How Amazon is turning a profit on working desperate fingers to the bone.
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Mechanical Turk, Amazon.com's brainchild created to facilitate corporate greed and spread it into the marketplace for small business, internet start ups and people generally obsessed with categorizing obscure data.
The principal behind Mechanical Turk seems like a brilliant one at first glance. Having business owners assign administrative tasks in an outsourcing capacity so that they have less initial overhead. Workers sign in and pick and choose the tasks that they would like to complete. It’s simple, no resumes, no job interviews, no major hassles, just log in and make a few extra bucks in your spare time while working from home…or not.
The reality is that when you log on to Mechanical Turk for the first time with your wide eyed optimism and cheshire grin you are greeted with glaring, evil taskmasters, with cattail whips offering you slave wages amounting to $0.01 - $0.04 per minute for tasks that will take you between 1 – 2 minutes to complete. Now, I’m no mathematician, but at that rate you’re making a whopping $0.60 to $2.40 per hour. This wasn’t my idea of extra money.
I slaved away at various tasking for a little over a month and was able to net a little over $600.00 in my struggle. However this was attained working 10 hour days at least 6 days a week while taking part in my Mechanical Turk experiment, and graduating from novice to expert user in the process. I quickly learned which assignments to take, what paid and had a mathematical equation on what I would need to do per hour to earn a minimum of $10.00 per hour. The bad news is that I rarely made this hourly goal.
You find yourself competing with a multitude of overseas workers willing to accept and toil away for hours at these mundane and low paying tasks, to be paid the equivalent of their earnings in Amazon.com gift cards as opposed to local currency. However to someone at Amazon, this business plan seems to make perfect sense as Mechanical Turk is still going strong coming upon its 3rd year in practice.
As long as there are people willing to accept the work for the sub par wages that are offered on the Mechanical Turk forum, and since Amazon.com won’t do anything to set a minimum limit to have individuals post their work on the site, there is no end in site to the fleecing of Mechanical Turk’s workers. At the end of the day, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is officially an old school sweatshop, hardcoded in HTML.
