Mechanical Turk – Is it for you? p.2

Okey.. :) You click on the link in the HIT to the site and are soon bogged down in page after page of about various “offers”. Eventually you simply abandon that HIT and look for another that may be a bit more legitimate. The next HIT down also wants the Turk worker to check the "functionality" of a website, and like the HIT before it, it also wants accurate information. In addition it states that in order to be paid you need to live in the U.S. , need have a cell phone (to test their SMS text functionality) and also when the test text comes through, you need to answer “YES” to it in order to complete the HIT and be paid. The HIT is offering to pay $5.00, so you decide to take it and click through to the link listed.  At about the forth page of filling in information, you look at the small print and realize that you are signing up for a pay SMS service to send jokes to your phone at $10 a pop.  About that time, your notice that your e-mail inbox is filling up with all sorts of offers from various SPAM sources and start to wonder if maybe you shouldn’t have been using your personal e-mail account when working those last two HITS. Alarmed you also abandon this HIT and quickly realize that many of top paying HITS seem to be fraudulent. You decide to take a different tact, and for the next half hour your cruise through various HITS (sorted various ways). Some are ridiculous, like offering to pay $1.00 for a 500 word article – or $0.50 to rewrite an essay. You also see a lot wanting to have you “like” their Facebook page. Since these are no brainers and you search the available HITS to specifically for “Facebook” and start clicking like all over the place. Sure, your friends may wonder what you’re up to and most if these HITS only pay a penny, but a penny is a penny! There are also some surveys and you complete a few of those as well. The surveys pay a little more, but they take longer if you conscientiously do them. You go back to the top jobs that have the largest number of HITS available per job. You see those two low paying jobs and decide to skip them – but also realize that out of the top ten jobs – you are not qualified for five of them (since you do not speak Arabic, or live in France). After an hour of trolling various random HITS, you take a look at your account and see that you picked up another $1.81. So far, you have three hours invested and realize that you made a grand total of $5.11. Not that you have any of that money right now – the HITS need to be approved still (which you later find out can take several days). At this point, you navigate over to the San Francisco Chronicle’s online website and start looking through the help wanted ads. This story basically shows you some of the benefits and drawbacks of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Some of the biggest pros being: there are always jobs (HITS) available to work and much of it is very easy to do. In addition, since the money is held in your Amazon Payments account, you can convert it to an Amazon gift card; send it to other people if they have an Amazon Payments account or even transfer it to your bank account (at least, you can transfer it to your bank account, as mentioned, if you are in the U.S. or India – otherwise your stuck with the Amazon gift card option). There are also some cons to the site as well. Some of these include fraudulent HITS that data mine your personal information or attempt to sign you up to pay services (both of which are actually in violation of the terms of Mechanical Turk – you can report these HITS to Mechanical Turk to have them removed), no one vetting the jobs (HITS) posted for legitimacy, the ability of a requestor to unilaterally reject work. Also most of the total HITS available seem to be tied to the top ten job (HIT) requests (for example, on January 5, 2011 there were a total of 96,734 total HITS available over a total of 1491 different jobs, however almost 50% of them (47,692) were tied to the top ten jobs), a chunk of HITS not being available to you at any given time for various reasons (such as the country you live in; the language you speak, etc. – for example, on that day in January, of the 1491 jobs available, I was only qualified for 1092 of them (of the top ten, I qualified for five). In my research of this site however, I found that, far and away, the biggest takeaway to Mechanical Turk to be the actual pay. It quickly becomes apparent that there seems to be no legitimate way for a person to even make something even close to equivalent to the U.S. minimum wage. The current U.S. Federal minimum wage is $7.25 and in my story above, I used the minimum wage of $9.92 for the city of San Francisco, CA (since one of the largest job requesters is headquartered in that city). Of the top ten HITS available, I took two of them (verifying Google search results and verifying veterinarian’s addresses) and did a number of HITS to get an idea of how long they would take – and then extrapolated those results out to an hour’s time for each. Wondering if a site like Mechanical Turk is facilitating a work around of the U.S. ’s Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) – in particular to the minimum wage portion of it (especially since some of the jobs were locked into U.S. workers only), I started asking around. I got no reply at all from Amazon, a Labor attorney and California Labor Federation (a labor union organization).Undaunted, I also asked the U.S. Department of Labor, the San Francisco Labor Standards Enforcement, CrowdFlower (aka Delores Labs - the San Francisco based company that by far and away is the largest requester of HITS on Mechanical Turk) and a person who works as a Business Agent for a union. The U.S. Department of Labor gave me a couple of links to check to see if a worker would be covered by the FLSA or be considered an independent contractor, as well as directing me to the local office if I had any more questions. The San Francisco Labor Standards Enforcement stated that minimum wage does not cover independent contractors and that they could not offer an opinion or interpret federal or state law in that regard. CrowdFlower rudely brushed my inquiry aside as they felt I was not a legitamate enough writer to respond to. And the Union Business Agent felt that such a weighty question would be better answered by a well-trained labor law attorney, and referred me to the California Labor Federation. He did feel however (in his own, personal opinion), that “these folks [the workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk] aren't smart enough to know they are getting [messed over] (if they are) out of their Federal and/or State minimum wage. ” But he also added the caveat that they would need to be actual employees to be covered by the FLSA, not sub or independent contractors. So, what do you think Tech Tip crowd? Is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for you? Is it a legitimate way to earn some extra cash by doing easy (almost mindless) tasks, or is it an exploitative website that preys on a desperate work force? Chime in on the comments section and let your voice be heard.

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