Some days, she’ll make $7 over the course of three to four hours.Erica, who has a GED and an associate’s degree in nursing administration, says the work for Mechanical Turk is the only option in the economically struggling town where she lives. And Erica told me that many of the plugins she had downloaded to find high-quality HITs are not compatible with a recent update Amazon made to Mechanical Turk’s website, one reason she’s making less money than she used to.In the worst days of the Great Depression, when desperate workers were undercutting each other to bid for the meager work that was available, the government stepped in and created a floor for wages by passing the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. In the late 18th century, a Hungarian inventor presented a new invention to the Empress of Austria. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

A 2016 Pew Research Center I talked to one such woman, a 29-year-old named Erica, who performs tasks for Mechanical Turk from her home in southern Ohio.
Erica spends 30 hours a week filling out personality questionnaires, answering surveys, and performing simple tasks that ask her, for example, to press the “z” key when a blue triangle pops up on her screen. Today, more and more jobs are done at a computer, designing new products or analyzing data or writing code.But technology is also enabling a new type of terrible work, in which Americans complete mind-numbing tasks for hours on end, sometimes earning just pennies per job. Here is a screenshot of this functionality:Any Requester with HITs that may be affected by this change has been notified in advance directly. But there are other reasons she makes so little that have to do with the nature of the platform. By clicking “Filter” in the top right corner of the “HITs | All HITs” page, they can filter to show HITs by reward amount. This means that tasks without payment — most commonly tutorials or tasks that a Requester routes to their own in-house team for testing purposes instead of the broader community of MTurk Workers — will not be shown by default. They’ve created browser plugins to filter good tasks from bad ones, and use sites like Reddit to review requesters. “Here, it’s kind of a dead zone. For some Americans, sub-minimum-wage online tasks are the only work available.Technology has helped rid the American economy of many of the routine, physical, low-paid jobs that characterized the workplace of the last century. “There are more people on these platforms because there are fewer jobs elsewhere that allow people to control their time and workloads so that they can manage other constraints, like family care and other jobs,” Gray told me.Indeed, another Turk user, Valerie, who lives in California’s Central Valley, told me that there are more people competing for good tasks now than there were when she started doing work on the site in 2009. (Erica asked to only use her first name because, she says, she read on Reddit that speaking negatively about Amazon has led to account suspensions. A recent Mechanical Turk listing, for example, offered workers 80 cents to read a restaurant review and then answer a survey about their impressions of it; the time limit was 45 minutes.
More on the History of Computers: That’s a larger share of people than the 2 percent who made money from driving through ride-sharing apps, according to that Pew Research Center survey. It’s emblematic of the state of the economy in certain regions of the country that some people consider this type of work to be their only choice. They are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which guarantees workers minimum wage and overtime protections, as well as a host of other benefits. In last week’s blog post, we announced improvements to the MTurk Worker site. We are making this change to directly address feedback from MTurk Workers.For Workers who would like to continue browsing these HITs, they can simply adjust their filter settings.

)Erica’s experience with Mechanical Turk is not an anomaly. While there are Sometimes, requesters will say that a task will take 20 minutes when it actually takes an hour, Erica says, but by the time she realizes that, she’s devoted enough time to the task that it’s worth completing. To compete, Valerie keeps the site open all day, sometimes waking up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, in order to grab tasks and earn enough money to keep her bills paid.Even with all those hours, she told me, she’s struggling to make $30 a day. On Mechanical Turk, where she spends most of her working hours, Erica looks out for “HITs,” as assignments are called (for “human intelligence task”), that “requesters” are hiring for online. Just as small-business owners are allowed to work for hours on their own and not earn any money, independent contractors like Erica can spend significant time seeking work and completing tasks, and receive very little in return for doing so.The problem is not necessarily that requesters are underpaying for the work. The Mechanical Turk is the eleventh major milestone in the history of computing.

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