Is Microwork Worth the Trouble?
Microwork is simply defined as when a number of people band together to complete a large task with each individual doing a small part. Microwork is available through multiple different crowdsourcing providers, and usually, the work is done from cell phones and/or tablets. The kinds of tasks that involve microwork are at the lowest end of the skill hierarchy (Webster 2016). Examples of microwork include entering data, tagging images, transcribing scanned text into digital text, and checking product sentiment or people ratings. Microwork is essentially work that requires little to no skills and can be completed in very little time, however, they are still vital to the gig economy. Microwork “differs from earlier forms of freelance or home-based work by mediating work digitally, by dispersing work and workers, and by the use of temporary contracts…” (Webster 2016). This means that if you decide to do microwork, you have to always be on-call whenever required, regardless of the ramifications in their lives away from paid work.
There is also the argument that microwork systems produce a difference between innovative laborers and menial laborers. For example, Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is a symbol of microwork crowdsourcing and how the cultural work of AMT mediates divisions of labor and software interfaces. “AMT is an internet marketplace where employers, called Requesters in Amazon’s parlance, can post Human Intelligence Tasks with a price for each task” (Irani 2015). To post a task, these requesters only need to have a valid credit card, and then Amazon profits by a taking a percentage of the task price paid to workers as a fee for using the platform. Workers and requesters have different views of the infrastructure. The workers sign in to see a list of tasks that have been posted to the market, while the requesters interact primarily by posting tasks and receiving results.
One of the benefits of microwork is the ability to help combat poverty. In poorer countries, like Haiti, microworkers are being trained for specific tasks which gives them the ability to earn money to help sustain their houses (Martel 2016). In Kenya and India, there are more than 2,000 workers that are working full-time in microwork tagging photos and doing other small data entry tasks and have made more than $2 million in payments to them. The continuing growth of technology will create an entirely new market for microworkers in rural areas. Companies will always need small repetitive tasks completed, and there is a good chance that microwork will expand into countries that have a large number of unskilled workers (Martel 2016). However, it is important to note that not all microwork is unskilled, one-quarter of all microworkers do have some education and it is especially true in the United States. It is also possible that many will take advantage of the unique opportunity to earn money at home by doing small tasks in the future years. While microwork will not be the end of poverty, it still is a viable option for many that have nothing.
Works Cited
Irani, Lilly. “The cultural work of microwork.” New Media & Society. 2015. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YJmVmF9IACyi__7Q3-NOOIYlSwou9NMa/view.
Martel, Doreen. “What is microwork and how does it work?” Online Business Home. 24 June 2016. http://www.onlinebusinesshome.com/what-is-microwork-and-how-does-it-work-aid-16008/.
Torpey, Kyle. “Microwork.io Uses Smart Contracts to Coordinated Small Tasks Worldwide.” BITCOIN Magazine. 5 May 2015. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/microwork-io-uses-smart-contracts-coordinate-small-tasks-worldwide-1431026361/.
Webster, Juliet. “Microworkers of the Gig Economy: Separate and Precarious.” New Labor Forum. 2016. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ou-93WAoQn49v9CRy3g3kIPYyUF7ZAjs/view.
