Labor ethics in Amazon Mechanical Turk: survey of demographics and recommendations
(Thanks to Molly Sauter for pointing me at Panos Ipeirotis’ work)
Hunting down through Panos Ipeirotis’ posts, this demographics of AMT is great:
Turkers come from:
United States: 46.80%
India: 34.00%
Miscellaneous: 19.20%
Based on a survey, it also includes gender, income, and many other questions.
http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html
More, and perhaps even more helpful:
Alex Felstiner’s paper “Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry”
“encourages legislatures to clarify and expand legal protections for crowdsourced employees, and suggests ways for courts and administrative agencies to pursue the same objective within our existing legal framework. It also offers voluntary “best practices” for firms and venues involved in crowdsourcing, along with examples of how crowd workers might begin to effectively organize and advocate on their own behalf.”
http://works.bepress.com/alek_felstiner/1/
Felstiner writes that well-meaning employers are limited to ensuring fair minimum wages, but cites more broadly “the information asymmetries that tilt the scales against crowd workers.” That separates the *ability to be fair* from the *willingness to be as fair as the system permits*. I am much more concerned about whether the use of AMT — even at ethical wage levels — encourages a structurally unfair system.
While this paper (hmm, gotta see if I can get access somewhere) hints at some suggestions for ethical use:
Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine?
Karën Fort, Gilles Adda, K. Bretonnel Cohen
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/COLI_a_00057
John Horton writes about laborer *perceptions* of fairness in AMT:
The Condition of the Turking Class: Are Online Employers Fair and Honest?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.1172
I’d love to see a survey of crowdsourcing venues and an examination of whether laborers are structurally able to pursue fair conditions/wages/protections.
December 7th, 2011 at 7:07 am
We used AMT sometimes at the psych lab I worked at, to get online participants for our studies. I think generally we did pay minimum wage, but that’s in large part (maybe entirely?) because we had internal review boards who were used to ensuring fair payment for our in person subjects.
December 18th, 2011 at 7:27 pm
In addition to labor laws, I’m curious as to what would happen with crowd-sourcing if the project output gets truly innovative. Like, the ethics of appropriating someone’s contribution under a work-for-hire arrangement if a number of people undercompensated for truly creative contributions.
February 8th, 2012 at 11:16 pm
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