The Problems with Crowdwork Today

Brent Lessard
rLoop
Published in
5 min readJul 9, 2018

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With the right platform and the right form of governance, crowdwork has the potential to unlock and engage talent from all over the globe, launching innovative technology that can be used to improve the world and humanity.

However, historically — and even still today — the workplace paradigm has shifted. Nowadays, it’s focused on outsourcing microtasks that computer algorithms are unable to handle to humans. The downside? Uncharted legal waters that expose a decentralized, invisible workforce to myriad labor abuse issues.

What is Crowdwork?

Many crowdwork platforms, such as the goliath Amazon Mechanical Turk, provide “Human Intelligence Tasks”. HITs are often easy to complete tasks, such as sorting merchandise into categories based on style.

Such categorizing was the original purpose of Amazon Mechanical Turk. However, it quickly bloomed into a variety of other tasks that all can be completed virtually by people who are willing to be paid pennies.

According to UTNE, “It’s [Amazon Mechanical Turk] spawned a host of imitators and become a massive market, with well over 200,000 workers.” While microtasking is not the entire picture when it comes to crowdwork, it is the fastest growing segment.

Information Gap and Lack of Commitment

Most crowdwork “employees” — currently they exist in a gray area of employment often written off as freelance — sign “clickwrap” agreements when they start, which is usually a page of fine print with an “agree” button that they click at the bottom.

These contracts often contain language that allows the company presenting the task to refuse to accept completed work for any reason, without explanation. Further distancing “clickworker” and the task at hand, these freelancers do not know for what purpose they are completing the task or what company is providing the job.

There are many cases where a clickworker who has completed a task is denied payment without any explanation. Though they may only be out a few cents for the job, the failure impacts their performance rate, which can make it more difficult to get future work. Even those who follow up with a platform attempting to establish why work was rejected are often greeted by silence, which leads to a significant information gap.

The major concern is accountability, as this is an opportunity for major abuses to happen to workers.

To improve the working environment for clickworkers, it’s necessary to provide them with an idea of where they fit into the larger picture, in addition to feedback about their work. For crowdwork that goes beyond microtasking, it becomes even more essential to develop a community and a system that allows for a democratic development of projects.

Why Clickworkers Click

Those in a pinch and those who are balancing other gig work, often look to crowdwork as a way of supplementing their income. The flexibility of being able to work whenever they want and the opportunity to work from home are attractive incentives for those willing to click for pennies per task.

However, the reality is that if a person is working for pennies, they aren’t going to end up with many dollars. Joel Ross, of the University of California Irvine Department of Informatics, estimates that the average hourly wage garnered by clickworkers is $1.25, while another estimate puts it at about $2. Either way, such salaries are far below minimum wage in the United States, where the majority of clickworkers reside.

Co.Design emphasized the point when it wrote, “It’s not necessarily a great way to make extra cash. ‘Clickworkers,’ as they’re called, have no benefits and no rights, and there are no regulations about minimum wage–similar to other elements of the gig economy.”

Of course, there are those who are able to scrape by as professional “Turkers.”

“If a batch [of HITs] comes up and it’s lunchtime, or I have a doctor’s appointment, or my dog needs to go out,” Kristy Milland told TechRepublic. “I drop everything and do it. I’m literally chained to my computer. If this is how you feed your children, you don’t leave.”

Not All Clickers Are Equal

As part of Amazon Mechanical Turk, there is a ranking system for Turkers, some of which qualify as “Master’s Level.”

Despite a great amount of speculation about how one reaches Master’s Level, little is known about why some are given the title and others are not. Rather than clarifying and educating the click workforce, Amazon refuses to reveal their criteria for attaining this level.

This constitutes yet another information gap that leaves workers vulnerable, as when a new HIT is posted, it’s automatically defaulted to find Turkers at the Master’s Level — which costs more for the requester, and pays more for the worker.

Beyond The Dark Side of Crowdwork

The question many come back to when assessing crowdwork is whether or not it’s the democratization of work or exploiting the disempowered, creating a dystopia ahead of an artificial intelligence revolution — much clickwork is actually done to train AI systems.

Though Turkers and other clickworkers are still attempting to make a few extra bucks in an unregulated system where companies have plenty of incentives to look the other way in what would otherwise be considered labor abuses, crowdwork done right offers extraordinary opportunities.

Several years ago, a group of designers, engineers, and tech enthusiasts from around the world teamed up and called ourselves rLoop. We became finalists in Elon Musk’s Hyperloop competition, and were awarded the Pod Innovation Award from SpaceX.

The decentralized and democratic nature of rLoop allows us to mitigate the risk of early stage R&D by leveraging an untapped global pool of talent and resources, harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, and using blockchain technology to facilitate group coordination on complex and interdependent work.

And, aware of the many pitfalls that come with crowdwork — though, without a doubt, the skill set necessary to be part of rLoop is significantly different than what it takes to be a Turker — we have designed and created a platform that measures participants work across a variety of metrics, encouraging and rewarding productive activity and disincentivizing counterproductive and malicious activity. Opportunities to develop skills and knowledge are emphasized, and potential avenues for career growth are afforded.

Much of this can be read in our Whitepaper, which went live on June 18.

Despite the plethora of issues that continue to exist on some crowdwork platforms today, our model for distributed collaboration is designed to harness the human capacity for innovation and drive it towards the greater good while focusing on the individuals within the community.

Have questions about how rLoop uses crowdwork to tackle problems facing humanity? Tweet them to us @rLoopTeam , or join our telegram!

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