People will sacrifice well-being in one area (ex.: mental health) for well-being in an other area (ex.: money for housing/food). That doesn't mean it isn't a problem. You seem to be assuming a perfectly rational world...
more 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.
well, 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.
If 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?
I'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.
Yet 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.
People 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.
In general isn't it better to be given a choice instead of having a decision forced upon you? Because even if we consider from our view that one choice is worse, other people may value things differently and may be in different situations that apply different weights to the options.
If we really think that someone is too incompetent to make a choice and remove the choice from them, then don't we have some duty to help them out?
For example, I want a child to go to school, not a job, and think them too incompetent to make the decision of which is better for them. In removing the option to work, I then have a duty to support them if they were needing the job to live (which is done by specific welfare for children or their parents).
Sure, choice is good. But if this work is as bad as the article describes, yet people still choose to do it, then consider how bad the other option must be. Hardly a real "choice."
Exposing the ills of minimally-regulated contract labor isn't forcing anyone to do anything. If amazon benefits from MTurk, it's not going to shut it down if it can help it. If laborers have no other option between earning a fraction of minimum wage for an hours work and going hungry, they'll probably keep working.
But calling that a "choice" is like saying the mafioso holding a gun to your head is giving you the freedom to decide to follow his orders.
Except in this case nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head. Amazon aren't saying "work on MTurk or we'll do some harm to you", they're saying "work on MTurk if you think the money is worth it".
If the best option for these workers is earning sub-minimum wage via MTurk to pay for life's basics, then society, through its income distribution patterns, not Amazon, is threatening them harm.
Which makes it society's responsibility, through regulatory mechanisms, to improve the workers options.
Why not start UBI on a small, voluntary scale, and demonstrate its success? Every one advocating for UBI could go to a poor neighbourhood / country, pick a poor person (or several), and start transferring them a portion of their income every month...
They have 100s of millions to experiment with ... the average person does not.
> Every one advocating for UBI could ...
Advocacy (and voting) are the most power tools for shaping the future direction of society. It's very effective as a way of bringing change, and we have many examples in recent history of this being true. If it weren't, you wouldn't see huge amounts of money being given to Super PACs to advocate for political positions.
> start transferring them a portion of their income every month...
This is a rehash of the very tired, and baseless, cliche against higher taxes that says that those who support higher taxes should write a check to the IRS.
It's a fallacious argument, because redistribution only has societal impact when operating on a society-wide scale. The most significant example of this, the Great Society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society) wasn't built on voluntary contributions to the government.
Individuals of normal means making marginal contributions does little to move the needle on the relevant societal problems in any significant way, whether those problems are infrastructure, poverty, health care, education, etc. These things, if they are done at all, have to be done at a societal scale, and that means via government methods of finance.
But what happens when we pass laws in our country that takes away the job in another when there is no realistic chance of them implementing some safety net to help? For example, when western countries put pressure on east Asian sweat shops to stop using child labor, they did, but the local governments didn't offer anything to help the children who depended upon those jobs to have enough to feed themselves, and as such many of the children transitioned into even more dangerous jobs or worse.
It would be nice if their government made up for the gap, but int he real world we have to deal with the possibilities they won't. So one has to deal with the ramifications of their choices that shouldn't and wouldn't happen in a good world but do happen in our world.
And the economy at large is saying "do this, or starve". For people working for such pay, it's not a voluntary transaction between them and Amazon. The larger system is screwed up.
To quote Catch-22 from hazy memory: "The men don't have to sign Pilchard and Wren's loyalty oath if they don't want to, but I need you to starve them if they don't."
"Except in this case nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head."
No, I flat out reject that notion. The fact that one must have a job to survive in this world removes the ability to chose "not having a job". The illusion of choice does not mean that all employment agreements are purely consensual, and as such there need to be many safeguards in place to prevent exploitation.
>But calling that a "choice" is like saying the mafioso holding a gun to your head is giving you the freedom to decide to follow his orders.
Yes, but hunger, not Amazon, is the one holding the threat over the person, and as of yet we have not found a way to change these fundamental aspects of nature/reality. You aren't going to remove threat, you are going to just make it become realized. Think of how some areas where child labor was reduced but the reasons behind children working weren't fixed resulted in children turning to far more dangerous and illegal labor that would near universally be considered a far worse option than sweat shop work.
Having a choice is good. Having 1000000000 choices where only a few are good ones means that there is significant cost in discovering what the good choices are. When you need to be making money immediately, you may rationally choose the first option that presents itself...it’s playing the lottery with your time, but with insufficient knowledge and sufficiently high immediate need, that may still be a rational choice.
