Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray

Author:Mary L. Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Getting the Work Done

Poonam is in her early twenties. She and her husband, Sanjay, hope to start a family soon. After signing up for Microsoft’s on-demand platform, UHRS, Poonam found she made enough money working at home to quit her job at a business processing organization and forgo the lengthy and tiring commute to the center of Chandigarh. Sanjay works full-time at a graphic design and print shop and does crowdsourcing on the side. His online earnings are an important part of the couple’s income, but Sanjay sometimes finds himself struggling to manage both his on-demand work and his design job.

When we sit down with them, the couple sheepishly acknowledge that they share tasks, a risky practice. Companies expect the user whose name is on the account to be the sole person doing the work. They know that sharing work may get their account suspended, but Poonam and Sanjay take a calculated risk and do it anyway. They explain that, because they divide up the work, whoever they think has the best skill set for the task at hand can take the job. Sharing a single account helps them keep a high reputation score and doubles the number of jobs they can tackle with confidence. For instance, if one of them accepts a task but doesn’t feel confident in his or her ability to complete the work, they call upon the other one. Thanks to his expertise in design, Sanjay excels at tasks that are highly visual, whereas Poonam does well with language-based tasks, like search-query evaluation.

Although one can easily imagine how common this type of coordination is among married couples like Sanjay and Poonam, we also found the practice common among workers who met on Facebook or other forums, via chat, or in person. Again and again, we heard stories about how people meet to reduce the transaction costs of different jobs, including sharing details about how to manage one’s time completing tasks, how to do search queries, and how to handle tasks that require the execution of basic scripts or simple computing techniques, like copying and pasting.

For instance, Anand, 24, is a student working on MTurk and living with his parents in Chennai. Anand uses his income from MTurk to pay for personal expenses. He told us that his parents don’t understand what he is doing in front of the computer so much, but he hopes to prove them wrong by eventually getting a formal position with Amazon.com. He learned about MTurk from his friend Raja, who is somewhat of a pied piper figure among Anand’s friends. “Because of Raja, all of us have learnt MTurk,” he says. Anand shows us the handwritten computer shortcuts and key commands Raja gave him. He keeps the tattered note taped to the wall to the left of his desk. On it are commands for saving screenshots, common search queries, and a description of how to download and search Excel spreadsheets of U.S. states and cities—a cheat sheet of sorts so that Anand can quickly answer basic questions about the U.

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