Daphne Leprince-Ringuet
| August 5, 2021 — 10:41 GMT (11:41 BST)
| Topic: Productivity
Mechanical Turk requesters outsource paid tasks and processes via the platform, where they are made available to workers, or Turkers.
Image: Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty Images
About a year ago, shortly after having a baby boy, Brittany set out to find ways that she could contribute financially as a stay-at-home mum. She soon discovered the crowdsourced work marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) – and after working her way through the platform, started landing jobs that pay up to $50 per hour.
At times, she laughs, she is even making more money than her husband.
That is not to say that the “good work” came easily. Some savvy Googling and a few Reddit channels got things moving, but she still remembers starting off with “crappy stuff”.
In a much-publicized example, Uber drivers organized a collective strike in 2019, which spanned 25 cities across five continents, and led to the publication of a manifesto asking, among other things, for the right for all app-based drivers to form unions.
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Following these events, Uber recently lost a court battle in the UK over how its drivers are classified, potentially paving the way for workers to claim holiday pay or a minimum wage. Shortly after, in another landmark ruling, Uber went one step further and agreed to recognize that the GMB trade union would have the power to represent UK drivers in discussions over earnings, pensions, benefits and so on.
Such organization is harder for purely online workers, but they are trying to improve their situation in other ways. Turkopticon, for example, has started setting up international discussions, bringing Turkers together to come up with “action plans” to make turking work better for the workers. And in a recent move that seems to reflect the desire to organize even more formally, the platform united with labor rights group Tech Workers Coalition to launch its first fundraiser.
It’s still the case, of course, that the power that online communities of Turkers have when it comes to influencing the policies of a tech behemoth such as Amazon remains very limited. In other words, when negotiating working conditions, the terms of the debate are still very much out of the hands of the workers.
One Turker, who goes by the name Tjololo, spent years making “beer money” as a Turker on the platform, before he started liaising with requesters to help them make a better use of AMT – a side-hustle that he does for fun more than anything else, in parallel to working a nine-to-five job.
Tjololo regularly participates in online communities of Turkers like Turkopticon; in his opinion, however, going so far as to call those groups a new form of unionizing might be pushing it.
“I agree that the various communities are helpful but I don’t think they’re quite as powerful as a ‘union 2.0’ might imply,” Tjololo tells ZDNet. “We have very little say when it comes to actually changing Amazon’s policies.”
Upgrading the wages recommended by default on AMT, for instance, or creating better channels to dispute rejections, are all actions that are out of Turkers’ hands. Despite the tips, tricks, and tactics shared online, therefore, workers still have little bargaining power when it comes to generating real change.
“We are constantly advocating for higher wages, but the platform is still looked at as a place where you can get work done for less than the minimum wage,” says Tjololo. “A union, I believe, would have direct access to the platform and would be able to make positive change.”
Being part of a much bigger community
MTurkForum, TurkerNation, MTurkCrowd, Turkerhub, TurkerView: alongside Turkopticon, explains Tjololo, there is a huge number of online groups and forums where Turkers communicate on a daily basis, whether to exchange professional advice, complain about the job, or simply to hang out.
From Reddit to Slack channels through WhatsApp groups, Turkers have gathered all over the web and social media, in groups often marked by a strong sense of belonging to the same community.
To communicate, they use everything from Slack to Discord to Facebook to forums, says Tjololo, and even some IRC channels that are still floating around.
Michael (not his real name) who has been turking for a couple of years now, describes a similar experience.
He quickly turned to online forums and communities dedicated to AMT, initially hunting for advice about turking, but soon found that the groups were also about banding together and encouraging each other. Office-based small talk, it would seem, would pale in comparison to AMT’s most popular discussion platforms.
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Daphne Leprince-Ringuet
| August 5, 2021 — 10:41 GMT (11:41 BST)
| Topic: Productivity