The fact that the only reason people work for MTurk is because they're desperate for money is hardly a criticism of MTurk. If anything, it's a criticism of everyone else in the world for not providing better ways to make money.
For example, the only reason homeless people queue up to get food from soup kitchens is because they're desperate for food, but that doesn't mean soup kitchens are bad because the queues can be long. (Hypothetical; I don't actually know if queues are typically long).
You're right that nobody had advocated any specific action and I merely assumed that everybody who was against microtask work was in favour of shutting it down. My mistake.
> Sorry, I hadn't noticed any reasonable criticism
Did you read the article?
> For example, the only reason homeless people queue up to get food from soup kitchens is because they're desperate for food, but that doesn't mean soup kitchens are bad because the queues can be long. (Hypothetical; I don't actually know if queues are typically long).
Are you really drawing a comparison between skirting minimum wage laws and providing free food for homeless people?
Two economists were walking down the street. One of them saw a $20 bill lying on the ground and reached down to pick it up.
The other economist, startled, said, "what are you doing?"
The first economist said, "I'm picking up that $20 bill."
The other economist was bemused. "There can't possibly be a $20 there to pick up. Why, someone would have already picked it up!"
The first economist straightened up, and considered carefully the words of his colleague. Convinced that it must be his imagination, he nodded, and the pair of them walked off.
The problem I see is that these people aren't building up anything. With regular jobs you build up some level of reputation over time which then helps you get better jobs. With mechanical turk work or driving Uber you never get beyond step 1 in a career.
The survey answers in this report, from people who say they enjoy this work, refute this notion. Many of the workers say they are learning interesting things. (Also, a surprising number have significant educational backgrounds, implying they have other work choices.)
Also, the systems themselves certify high-performing workers over time, who then become eligible for higher-paying microtasks.
“Children wouldn’t work in factories if their parents didn’t think it was beneficial to them. Why should we take away that source of income for families that desperately need it?”
Did you miss that bit? The point of the comparison is to highlight the obviously fallacious reasoning that underlies the idea that someone's participation in something means it's beneficial to them.
I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but here's my interpretation:
Elsewhere in this thread, the entire concept of employment regulation is called into question. The history of employment law goes back to child labor regulations. So if you reject all employment regulation, you also reject child labor regulation. This is a very fringe argument that is a nonstarter with basically everyone. If, on the other hand, you don't reject child labor regulations, then you accept the premise that employment regulation is sometimes necessary, and now we're just haggling over the details.
Those parents aren't acting in the children's best interests, and the children themselves aren't capable of understanding or consenting to the decisions being made.
An adult can understand and consent to whatever work they want. They're free to dig their own grave if that is what they want to do
I'm reminded of the YouTube video that took a considered look at the mail-order bride industry. The conclusion was that it's expensive, you have to worry about companies scamming you out of your money, or less maliciously and more commonly, simply not doing their best to solve your problem and letting you rack up tens of thousands in fees, but for the most part, it's an avenue for real people with real problems to find a solution for them, and the outcomes are largely beneficial.
What we need to do as a society is to protect the unsophisticated from scams that they are entirely unprepared to spot and avoid. Like bringing workers over from other countries, taking their passports, and basically turning them into slaves.
Compared to that, this is far less wretched hive of scum and villainy. But even wretched hives are better than no hive at all.
The United Nations' International Labor Organization performs a study across thousands of people in many countries. This is on one side of the scale, and on the other side of the scale we have “I don't see the problem.”
Can we please do a little better than this? Actually learning something is more important than satisfying oneself with glib dismissals, which inevitably draw others into a sad cloud of dullness.
You could equally well have written this response about, say, child labor, or factories where they locked all the exits and once in a while people died preventable deaths. People were there for some kind of benefit. Did that make it OK?
> The survey counted unpaid work as "time spent looking for tasks, earning qualifications, researching requesters through online forums, communicating with requesters or clients and leaving reviews, as well as unpaid/rejected tasks/tasks ultimately not submitted."
These hidden costs are almost identical in the world of independent freelance work. Similar for "gig" workers as well. An Uber/Lyft driver told me he aims for 10 hours per day, which usually takes an extra 4 hours (14 total) of unpaid relocating, waiting around, etc.
My hope is that people view this as the cost of autonomy, but I fear most people aren't pricing it in.
Presumably they would find out about those costs relatively fast.
