page_title: Microwork
section_title: Treatment of workers
hierarchical_section_title: Microwork / Treatment of workers
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a graph indicating the percentage of both offline and online employers in which Turkers think employ fair treatment.
context_page_description: Microwork is a series of small tasks which together comprise a large unified project, and are completed by many people over the Internet. Microwork is considered the smallest unit of work in a virtual assembly line. It is most often used to describe tasks for which no efficient algorithm has been devised, and require human intelligence to complete reliably. The term was developed in 2008 by Leila Chirayath Janah of Samasource.
context_section_description: Microtasking services have been criticized for not providing healthcare and retirement benefits, sick pay, and minimum wage, because they pay by the piece and treat workers as independent contractors rather than employees.  They can also avoid laws on child labor and labor rights. Additionally, workers may have little idea of what their work is used for. The result may be that workers end up contributing to a project which has some negative impact or which they are morally opposed to.
  Some services, especially Amazon Mechanical Turk and other services that pay pennies on the task, have been called "digital sweatshops" by analogy with sweatshops in the manufacturing industry that exploit workers and maintain poor conditions.  Wages vary considerably depending on the speed of the worker and the per-piece price being offered.  Workers choose what tasks they complete based on the task, price, and their experience with the employer.  Employers can bid higher for faster completion or for higher-quality workers.  On average, unskilled Turkers earn less than $2.00 an hour. This is below minimum wage in the United States; however, for India, this is well above the minimum for most cities (India has more than 1200 minimum wages).
  Because global services outsource work to underdeveloped or developing regions, competitive pricing and task completion could result in the lower wages. The possibility also exists for true brick and mortar sweatshops to exploit microtasking services by enlisting those that are too poor to afford a computer of their own and aggregating their work and wages. There is also the possibility that the requesters may tell the worker that they reject the work but cheat the worker by using it anyway to avoid paying for it. However, while the dispersed geography of microwork can be used to keep wages low, the very networks that fragment the labour process can also be used by workers for organising and resistance.
  The San Francisco-based company CrowdFlower has facilitated outsourcing digital tasks to countries with poverty to stimulate their local economies. The crowdsourcing company has a partnership with Samasource, a non-profit organization that brings computer based work to developing countries, they have currently outsourced millions of repetitive microwork to the Kenyan refugee camps. These workers make $2 an hour; to the locals this is above average for refugees. When asked if this is exploitation, Lukas Biewald of CrowdFlower argues that the "digital sweatshop" is a much better job for people from the developing world as opposed to working in a manufacturing sweatshop. He states that the treatment received by the workers are far superior and should not be categorized as a sweatshop, "The great thing about digital work is it's really hard to make a sweatshop out of digital work. It's really hard to force someone to do work, you can't beat someone up through a computer screen."
caption: A small survey of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers found they think Mechanical Turk employers treat workers about as fairly as offline employers in their home country.[22][23][24]
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