10 ms·

What this article is effectively advocating, but can't or won't say outright, is that America needs the ability to pay people less than the minimum wage. Someo

by shingen 15y ago

What this article is effectively advocating, but can't or won't say outright, is that America needs the ability to pay people less than the minimum wage. Someone working all day at mechanical turk, is likely to fall below the federal minimum wage rate in terms of what they're pulling down per hour. Is it ok for companies to utilize mass scale labor at what becomes in reality a sub minimum wage rate? Particularly if mechanical turk stations were to become wide spread. Obviously mechanical turk is a per unit pay system, not a job with an hourly pay rate. However, if you're doing it full time, I call bullshit on that difference. If you had 100,000 people working on mechanical turk 40 hours per week, making $6 per hour, those are very much jobs paying sub minimum wage. It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility. One solution to this legal boundary, would be to require that mechanical turk style tasks pay at least equivalent to minimum wage based on the time they take. I expect in any large scale adoption of mechanical turk, this issue will jump to the forefront.

jakeonthemove 15y ago
People already work for less than minimum wage... if they can find a job! This would just bring more employment opportunities to those who need it.
marshallp 15y ago
So what you also need is more businesses to use mechanical turk or similar services. There's a huge opportunity in that for startups. The biggest is probably bridging the physical and digital worlds. Controlling robots through mechanical turk. Every factory robot, cnc machine, or 3d printer needs someone to keep an eye on it in case anything goes wrong so that the machine can get shut off. Also, cashiers and receptionists. Is it really necessary for person to be there in person. And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best.
- spindritf 15y ago
  > Controlling robots through mechanical turk. No one would let a random person on the street control their half a million dollar machine. > And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best. Urban poor are definitely not the group advertisers are targeting.
  - marshallp 15y ago
    It's not as simple as that. It's not one poor guy looking a video feed or judging ads. It would be sophisticated system that pools together many workers in ways to get quality. So, for example, if the factory robot knocks something over, and there are 10 different people watching a few frames of video, it's pretty likely they'd spot the mistake. Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people.
    - spindritf 15y ago
      > Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people. But you're still asking the "wrong" people. And you're asking, instead of observing the actual behaviour.
      - marshallp 15y ago
        You can have statistics figure that out for you. Are turkers good at judging ads based on past data. If not, maybe it's because you weren't presenting the right metrics for the turkers to judge and so you keep reiterating until you do. This is actually a good business for a startup, you get runaway success such as google has (the data keeps improving your lead over rivals).
tomjen3 15y ago
First of all, the payment is about seven dollar according to the article that is slightly above minimum wage. It may be below some states wage but it is clearly close. What mechanical turk does allow companies (and individuals) to do however is to hire people for a very short term (a few seconds) for, literally, pennies. And assuming that enough work was available we should expect the rate to increase since there will be less spam bots. And at any rate it is better than the alternative of make work.
- shingen 15y ago
  Federal minimum wage is $7.25 / hour. So it's slightly below minimum wage.
- greyish_water 15y ago
  the payment is about seven dollar according to the article This is unrealistic in practice. The Simple Dollar article cited describes making >$7 in an hour, but $6.55 of that comes from writing an article on email autoresponder marketing and writing a review of an unspecified service. Those aren't the kind of tasks that anybody can accomplish in a timely and competent manner, nor is the supply of those tasks reliable.
danielharan 15y ago
I'm glad someone else is calling this for what it is: a way to get around minimum wage. Another solution would be to use worker reputation (something explored by Panos Ipeirotis @ http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/ http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/ ) Because MT workers are unreliable, you often need to have several doing the same task. Better workers require fewer checks, and are therefore much more cost effective. Right now MT is a market for lemons. So the challenge then would be to let poor people build up a reputation to fix that market...
- JumpCrisscross 15y ago
  At that point just hire someone skilled to write around it. The unskilled labour isn't competitive at 7.25/hr. I'd rather send it to a semi-skilled in Bangalore at 5-6/hr.
bmj 15y ago
It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility. This is not the sort of disruption we want in the marketplace. Let's say someone rolls this out, with moderate success. What's to say a company like Wal-Mart wouldn't crowdsource stocking shelves? We already see some people taking advantage of low-income workers (giving less than 36 hours to avoid health insurance coverage, etc). This would be another opportunity to lower costs all around without much of an upside for those doing the work.