But I mean those costs have always been part of the reason freelancers are more expensive than employees (the other being the increased flexibility).
What seems to happen now is that, increasingly, free lancers are cheaper, which suggests that employees are paid above the price they could expect, if there weren't rules about minimum wage.
Well that's one conclusion we could draw. Another is that these services are illustrating the necessity for robust regulation of employers who would pay less than minimum wage.
I think this particular example is a great example of what's difficult about the world right now.
Technology has opened many new opportunities for corporations and for everyday people.
However, the pace of new opportunities is way faster than the ability that governments have to regulate the new opportunities. It would seem that companies, entrepreneurs, and silicon valley have realized this and are using it as a business strategy. If I had to sum up the business strategy, I would say "Find a regularity system that can be exploited by rapid innovation".
While it's always been a business strategy to exploit legal loopholes, I think the difference is that companies exploit an entire regulatory system which is harder to update and takes longer. Airbnb, Uber, Mechanical Turk, are all examples of exploiting a regulatory system by creating a product and then quickly scaling it up to mass adoption before the practices introduced can be outlawed.
Once something has been massively adopted it's difficult to stop completely.
While the word exploit seems inherently negative I'm not trying to make judgment value, I think it's the correct description. I don't have a strong opinion about any of these companies or exploiting regulatory systems.
However, I do think that democracy needs to find a way to keep up with the forces taking advantage of its inherent systematic boundaries, such as being slow to react. I'm not sure what needs to change but I think when you have many US citizens participating in completely unregulated labor markets there is a problem that needs to be solved.
> I think the difference is that companies exploit an entire regulatory system which is harder to update and takes longer. Airbnb, Uber, Mechanical Turk, are all examples of exploiting a regulatory system by creating a product and then quickly scaling it up to mass adoption before the practices introduced can be outlawed.
> Once something has been massively adopted it's difficult to stop completely.
> ...
> However, I do think that democracy needs to find a way to keep up with the forces taking advantage of its inherent systematic boundaries, such as being slow to react. I'm not sure what needs to change but I think when you have many US citizens participating in completely unregulated labor markets there is a problem that needs to be solved.
I think the solution is that it be made very clear to the companies pushing the regulatory boundaries (and their fans) that they should be prepared to have their business models destroyed when the regulatory environment catches up.
This feels too harsh. It's not that either the business models need destroyed or that regulations should never change, but that some middle ground is worked out that benefits society at large.
All the services we're talking about have both real utility and (for the most part) unplanned costs and impacts.
The Taxi Medallion system is/was horribly corrupt and inefficient. Uber (for all their faults) is an improvement in terms of safety, convenience and less discriminatory practices.
Similarly, AirBnB isn't defacto a horrible presence in cities (tons of great experiences), but hosts should abide by neighborhood norms, pay hotel taxes, etc.
Uber, for all its faults, may be a vast improvement on the USA approach to taxis.
In many of the other countries Uber has presence it has done damage to a sector that was not horribly corrupt or inefficient. Yet the workers and governments still have to react to rule breaking that effectively treats everywhere on the planet as some US city with a broken and corrupt taxi system.
In the UK I would call Uber a very marginal increase in convenience (all taxis have apps if that's your preferred method), but absolutely and demonstrably significantly worse in terms of safety, discriminatory practices, and worker's incomes. So overall I don't think it is too harsh, at least here.
I think the concept of "informed consent" is applicable here.
Are the workers informed? Much like the question of whether Uber drivers properly factor in the cost of maintenance, it's possible that workers do not have the right expectations of what they will earn, so articles like this are helpful in adding context and information. Let it get around that these tasks make you less than minimum wage.
Do the workers consent? Obviously they consent in at least some sense, so comparisons to slavery (as in the comments to the original article) are overblown. These workers are free to seek other options. However, it's also possible that they are correctly concluding this is their best option, due to lack of opportunity in their area, health reasons that make them immobile, etc. In that case, then two cheers for MTurk for improving their lives, to at least some extent.
I take issue with your conclusion that "if the workers are correctly concluding this their best option, then cheers to Mechanical Turk for improving their lives to some extent". A less generous interpretation is that Amazon has identified a cohort of people with limited employment options and found a way to effectively pay them less than minimum wage.
Is any job better than none to an unemployed person? Maybe — but we need money to live, and labor laws exist precisely to prevent employers from exploiting that.
The same wage that's a slap in the face to an American can be quite lucrative to someone in a lesser developed nation. Hits for pennies are a god send to those folks.
