Last week, at precisely 9 am PST, thousands of businesses in the west screeched to an abrupt halt when over half a dozen online outsourcing labor markets went on strike. In what was obviously a highly organized global labor movement, workers from Mechanical Turk, Fancy Hands, Taskrabbit, and many more shut down all operations by simply refusing to participate. As there were no contracts, hourly wages, or real infrastructure built around these services, very little could be done.

“The entire system is based on desperation,” an anonymous spokesperson for the strike said in a message board vital for the strike’s coordination. “Yes, we are desperate, we are hungry, and we are poor, but it’s time the West realized it too needs us to function at all. Although we don’t have the upper hand, we have a say in this game as well. We aren’t robots, we are humans!” Similar sentiments were loudly echoed by the forum’s impressive 63,000 participants.

Much like the first Mechanical Turk, a fake chess-playing “machine” hiding a human inside, the allure of these outsourced labor markets has been tarnished by the recent strike. At a public hearing calling attention to the inhumane treatment of workers, ACLU labor rights advocate, Judy Brown said, “We had no idea America was so reliant on this incredibly diminutive labor. We thought we had minimum wage laws, but business have figured out how to circumvent the rule of law. We definitely will continue this battle that these workers in India, Philippines, and China, began.”

In an anti-climatic turn of events, the strike held strong for two days until a large group of Kenyans began filling orders around the clock for twice the previous pay. While East African internet rates usually are too steep to compete in these markets against their Asian counterparts, the price bump of pennies was enough to make Mechanical Turk viable. In a matter of hours, the entire labor force had returned, desperate to not permanently lose their livelihood.

The impossibility of organizing meaningful resistance to this type of global-level labor place creates the low prices that companies have come to rely on. While stocks did fall dramatically, everything has smoothed out and is in working order once again.