Crowdworkers are among the most underpaid and exploited on-demand laborers. So why aren’t they unionized?
There's a popular forum on Reddit for Turkers, the roughly 500,000 people all around the world who are hired by researchers, marketing companies, and the like to do tiny tasks, like gauge the sentiment of a tweet or transcribe an audio snippet, for pennies (or fractions thereof) apiece on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. It's called r/mTurk, and it's a place for Turkers to discuss their work, share tips, and create a sort of virtual watercooler (or Slack room) within a labor force that's fragmented, diffuse, and disorganized.
On Tuesday, a frequent poster who goes by the handle Tyoung916 posted a link to a YouTube video under the headline, "A soundtrack to accompany Mturks price increase taking place tomorrow, July 22nd." This is the video the headline linked to:
As BuzzFeed News reported, last month, Amazon rather abruptly announced that it would be doubling and in some cases quadrupling the commission it collects on each task facilitated by the platform. Both Turkers and requesters, as people who pay them are called, expressed concern that the move — which went into effect this week — would disrupt the delicate balance of the mTurk marketplace. Some posters on r/mTurk predicted that the number of available jobs would decrease by 50%, if not more. Already, they've taken to calling the situation "Turkageddon" or "Turkgate."
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