The Gig Economy by Jamie Woodcock & Mark Graham

Author:Jamie Woodcock & Mark Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509536375
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

It leverages the ‘gamification’ that is a feature of many forms of work today (Woodcock and Johnson, 2018) in order to encourage people to work for an amount that may not hit minimum wage.

In the process, it unveils parts of modern society that are often hidden: the work that goes on behind the scenes to develop AI and run services that many of us rely on. In some cases, the work that is being requested can be much more sinister than the tasks that Limer describes. For example, in his ongoing PhD research, Adam Badger (2018) has traced where some of his writing tasks have ended up. For one, he was asked to rewrite an article for Russia Today on Russia stockpiling gold, with the task setter noting that ‘our readers are into conspiracy theories’. The payment for this was US$3, with an additional US$1 for an image to go with it, plus a bonus of US$1 for ‘exceptional work’. As Badger explained, as ‘a writer, lefty, and general critic of the role of the internet and the press on our contemporary psyche, the job made me deeply uncomfortable’. Ethics is not something that most microworkers get much of an opportunity to reflect upon when selecting work, particularly as ‘once the tasks are done, they also often shoot-off into the ether with no follow-up apart from the payment (if you’re lucky).’ However, in this case, Adam was able to track down the article afterwards as he could search for parts of the text via Google. The result was finding the article published under someone else’s name, and Adam explained, ‘if that wasn’t creepy enough, there was a video made for the “Alternative News Network” (ew…) which is just a narrated version of my article as read by a robot from the dystopian future’ (Badger, 2018).

Another glimpse into the experiences of microworkers can be found with the ‘Dear Mr. Bezos’ letters organized by Mechanical Turk workers to the founder and CEO of Amazon. This followed an article in Business Insider, which noted that ‘Jeff Bezos may run Amazon and he may be a billionaire, but he is very accessible to his customers with an easy-to-find email address, [email protected].’20 Through Dynamo,21 a workers campaign was organized to send emails to Bezos with three aims: first, to point out that ‘Turkers [workers on Mechanical Turk] are human beings, not algorithms, and should be marketed accordingly’; second, that ‘Turkers should not be sold as cheap labour, but instead skilled, flexible labour which needs to be respected’; and third, that ‘Turkers need to have a method of representing themselves to Requesters and the world via Amazon’. In each of these emails, which can still be found on the internet,22 the experiences and concerns of these workers are made clear, all starting with ‘Dear Mr. Bezos’ – or close to it. For example:

Dear Mr. Bezos

I am a Turker: middle age, entrepreneur, university student, mom, wife, reliant on my mTurk income to keep my family safe from foreclosure.

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