I'd guess it was less intentional than that. Amazon created the market, but I don't think they'd regard it as a failure if the equilibrium price were above minimum wage.
I'd guess that as well, but that doesn't make it any more laudable. If a job market is such that the equilibrium price of labor is below the minimum acceptable threshold that we as a society have agreed upon, something needs to change.
Yeah, consent doesn't really exist in the context of wage slavery.
While it's certainly true that if these jobs were forced to pay a reasonable minimum wage there would be some less work to do, most of the world has already conceded the point that pure supply-and-demand is not an acceptable way to negotiate wages - we agree that some minimum wage is useful to protect those without other options.
If I weren't already off-topic, this is where I would veer into advocating for basic income.
While I don't agree about consent (see my other comments), I could see basic income and no minimum wage. If people were taken care of, there would be nothing wrong with people earning extra dollars at whatever their market rate was (although they might be less inclined to bother, if it's low).
When you say "we agree" - does that include the people that end up unemployed because the expected value of their work is less than the minimum wage? Whereas had they been allowed to work for less than minimum wage, they would have been able to build a track record of reliability, reducing the risks of hiring them in the future and thus increasing the expected value of their labour?
I would love to see the data, but in my experience of growing up in a very poor neighborhood, getting a foot in the labour market is the difficult part; once you are in, moving up is relatively easier.
It's not as direct as that, but certainly the more expensive labor is, the more incentive companies have for automation, which reduces the number of jobs. If minimum wage were lower, we might not see so many self checkouts at grocery stores, and instead employ more cashiers.
I'm not saying the minimum wage or automation are bad, but it's simplistic to claim wage levels and employment have no relationship.
You have to agree, though, that it depends on the value that the minimum wage is set at? If you set the minimum wage at a senior developer level, anyone at the junior level will be unemployable.
So if we agree that at some level of the minimum wage, businesses would not be hiring someone because they cannot pay them below minimum wage - then why do you think this is not happening to some people at the current level of minimum wage?
If that were literally true, I would credit MTurk for saving lives! In reality, I'm guessing it's the least bad out of a few bad choices, or maybe incrementally added on top of other [under]employment. I'd personally call it consent. That doesn't mean we couldn't or shouldn't make other changes!
I feel Sarah Bagley, a Lowell factory worker, wrote essentially the definitive answer to this line of argument in the 19th Century:
> Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a close room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employment, I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntary! Let us look a little at this remarkable form of human freedom. Do we from mere choice leave our fathers’ dwellings, the firesides where all of our friends, where too our earliest and fondest recollections cluster, for the factory and the Corporations boarding house? By what charm do these great companies immure human creatures in the bloom of youth and first glow of life within their mills, away from their homes and kindred? A slave too goes voluntarily to his task, but his will is in some manner quickened by the whip of the overseer.
> The whip which brings us to Lowell is NECESSITY. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be sup- ported, a brother’s ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? When a man is starving he is compelled to pay his neighbor, who happens to have bread, the most exorbitant price for it, and his neighbor may appease his conscience, if conscience he chance to have, by the reflection that it is altogether a voluntary bargain. Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his task by the whip of the over- seer or the wages of the Lowell Corporation. In either case it is not free will, leading the laborer to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question.
Well, sure, true enough. But the main point is a good one -- a free choice between degrading labor on one hand, and penury and starvation on the other, is hardly a choice at all.
79 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadIf you were to shut down MTurk I don't think the people who rely on it for money would thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we really think that someone is too incompetent to make a choice and remove the choice from them, then don't we have some duty to help them out?
For example, I want a child to go to school, not a job, and think them too incompetent to make the decision of which is better for them. In removing the option to work, I then have a duty to support them if they were needing the job to live (which is done by specific welfare for children or their parents).
But calling that a "choice" is like saying the mafioso holding a gun to your head is giving you the freedom to decide to follow his orders.
Which makes it society's responsibility, through regulatory mechanisms, to improve the workers options.
UBI is an example, but there are likely others, for example, a sovereign wealth fund as found in Alaska and Norway.
That's what YC is doing: https://basicincome.ycr.org/
They have 100s of millions to experiment with ... the average person does not.
> Every one advocating for UBI could ...
Advocacy (and voting) are the most power tools for shaping the future direction of society. It's very effective as a way of bringing change, and we have many examples in recent history of this being true. If it weren't, you wouldn't see huge amounts of money being given to Super PACs to advocate for political positions.
> start transferring them a portion of their income every month...
