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You seem to be assuming that you know what's best for other people. Why not leave it up to them? If you were to shut down MTurk I don't think the people who re
by jstanley 8y ago
You seem to be assuming that you know what's best for other people. Why not leave it up to them?
If you were to shut down MTurk I don't think the people who rely on it for money would thank you.
- crc32 8y agoYour question amounts to "Why do we have employment law"?
- beaconstudios 8y agomore like "should we be creating employment law for microtask work?" which is more of an open question, especially if you consider what such legislation might look like and what effects it may have on the workers and clients alike.
- xg15 8y agoWhat is so fundamentally different about microtask work that it would warrant no employment regulations?
- beaconstudios 8y agowell, a ton of things - it's much closer to freelance work than employment. Not that I'm even advocating for keeping it deregulated specifically - I was making the point that when considering regulation, the (often accidental) effects of said regulation need to be considered. You don't want to fall afoul of the Cobra effect and end up destroying a good thing. Regulation should be introduced to fix specific issues, not just because there aren't any yet. Especially if it's filling an important financial gap for people with low incomes.
- jstanley 8y agoIndeed!
- nkrisc 8y agoIf workers are choosing to subject themselves to the sort of work described for less than minimum wage then that suggests to me there is a very real problem indeed. You stated you don't see a problem, when to me this looks like the symptom of a much larger problem. Why do they feel this is the better choice? What were their other options and why?
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoYou seem to be making exactly the same assumption, merely a different assumption.
- jstanley 8y agoI'm not assuming that I know what's best for other people, I'm assuming that they know what's best, or are at least in the best position to know what's best. If working for MTurk isn't their best option, they'll pick one of their better options. It follows that, for people who do work on MTurk, MTurk is their best option.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoYet as most of our regulations on every major area show, people in need often don't have better options. Very often they know that only too well, but do it because it's their only option. It follows where an option at the margins causes problems it may need to be regulated to prevent abuse of those in dire straits or need. As already seems clearly necessary for things like Deliveroo etc. Abuse of that nature is how we got a lot of our more civilised food, consumer and employment regulations. It's how we came to the hard-fought idea of a safety net that this generation is trying to shred.
- Spooky23 8y agoPeople depending on something like mechanical turk for income lack the agency to make that decision. Why don’t we allow 15 year olds to enter contracts? Piecework is usually awful to workers. When you consider that minimum wage is about $0.25, chiseling workers out of such a small amount of money seems pretty awful.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoSo let's tax the fuck out of these trillion dollar companies in order to make up for that.