The assigned reading describes a new employment category that refers to crowdsourcing jobs. The new market that has been on the rise due to artificial intelligence creating what the book refers to as “Ghost work”. Ghost work differs from typical jobs by being task based, done remotely, flexible hours, and endless tasks. Ghost workers do tasks like: captioning photos, reviewing inappropriate content, and debugging code. Even though these tasks provided some people with jobs that fit their schedules, the labor conditions that they’re working under minimizes their contribution significantly. Nowadays, many tasks posted are preparing training data to develop AI models aiming to automate the task at hand. These tasks are called microtasks but the description is misleading, except by how little they pay. Platforms like MTurk assume that task-doers are interchangable. Anyone can do any task, any time, anywhere. Which masks the importance and value of the person behind the task. People that join these platforms are divided into three types: always online, being the dedicated workers who do 80% of the work, regulars, who work routinely, or experimentalists, who pick up a task or two before moving on.
I believe one of the interesting points the chapter discusses is how ghost work is shaping the future of employment. Traditional full-time employment is no longer the norm in the US. The department of labor shows that only 52% of employers sponsor their employees for benefits. The on-demand gig economy has exceptions when it comes to employment law which taskers sign off when they agree to the terms-of-service as they’re creating their accounts. This makes it difficult for people who consider it their primary job or income source. Hara et al. [1] published a paper showing analysis results of 3.8 million tasks on Mechanical Turk, performed by 2,676 workers and found that those workers earned a median hourly wage of about $2 an hour. Only 4 percent of workers earned more than $7.25 an hour. Earning so little and having the challenge of securing enough tasks makes me question the legality of MTurk and similar platforms. No matter how useful they are. These tasks/jobs are expected to grow and be a bigger part of the economy, it’s time to have laws in place for them to protect those workers and their rights.
Discussion Questions:
- Who is ghost work for?
- How do companies find quality workers?
- What are the benefits of using crowdsourcing systems?
- As the task-based economy grows, how do we ensure that these taskers are well compensated?
- How are the taskers different from freelancers? Or part time gig-workers (uber, grubhub, ..etc)?
- Have you used MTurk in your research?
- What is something new that you learned from this reading?
- How did learning that change your opinion about task based jobs?
- What are the points that you disagree with the authors on?
References:
- Hara, Kotaro, et al. “A data-driven analysis of workers’ earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk.” Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2018.
