Want to improve crowdwork? Regulate it

Valerio De Stefano

Janine Berg

Crowdwork is the casual work of the 21st century. Like other forms of casual work, crowd work is characterized by lack of job security and few, if any, labour protections. But with day labourers, dockworkers, and agricultural hands – probably the types of casual work that most readily come to mind – work is at least for the day. In the on-demand economy, it is for the task at hand. This can be as short as a few kilometers’ drive or ten minutes spent tagging photos on the internet. Lucas Biewald, the CEO of the micro-task platform Crowdflower, once quipped that ‘before the Internet it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes’. Now instead, ‘you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore’ (quoted in Marvit, 2014).

The ‘Turker’, the Uber driver, or the graphic artist working on an online design platform must continuously search for work, monitoring their computer screens or phones for work opportunities. Indeed, in a recent ILO survey on employment and working conditions in two leading micro-task crowdwork platforms, it was found that workers averaged 18 minutes looking for work for every hour working (Berg, 2016). As an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker from the United States put it, 

The toughest part of turking for a living is actually finding the jobs. For every hour I spend working I most likely spend 2 hours monitoring the various scripts I have running to see what jobs show up (Quoted in Berg, 2016:14)

Uber: do not take us for a ride!

Claire Clarke

Mac Urata

The ‘sharing economy’ is changing the landscape of work by promoting a model that provides easy access to work but further casualises the workforce. Work has evolved from long-term employment to a series of jobs, and has now again been reduced to the delivery of unique tasks.

Transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber are driving the growth of less formal work in passenger transport via a business model that challenges the traditional approach to the supply and demand of passenger transport as well as the way in which value is created, distributed and controlled. These companies promote themselves as electronic marketplaces that connect customers with drivers. They claim they are not taxi operators, and therefore operate outside existing industry regulations on licensing requirements, insurance, and driver screening.

Uber claims to offer flexibility for its ‘partners’ (users and drivers), but driving for Uber can be tough. Many media reports suggest that Uber drivers are not earning the legally required minimum wage. In some cases, drivers make no money at all from some shifts.

Crowd Work: Shame, Secrets, and an Imminent Threat to Employment

Kristy Milland

You may have no idea what crowd work is, and that is understandable. Most people do not. Crowd work is not a job that many aspire to, nor is it one that workers are necessarily proud of. It may not carry as much shame as some other jobs, but due to the low pay and unfair treatment workers often experience, it is not a job to boast about.

Crowd work comes in a variety of forms, but I define it as any paid work which is offered to or completed by a large group of people. Crowd work is the dirty secret of major corporations. It is a rising threat to economies and governments around the world, and it could be a future for many people as they try to make a living. In this article I wish to reveal the exploitation of crowd work, the pressing threat it has become when paired with automation, and some possible avenues of resistance that we can use to protect ourselves and our loved ones in a future where this is the only option left for income generation. I want to show the reality of crowd work and how harmful it could become.

An Introduction to the Platforms
A few major forms of crowd work are found today. The first are macro-task platforms such as Upwork, Uber, and Fiverr, where work is offered to a large group of people, but only one completes it. Competition is fierce, so pay declines over time, and worker reputation, which is key to accessing more work, is totally in the hands of the work requester.