- marshallp 15y ago
  That sounds like a pretty good idea, walmart crowdsourcing shelf stacking. Startups might be able to offfer that as service smaller stores right now. Also, the possibility for automation is then great as well. Companies could offer assistive devices and software to the freelance shelf stackers for increasing their productivity, all they way to full blown robots. Can also apply this to other tasks such as crowdsourced burger flippers and crowdsourced cleaners. There's a lot of opportunity in automation of service businesses such as retailer and restaurants, but it seems like the industry does not take much interest in applying robotics to the task. This crowdsourcing system would be a way for nimbler companies to introduce more technology into the system without going through the management.
  - krschultz 15y ago
    Robotics is not as cheap as you think. I've brought systems in to factories to do seemingly simple things that cost easily $250k without batting an eye. You can pay someone more than minimum wage for many years for that kind of money. What would robots capable of stocking shelves cost? $500k? It's just not worth it. McDonalds has how many thousands of stores - and they don't bother automating that much. Amazon.com still uses people to pick their orders (for the most part). The companies aren't stupid, someone has run the numbers and figured out that robots are too expensive. It's not even Moore's law thing. Computer are plenty powerful. You can make a robot do these things. But by the time you buy good quality motors, batteries, and sensors, it gets expensive no matter how cheap the computer is.
chrmaury 15y ago
There is a really good talk by Jonathan Zittrain on the dangers of crowd sourcing. I think it speaks to your point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3h-rae3uo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3h-rae3uo
hooande 15y ago
I was under the impression that "by the piece work" was currently not subject to the minimum wage. For example, if you pay someone $1 per apple that they pick, you aren't required to pay them a minimum amount per hour. Is there anyone familiar with labor law who can provide some perspective?
- Natsu 15y ago
  That's a good question. The law is pretty complex and I don't pretend to understand it all, but the basic answer as I understand it is that piece work rates have to be calculated in such a way that you'll get the "prevailing wage rate" -- http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/14c/18e.htm http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/14c/18e.htm There are also exceptions for people with disabilities, special minimum wages (you can actually pay the disabled less than minimum... sometimes), etc. So, I think the basic answer is that you still have to respect minimum wage, but how you do that is pretty complex.
gojomo 15y ago
Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements. Minimum wages are implemented with noble motivations, but are based on a broken mental model, where the edict alone can lift everyone who would have made less up to the new statutory minimum. In fact, many of the people who would be employed at lower wages aren't (yet) productive enough to justify a higher wage. An employer will pick a mix other adaptations rather than simply 'the same number of employees at a higher cost' once the wage floor is enforced. (These might include shorter opening hours, more automation, a few higher-paid workers replacing many lower-paid workers, longer waiting lines, less customer service, less attention to cleaning/inventory, and outsourcing work to other lower-cost entities or countries.) These dynamic adaptations leave a few people bumped up to the higher minimum, but more left completely unemployed, idle and dependent on other social assistance. They're not building work habits or a work history that would put them on the path to much higher wages. Even if we wanted, as a society, to ensure a certain minimum wage, why would we make the responsibility for paying it fall solely on those particular companies and industries that can best utilize inexperienced and low-skilled labor? Their manufacturing and simple services fill a important role, in the goods they provide and the meaningful productive work they offer those without other skills. By making them and them alone face this costly extra non-market constraint on hiring, they become disadvantaged and shrink, relative to other sectors and overseas competitors. It would be like deciding "every low-income family requires a computer", but rather than buying it out of common public funds, making it a legal requirement for just the domestic computer industry to provide free computers, out of their own revenues. Would that properly value the exact thing you want to happen – more computer production – or impair it by making it less profitable than other uses of the same talent/capital? The same goes with employment opportunities for the low-skilled. The minimum wage has been thinning such domestic opportunities out, for decades, rather than expanding them. Intended to reduce income disparities, it's increasing them.
- blahedo 15y ago
  > Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare Cite, please.
  - 15y ago
hippich 15y ago
Want to enforce minimum wages laws? No problems - it will just change work flow to workers from other countries where local ones will be left without one extra option.

