Virtual Piece Work for Pin Money - Part 1

There was a very interesting article in today's Sunday Times entitled: Wanted: Digital Drones To Earn 1/2p An Hour. It focuses on the Amazon service Mechanical Turk which is a global market place for companies seeking a mass digital workforce willing to complete piece work for pin money. As an experiment, the writers of the article signed up to Mechanical Turk and earned themselves $2.14 for 4 hours work! Karl Marx would be turning in his grave! Words like exploitation and rip-off come to mind...

...but curiosity got the better of me and I've signed up. You knew I would. A dollar is a dollar after all. (The free £10 that I got from William Hill as a Christmas pressie is getting lonely and needs company - see previous post). I've got my eye on a wee task that I hope will take me 10 minutes and pay me $1 dollar. If it all works out I reckon I can beat Matthew Bingham and Joseph Dunn - the Sunday Times journalists - and hit a rate of $6 per hour pro rata. Now, at the today's exchange rate that would net me:

6.00 USD = 3.97034 GBP

Nearly £4! The UK minimum wage currently stands at £5.73 - so it is quite considerably short of that but it get's the mind thinking. However, unless you live in the US or India, you can only get paid in Amazon credits and therefore are restricted to buying Amazon products but this is likely to change soon as Mechanical Turk becomes more popular, so the article says.

I know a freelance professional who directly competes with workers from Minesota to Mumbai on a site called Elance. The site is a little different from Mechanical Turk in that it is aimed at freelance professionals with a skillset, such as transcription or web design, and the jobs tend to be self-contained. You are slightly less of a cog completing one small task for a giant leveraging labour machine and often you are invited to pitch and quote. Nevertheless, the implied rates are still low and to even have a cat in hell's chance of competing with the developing world, your rates have to stay low.

Anyway, when I've done my experiment I'll let you know.