Amazon and the mechanical Turk--crowd-sourcing or out-sourcing?: guest blog by Spencer Roddan
In true amazonian fashion, Amazon has another dimension to its sprawling on-line domain that I was completely unaware of until recently: out-sourcing to the masses. They're calling it The Mechanical Turk, and it's a pretty nifty way to hire a workforce to perform menial digital tasks at starvation wages.
I found the Mechanical Turk a few weeks ago and was very excited to see if it really was an opportunity to make some extra money. Even with all the on-line scams, Amazon's offer seemed promising: it is Amazon afterall, it had to be somewhat legitimate. So I signed up and waited for them to approve my application, which they did, and started on my first "task": to enter a search term into a search search engine and find the results that had a list of some sort of ordinal data, i.e. ranked best to worst. I was instructed to copy the top 3 and then to link them to the site where the information was found.
Easy money, right? Not really. Fill out one of these forms and you get .50 cents! After warming up on a few of these forms, I found I could do each one in about 8 minutes, which works out to be a whopping $3.75 an hour...I made more than that working behind the counter at a deli when I was in high school. This 'payscale' couldn't be true, could it? I didn't expect to make a fortune--I'm a grad student with a young family--but maybe I could pick up some money in my spare time.
Makes you wonder too what all these tasks and the companies paying for these tasks to be completed with this data? Obviously, Amazon is making their $$millions from it or they wouldn't be doing it. This would seem to be an extremely notable development in the workforce! Particularly since Amazon is often an early leader or inventor of new, purely digital 'opportunities' and markets. Think AWS (Amazon Web Services), Amazon PlayStore etc. etc. Breaking new ground and making up rules as they go along, the way of the tech world.
This is uncharted territory in the labor world, and many questions come to mind. Do minimum wage laws apply? How are Mechanical Turk workers taxed? And of course, what's up with the name Mechanical Turk? Can workers be foreign nationals, in effect out-sourced labor? Are workers sub-contractors who will need to obtain a 1099? Like torrent platform and digital piracy, does Amazon simply provide a forum for employers to procure workers thereby relieving themselves of any responsibility? Is Amazon beholden to the employers or the employees?
I worked enough on Mechanical Turk to see some jobs through, making a total of about $4.00 (four dollars) for my efforts.
Money's money though and I became interested in learning how Amazon arranged for their "employees" to be paid. I was hoping for Paypal or a bank transfer option. I found there are two ways to get paid by Amazon--Amazon Payments and Amazon Gift Cards. With Amazon Pay it's possible to transfer money into an outside Amazon account, but the process was designed for online merchants, isn't easy to set up, and there's probably (no doubt) a fee involved. This leaves Amazon Gift Card as the easiest and quickest way to be compensated...HA!
Thus I came to the end of my Mechanical Turk experience. Thanks Amazon, always a pleasure doing business with you.
Spencer Roddan is a student in the G.I.S. program at the University of Utah. Married and the father of two young children, Mr. Roddan lives in Salt Lake City where he makes music, reads, and tends his garden, when not studying for an exam or attentding a lab. Roddan's now convinced that there are much more profitable ways to spend his time than being a Mechanical Turk slave to Amazon.
For more information on this topic, please look here:
https://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html
https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/4/733177/amazon-mechanical-turk-workforce-digital-labor