by shingen 15y ago

jakeonthemove 15y ago

People already work for less than minimum wage... if they can find a job! This would just bring more employment opportunities to those who need it.

marshallp 15y ago

So what you also need is more businesses to use mechanical turk or similar services. There's a huge opportunity in that for startups. The biggest is probably bridging the physical and digital worlds. Controlling robots through mechanical turk. Every factory robot, cnc machine, or 3d printer needs someone to keep an eye on it in case anything goes wrong so that the machine can get shut off. Also, cashiers and receptionists. Is it really necessary for person to be there in person. And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best.

spindritf 15y ago
> Controlling robots through mechanical turk. No one would let a random person on the street control their half a million dollar machine. > And marketing. Testing which ads/videos work best. Urban poor are definitely not the group advertisers are targeting.
- marshallp 15y ago
  It's not as simple as that. It's not one poor guy looking a video feed or judging ads. It would be sophisticated system that pools together many workers in ways to get quality. So, for example, if the factory robot knocks something over, and there are 10 different people watching a few frames of video, it's pretty likely they'd spot the mistake. Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people.
  - spindritf 15y ago
    > Same goes for ad critiques. You wouldn't ask "is this a good ad". You'd split it up. "Is this actor better wearing a blue shirt than a red shirt" - ask 10 people. But you're still asking the "wrong" people. And you're asking, instead of observing the actual behaviour.
    - marshallp 15y ago
      You can have statistics figure that out for you. Are turkers good at judging ads based on past data. If not, maybe it's because you weren't presenting the right metrics for the turkers to judge and so you keep reiterating until you do. This is actually a good business for a startup, you get runaway success such as google has (the data keeps improving your lead over rivals).

tomjen3 15y ago

First of all, the payment is about seven dollar according to the article that is slightly above minimum wage. It may be below some states wage but it is clearly close. What mechanical turk does allow companies (and individuals) to do however is to hire people for a very short term (a few seconds) for, literally, pennies. And assuming that enough work was available we should expect the rate to increase since there will be less spam bots. And at any rate it is better than the alternative of make work.

shingen 15y ago
Federal minimum wage is $7.25 / hour. So it's slightly below minimum wage.
greyish_water 15y ago
the payment is about seven dollar according to the article This is unrealistic in practice. The Simple Dollar article cited describes making >$7 in an hour, but $6.55 of that comes from writing an article on email autoresponder marketing and writing a review of an unspecified service. Those aren't the kind of tasks that anybody can accomplish in a timely and competent manner, nor is the supply of those tasks reliable.

danielharan 15y ago

I'm glad someone else is calling this for what it is: a way to get around minimum wage. Another solution would be to use worker reputation (something explored by Panos Ipeirotis @ http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/ http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/ ) Because MT workers are unreliable, you often need to have several doing the same task. Better workers require fewer checks, and are therefore much more cost effective. Right now MT is a market for lemons. So the challenge then would be to let poor people build up a reputation to fix that market...

JumpCrisscross 15y ago
At that point just hire someone skilled to write around it. The unskilled labour isn't competitive at 7.25/hr. I'd rather send it to a semi-skilled in Bangalore at 5-6/hr.

bmj 15y ago

It would be no different than if a thousand companies banded together to source labor below minimum wage by paying per task, and sharing that labor around rather than employing each laborer in a "job" (eg in a metro area with high population density). Those companies would be paying for net full time labor, while evading the minimum wage responsibility. This is not the sort of disruption we want in the marketplace. Let's say someone rolls this out, with moderate success. What's to say a company like Wal-Mart wouldn't crowdsource stocking shelves? We already see some people taking advantage of low-income workers (giving less than 36 hours to avoid health insurance coverage, etc). This would be another opportunity to lower costs all around without much of an upside for those doing the work.