This is a rehash of the very tired, and baseless, cliche against higher taxes that says that those who support higher taxes should write a check to the IRS.
It's a fallacious argument, because redistribution only has societal impact when operating on a society-wide scale. The most significant example of this, the Great Society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society) wasn't built on voluntary contributions to the government.
Individuals of normal means making marginal contributions does little to move the needle on the relevant societal problems in any significant way, whether those problems are infrastructure, poverty, health care, education, etc. These things, if they are done at all, have to be done at a societal scale, and that means via government methods of finance.
It would be nice if their government made up for the gap, but int he real world we have to deal with the possibilities they won't. So one has to deal with the ramifications of their choices that shouldn't and wouldn't happen in a good world but do happen in our world.
No, I flat out reject that notion. The fact that one must have a job to survive in this world removes the ability to chose "not having a job". The illusion of choice does not mean that all employment agreements are purely consensual, and as such there need to be many safeguards in place to prevent exploitation.
Yes, but hunger, not Amazon, is the one holding the threat over the person, and as of yet we have not found a way to change these fundamental aspects of nature/reality. You aren't going to remove threat, you are going to just make it become realized. Think of how some areas where child labor was reduced but the reasons behind children working weren't fixed resulted in children turning to far more dangerous and illegal labor that would near universally be considered a far worse option than sweat shop work.
The fact that the only reason people work for MTurk is because they're desperate for money is hardly a criticism of MTurk. If anything, it's a criticism of everyone else in the world for not providing better ways to make money.
For example, the only reason homeless people queue up to get food from soup kitchens is because they're desperate for food, but that doesn't mean soup kitchens are bad because the queues can be long. (Hypothetical; I don't actually know if queues are typically long).
You're right that nobody had advocated any specific action and I merely assumed that everybody who was against microtask work was in favour of shutting it down. My mistake.
Did you read the article?
> For example, the only reason homeless people queue up to get food from soup kitchens is because they're desperate for food, but that doesn't mean soup kitchens are bad because the queues can be long. (Hypothetical; I don't actually know if queues are typically long).
Are you really drawing a comparison between skirting minimum wage laws and providing free food for homeless people?
The other economist, startled, said, "what are you doing?"
The first economist said, "I'm picking up that $20 bill."
The other economist was bemused. "There can't possibly be a $20 there to pick up. Why, someone would have already picked it up!"
The first economist straightened up, and considered carefully the words of his colleague. Convinced that it must be his imagination, he nodded, and the pair of them walked off.
Also, the systems themselves certify high-performing workers over time, who then become eligible for higher-paying microtasks.
Did you miss that bit? The point of the comparison is to highlight the obviously fallacious reasoning that underlies the idea that someone's participation in something means it's beneficial to them.
Who are the "parents" in this case?
Elsewhere in this thread, the entire concept of employment regulation is called into question. The history of employment law goes back to child labor regulations. So if you reject all employment regulation, you also reject child labor regulation. This is a very fringe argument that is a nonstarter with basically everyone. If, on the other hand, you don't reject child labor regulations, then you accept the premise that employment regulation is sometimes necessary, and now we're just haggling over the details.
What we need to do as a society is to protect the unsophisticated from scams that they are entirely unprepared to spot and avoid. Like bringing workers over from other countries, taking their passports, and basically turning them into slaves.
Compared to that, this is far less wretched hive of scum and villainy. But even wretched hives are better than no hive at all.
Can we please do a little better than this? Actually learning something is more important than satisfying oneself with glib dismissals, which inevitably draw others into a sad cloud of dullness.
These hidden costs are almost identical in the world of independent freelance work. Similar for "gig" workers as well. An Uber/Lyft driver told me he aims for 10 hours per day, which usually takes an extra 4 hours (14 total) of unpaid relocating, waiting around, etc.
My hope is that people view this as the cost of autonomy, but I fear most people aren't pricing it in.
But I mean those costs have always been part of the reason freelancers are more expensive than employees (the other being the increased flexibility).
What seems to happen now is that, increasingly, free lancers are cheaper, which suggests that employees are paid above the price they could expect, if there weren't rules about minimum wage.
Technology has opened many new opportunities for corporations and for everyday people.
However, the pace of new opportunities is way faster than the ability that governments have to regulate the new opportunities. It would seem that companies, entrepreneurs, and silicon valley have realized this and are using it as a business strategy. If I had to sum up the business strategy, I would say "Find a regularity system that can be exploited by rapid innovation".
