with
people wanting to join the program and had over 1000 people on our waiting
list.

At first, But the $1-per-post program attracted a whole different community:
mainly women, many of them minorities, who like to work-at-home. We actually
saw this as a big plus because they were no-nonsense about doing the work, and
gave diversity to the content, something Wikipedia struggles with. We paid out
in Paypal and some people would literally do some work so they could get some
food for that day.

I think too many companies think of crowdsourcing as a way to get cheap work,
but it's really good to get diverse workers.

After paying out $20,000 for 20,000 posts we changed to a revenue-share
system, where writers earn more as the site grows. That presents a different
challenge: finding writers who will put in work now, with the hope of a bigger
payout later.

~~~
savanaly
Would be interesting to see some side by side comparisons of the content
written by the minorities versus white male teen suburbanite (ideally
evaluated objectively by someone who doesn't know who wrote it) to see what
the tangible results are of a diverse writing staff.

~~~
sparkzilla
The amount of "creative" writing on our site is very limited. Each post in our
system has to follow a particular format, and we have a feedback loop so that
the writer can improve their posts, based on those formats. For example a
movie post is formatted in a very specific way [1].

I found no difference at all between the output of minorities and white
writers. A bigger and more rigorous sample would have given more insight. It's
interesting because Wikipedia is known for its gender gap: 90% of its writers
are young, white, highly educated males. So therefore most people think that
Wikipedia-like content can only created by those kind of people. Instead, I
found I could create _almost exactly the same content_ by restricting the
format and the users actions, irrespective of the class of person adding the
information. In fact, as the site stands it was created maybe 70% by women.

[1] [http://help.newslines.org/knowledge-base/add-a-movie-
post/](http://help.newslines.org/knowledge-base/add-a-movie-post/)

~~~
savanaly
Oh ok. I remain always curious about the benefit of diversity in these
projects then. It is constantly touted as a good and it makes intuitive sense
to me that it would be, but I was wondering if that manifested in the content
they produced in particular.

~~~
sparkzilla
I see what you mean now. In our site, a larger percentage of women
contributors doesn't affect the quality of the posts, but does add more
diversity to their content. For example, women are more likely to add news
about magazine covers, music performances, and celebrities, while men seem to
prefer to add posts about politics and issues. If we only had men contributors
then the latter would be overrepresented.

We can see the effect of the gender gap on Wikipedia in the content too.
Topics like porn stars, games and politics are overrepresented, while other
topics that women would be more interested in, are neglected.

------
cgriswald
I'm wondering what percentage of Mechanical Turk workers are doing the work
while at their primary job.

------
kruhft
A while back I was using Mechanical Turk as a source for programming problems.
The major issue was that they were distributing a lot of the work to get
around things like the limit of google searches one can do a day (100 I
think), so once the problems were scripted, you could easily break those
barriers.

Certain problems were quite interesting, involving OCR and fuzzy pattern
matching on google rankings, and I'm sure certain ones would make good
research problems. It was fun for a few days, but even when scripted the
amounts you would make were minuscule.

------
bandrami
Hasn't mturk in the years since this article was written essentially frozen
non-US workers out of the system?

~~~
zo1
Non-us requesters, even. I just got this from their site after wanting to
setup an account:

""" _Why is the country set as United States?

At this time Mechanical Turk does not support Requesters from countries
outside the United States. _ """

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ebt
This article is from 2013, not reflected in the HN title.

I seriously doubt the following statement in the article is still true:

"The users of Mechanical Turk are still early adopters, which explains why so
many workers are closer to the median US household income of around $50,000
than to the poverty line."

I did some survey work on MT back then, it was fun for a few days, then became
incredibly mind numbing.

A more recent article on MT (probably posted already to HN):

[http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/408680035/mechanical-turk-
work...](http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/408680035/mechanical-turk-workers-
secret-cogs-in-the-internet-marketplace)

------
lqdc13
>>>$1.13 for writing a verbatim transcript of a 4 minute and 2 second audio
clip

What? That's actually pretty good...

~~~
tracker1
That was my thought as well.. I don't think the majority of tasks will wind up
much under $10/hr for most people. Only Amazon knows what the average person
is making in an average hour of turn around time though. It would be
interesting to find out though.

~~~
pcthrowaway
Spend some time on mechanical turk.. the average transcription task takes a
surprising amount of time to complete. I type 70-90 words per minute and a 30
second transcription might take me 5-6 minutes, due to having to replay parts
over and over, and deal with formatting it according to the requirements

------
amelius
I guess the wages are low because any task has to be verified by another
person (possibly in a consensus-test, where the input of the other person is
verified against your input). Or at least, that's what I'm guessing.

~~~
zappo2938
Duolingo has hundreds of people translating the New York Times into several
languages being paid nothing. (edit) What about people who spend hours
answering questions on Stack Exchange?

American's spend several hours a day watching TV. What if the service gives
people a distraction that they are mentally active in? There might be several
advantages other than monitory performing these tasks over passively sitting
in front of a TV.

~~~
corysama
There was a stat a few years back that if we could redirect 1% of e everyone's
time spent watching TV we could have a new Wikipedia-scale project every 7
weeks. Zoning out has its place, but I bet more than a few percent of TV time
is raw boredom rather than relaxation.