marshallp 15y ago
That sounds like a pretty good idea, walmart crowdsourcing shelf stacking. Startups might be able to offfer that as service smaller stores right now. Also, the possibility for automation is then great as well. Companies could offer assistive devices and software to the freelance shelf stackers for increasing their productivity, all they way to full blown robots. Can also apply this to other tasks such as crowdsourced burger flippers and crowdsourced cleaners. There's a lot of opportunity in automation of service businesses such as retailer and restaurants, but it seems like the industry does not take much interest in applying robotics to the task. This crowdsourcing system would be a way for nimbler companies to introduce more technology into the system without going through the management.
- krschultz 15y ago
  Robotics is not as cheap as you think. I've brought systems in to factories to do seemingly simple things that cost easily $250k without batting an eye. You can pay someone more than minimum wage for many years for that kind of money. What would robots capable of stocking shelves cost? $500k? It's just not worth it. McDonalds has how many thousands of stores - and they don't bother automating that much. Amazon.com still uses people to pick their orders (for the most part). The companies aren't stupid, someone has run the numbers and figured out that robots are too expensive. It's not even Moore's law thing. Computer are plenty powerful. You can make a robot do these things. But by the time you buy good quality motors, batteries, and sensors, it gets expensive no matter how cheap the computer is.

chrmaury 15y ago

There is a really good talk by Jonathan Zittrain on the dangers of crowd sourcing. I think it speaks to your point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3h-rae3uo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3h-rae3uo

hooande 15y ago

I was under the impression that "by the piece work" was currently not subject to the minimum wage. For example, if you pay someone $1 per apple that they pick, you aren't required to pay them a minimum amount per hour. Is there anyone familiar with labor law who can provide some perspective?

Natsu 15y ago
That's a good question. The law is pretty complex and I don't pretend to understand it all, but the basic answer as I understand it is that piece work rates have to be calculated in such a way that you'll get the "prevailing wage rate" -- http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/14c/18e.htm http://www.dol.gov/elaws/esa/flsa/14c/18e.htm There are also exceptions for people with disabilities, special minimum wages (you can actually pay the disabled less than minimum... sometimes), etc. So, I think the basic answer is that you still have to respect minimum wage, but how you do that is pretty complex.

gojomo 15y ago

Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare; they should be repealed rather than extended to novel business arrangements. Minimum wages are implemented with noble motivations, but are based on a broken mental model, where the edict alone can lift everyone who would have made less up to the new statutory minimum. In fact, many of the people who would be employed at lower wages aren't (yet) productive enough to justify a higher wage. An employer will pick a mix other adaptations rather than simply 'the same number of employees at a higher cost' once the wage floor is enforced. (These might include shorter opening hours, more automation, a few higher-paid workers replacing many lower-paid workers, longer waiting lines, less customer service, less attention to cleaning/inventory, and outsourcing work to other lower-cost entities or countries.) These dynamic adaptations leave a few people bumped up to the higher minimum, but more left completely unemployed, idle and dependent on other social assistance. They're not building work habits or a work history that would put them on the path to much higher wages. Even if we wanted, as a society, to ensure a certain minimum wage, why would we make the responsibility for paying it fall solely on those particular companies and industries that can best utilize inexperienced and low-skilled labor? Their manufacturing and simple services fill a important role, in the goods they provide and the meaningful productive work they offer those without other skills. By making them and them alone face this costly extra non-market constraint on hiring, they become disadvantaged and shrink, relative to other sectors and overseas competitors. It would be like deciding "every low-income family requires a computer", but rather than buying it out of common public funds, making it a legal requirement for just the domestic computer industry to provide free computers, out of their own revenues. Would that properly value the exact thing you want to happen – more computer production – or impair it by making it less profitable than other uses of the same talent/capital? The same goes with employment opportunities for the low-skilled. The minimum wage has been thinning such domestic opportunities out, for decades, rather than expanding them. Intended to reduce income disparities, it's increasing them.

blahedo 15y ago
> Minimum wage laws destroy jobs and reduce overall welfare Cite, please.
- 15y ago

hippich 15y ago

Want to enforce minimum wages laws? No problems - it will just change work flow to workers from other countries where local ones will be left without one extra option.