While it's always been a business strategy to exploit legal loopholes, I think the difference is that companies exploit an entire regulatory system which is harder to update and takes longer. Airbnb, Uber, Mechanical Turk, are all examples of exploiting a regulatory system by creating a product and then quickly scaling it up to mass adoption before the practices introduced can be outlawed.
Once something has been massively adopted it's difficult to stop completely.
While the word exploit seems inherently negative I'm not trying to make judgment value, I think it's the correct description. I don't have a strong opinion about any of these companies or exploiting regulatory systems.
However, I do think that democracy needs to find a way to keep up with the forces taking advantage of its inherent systematic boundaries, such as being slow to react. I'm not sure what needs to change but I think when you have many US citizens participating in completely unregulated labor markets there is a problem that needs to be solved.
> Once something has been massively adopted it's difficult to stop completely.
> ...
> However, I do think that democracy needs to find a way to keep up with the forces taking advantage of its inherent systematic boundaries, such as being slow to react. I'm not sure what needs to change but I think when you have many US citizens participating in completely unregulated labor markets there is a problem that needs to be solved.
I think the solution is that it be made very clear to the companies pushing the regulatory boundaries (and their fans) that they should be prepared to have their business models destroyed when the regulatory environment catches up.
Call it "Creative Destruction 2.0."
All the services we're talking about have both real utility and (for the most part) unplanned costs and impacts.
The Taxi Medallion system is/was horribly corrupt and inefficient. Uber (for all their faults) is an improvement in terms of safety, convenience and less discriminatory practices.
Similarly, AirBnB isn't defacto a horrible presence in cities (tons of great experiences), but hosts should abide by neighborhood norms, pay hotel taxes, etc.
In many of the other countries Uber has presence it has done damage to a sector that was not horribly corrupt or inefficient. Yet the workers and governments still have to react to rule breaking that effectively treats everywhere on the planet as some US city with a broken and corrupt taxi system.
In the UK I would call Uber a very marginal increase in convenience (all taxis have apps if that's your preferred method), but absolutely and demonstrably significantly worse in terms of safety, discriminatory practices, and worker's incomes. So overall I don't think it is too harsh, at least here.
Are the workers informed? Much like the question of whether Uber drivers properly factor in the cost of maintenance, it's possible that workers do not have the right expectations of what they will earn, so articles like this are helpful in adding context and information. Let it get around that these tasks make you less than minimum wage.
Do the workers consent? Obviously they consent in at least some sense, so comparisons to slavery (as in the comments to the original article) are overblown. These workers are free to seek other options. However, it's also possible that they are correctly concluding this is their best option, due to lack of opportunity in their area, health reasons that make them immobile, etc. In that case, then two cheers for MTurk for improving their lives, to at least some extent.
Is any job better than none to an unemployed person? Maybe — but we need money to live, and labor laws exist precisely to prevent employers from exploiting that.
While it's certainly true that if these jobs were forced to pay a reasonable minimum wage there would be some less work to do, most of the world has already conceded the point that pure supply-and-demand is not an acceptable way to negotiate wages - we agree that some minimum wage is useful to protect those without other options.
If I weren't already off-topic, this is where I would veer into advocating for basic income.
I would love to see the data, but in my experience of growing up in a very poor neighborhood, getting a foot in the labour market is the difficult part; once you are in, moving up is relatively easier.
I'm not saying the minimum wage or automation are bad, but it's simplistic to claim wage levels and employment have no relationship.
So if we agree that at some level of the minimum wage, businesses would not be hiring someone because they cannot pay them below minimum wage - then why do you think this is not happening to some people at the current level of minimum wage?
> Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a close room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employment, I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntary! Let us look a little at this remarkable form of human freedom. Do we from mere choice leave our fathers’ dwellings, the firesides where all of our friends, where too our earliest and fondest recollections cluster, for the factory and the Corporations boarding house? By what charm do these great companies immure human creatures in the bloom of youth and first glow of life within their mills, away from their homes and kindred? A slave too goes voluntarily to his task, but his will is in some manner quickened by the whip of the overseer.
> The whip which brings us to Lowell is NECESSITY. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be sup- ported, a brother’s ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? When a man is starving he is compelled to pay his neighbor, who happens to have bread, the most exorbitant price for it, and his neighbor may appease his conscience, if conscience he chance to have, by the reflection that it is altogether a voluntary bargain. Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his task by the whip of the over- seer or the wages of the Lowell Corporation. In either case it is not free will, leading the laborer to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question.