Mutualist journal club
Monday, July 24, 2006
"I make $1.45 a week and I love it" | Salon Technology
"I make $1.45 a week and I love it" | Salon Technology
Salon reports on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a web-based system where a person can hire another to do mind-numbing, repetitive, digital jobs for just pennies. Many of the "workers" take these jobs on their down time, either when they are unable to perform "real" work or as a simple distraction, similar to online puzzle games. From this perspective, this innovation has a great potential to allow people to perform productive activities in a very flexible environment, without the "negative utility" generally associated with work.
However, some are concerned that the value of the work is much greater than the compensation that the workers recieve. Perhaps this illustrates the futility of labor laws, and the need for workers to have ownership over their work systems, or maybe not...
It's an interesting read, as are the other articles that are mentioned in the post-script.
Salon reports on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a web-based system where a person can hire another to do mind-numbing, repetitive, digital jobs for just pennies. Many of the "workers" take these jobs on their down time, either when they are unable to perform "real" work or as a simple distraction, similar to online puzzle games. From this perspective, this innovation has a great potential to allow people to perform productive activities in a very flexible environment, without the "negative utility" generally associated with work.
However, some are concerned that the value of the work is much greater than the compensation that the workers recieve. Perhaps this illustrates the futility of labor laws, and the need for workers to have ownership over their work systems, or maybe not...
It's an interesting read, as are the other articles that are mentioned in the post-script.
posted by Ricketson # 12:34 PM 
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