Stressed out and eager to make ends meet, thousands of Americans around the country work countless hours a day just to make pennies on the hour. Camille Bahr, a 23-year-old Research Associate from Boston, MA, used to be one of them.
Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing website owned by Amazon. It allows businesses and research companies, referred to as requesters, to set their own rates for a variety of tasks, including filling out surveys, writing product descriptions or reviews, and classifying objects in images for AI learning. These tasks are called HITs, and the workers who work on them are called Turkers. As wages are wildly unregulated on the website, requesters are allowed to set their own rates. This results in many HITs that offer as low as one cent per hour. This causes serious wage equality issues.
One study found that the average Turker only earns $2 an hour, and that only 4% of Turkers make over the federal minimum wage. With such low wages, it begs the question of why these crowdsourcing workers would sign up. But for many, it’s the only option. Due to mental health issues, Bahr found herself in a tight financial situation and ended up turning to Mechanical Turk.
“I used it because my dad said ‘Hey, you’re going to need to start chipping in for rent.’ I was scared of being poor but was too anxious to get a real job,” Bahr said. “I never felt productive using [Mechanical Turk].”
She spent several months checking Mechanical Turk daily for a variety of HITs. She preferred surveys, as they were slightly more engaging than AI tasks. She completed tasks for a variety of companies, answering questions about product placements in advertisements, racial inequality, decision making choices, and more. The work was dull but it was income she could earn from the comfort of her home.
Bahr’s situation isn’t unique. A study by the Pew Research Center found that 25 percent of those who regularly engage in gig work had no other option for income. The same study found that 56% of gig work workers found the income from these untraditional avenues to be “essential or important.”
Gig work is officially booming. A research compilation by Small Biz Genius found that around 36% of US workers are engaged in the gig economy, and that 90% of those believe that gig work is only heading upwards. Young people are especially prone towards gig work, with 42% of those between the age of 18 and 34 participating in freelance. There are also some additional benefits. Upwork found that 84% of gig workers feel they are living their preferred lifestyle, and in a similar study by McKinsey, it was found that one in six traditional workers has expressed interest in gig work. So what makes crowdsourcing websites like Mechanical Turk so enticing in this new era of freelancing and gig work?
Turns out, the answer is accessibility. Despite the low wages offered on Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing platform has still found a way to be essential to those who use it. As with Bahr and her anxiety blocking her from finding traditional work, the low-education barrier and easy access through the internet has created a strong draw, no matter what wages are being offered.
However, despite the accessibility, gig work isn’t for everyone according to Diane Mulcahy, author of the best-selling book, The Gig Economy, frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review and Forbes, and avid gig-economy worker.
“Working independently in the gig economy doesn’t work for everybody,” Mulcahy said. “If you’re not someone who can create structure to get work done on a consistent basis, you might struggle in the gig economy. Or if you don’t enjoy working independently, if you want to be a part of a team…you might struggle in the gig economy.”
Bahr experienced this same struggle when she was trying out gig work through Mechanical Turk, due to the difficulty of setting up a firm schedule while working from home with no forced accountability.
“It was hard to earn money,” Bahr said. “On good weeks, I would make $20…and that’s not a lot. I would definitely not recommend it as a stable source of income.”
Alec Levenson, USC professor and expert in labor markets and human resources economics, believes that despite the issues with low wages, there is another side to the situation offered on Mechanical Turk.
“On the one hand, there would be fewer regular jobs that a company might create, because of workers being able to go and use platforms like this,” Levenson said. “But the flipside is that this allows [companies] to branch out and to do work in more effective ways. It could actually lead to more growth and greater security for those who have their regular jobs within a company.”
Mulcahy expanded on the benefits that the gig economy offers to companies, including the ability to broaden their search for difficult-to-fill positions, as well as increased resiliency.
“Companies that hire independent workers are more resilient, they have much more flexibility to staff up and staff down without having to go through a long protracted hiring process and without having to incur the morale and financial costs of laying people off,” Mulcahy said. “They can save on capital costs, on real estate, they can be more cost efficient, and that can benefit their bottom line.”
The numbers prove gig work has become essential to businesses. Fabio Rosati, CEO of Upwork, has stated “The 53 million Americans who are freelancing already contribute more than $700 billion to our national economy.” This also frees up space for businesses to focus on skills and needs that must be satisfied in-house, by outsourcing research, writing, design, and more out-of-house. It also allows employers to save money on benefits they would offer to full-time employees, such as insurance or retirement fund matching. This level of saving can either contribute towards expansion or towards better benefits for existing full-time employees.
The increased level of saving does come at a cost to the workers. However, while the low wages can cause issues in terms of income equality, the accessibility is really the main factor here that creates a positive outcome instead of a negative outcome, Levenson said.
“If you’re a student and you do Mechanical Turk only in your spare time, and you don’t really want to go and work a regular job, then it’s a win-win for you and the company,” Levenson said. “Now that’s in terms of being able to do work. It’s a separate question about what wage you’re being paid.”
While there has been some work to ensure fair wages for all, it somehow glosses over Mechanical Turk. The recently passed California Assembly Bill 5 requires greater protections for workers classified as employees, a move that was meant to provide protection for gig work workers. However, AB 5 does not apply to Mechanical Turk workers, which means requesters can continue to set their own rates and ignore the typical legal minimum wage.
Again, Levenson finds the bright side in this oversight.
“Law AB 5 should have a positive affect for some people, for those who are doing a lot of work and might want to work regular hours,” Levenson said. “But it also runs a pretty big risk of eliminating a lot of employment for people who can’t work regular hours or for traditional roles for existing companies. AB 5 means people in California are now losing out and people in other states are benefitting.”
To an extent, that hypothesis is valid. Major gig work offering corporations have already pledged to spend $30 million each towards efforts to reverse AB 5. Similarly, AB 5 struck up fear in Turkers, who worried that Amazon would simply revoke their ability to access surveys, and instead create more openings in other states with lesser restrictions. With online gig work being the only access to work that some can find, revoking their ability to participate would be disastrous.
But there are still complications beyond AB5. Mulcahy explained that there is an inequity built into the labor market that frowns upon independent workers, including gig workers.
“The labor market doesn’t work for gig economy workers,” Mulcahy said. “If you work independently, you are taxed additionally, and you lose all sorts of rights, benefits, and protections. If you’re a worker, you should be able to access the benefits of the labor market.”
For Bahr, she found she was lucky enough to slowly be able to work her way back into being able to handle a typical job as an employee for an organization and tap into the benefits the labor market affords full-time employees.
“I never really accomplished anything more than pocket change and now that I have a ‘real job,’ I’ve mostly forgotten about [Mechanical Turk],” Bahr said. “I was bored using it and the work wasn’t mentally fulfilling.”
But not everyone will be able to subtract Mechanical Turk from their income without serious downturn. It seems it’s more than time for this heavily unregulated industry to become more regulated.