The Future of Crowd Work

Online labour exchange marketplaces like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and PeoplePerHour.com represent a rapidly expanding employment sector. This new area therefore represents fertile ground for academic investigation, and so ‘The Future of Crowd Work’ by Aniket et al. (2013) could be viewed as a useful contribution. Unfortunately however, I think that despite a good start, this paper does not live up to its potential and I was actually left feeling rather uneasy.

Early in the paper the authors pose a question which they aim to focus their research around: “Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate?” As a basic demonstration of how ethically problematic this workplace currently is, consider that when the authors present the pros and cons of the workplace they were only able to provide 7 lines of pros compared with 47 lines of cons. I think the authors give a fair and accurate assessment here, highlighting a wide range of problems central to which is the ‘extremely low pay for labour…with no benefits or worker protections’. They also astutely assert that in order to address their question appropriately they will need to draw on literature beyond the fields of science and design, and incorporate knowledge and ideas from labour economics, ethics and law. Unfortunately I don’t think that they are successful in integrating such knowledge and ideas sufficiently and I believe the paper suffers as a result.

In the remainder of the paper instead of tackling the underlying issues that make for poor working conditions faced by current crowd source workers, the authors instead appear to think that the best way forward is to expand crowd work’s reach to encompass more ‘complex, creative and highly valued work’. They propose utilising a framework that features a synergy of human workers and artificial intelligence, and they propose ways in which the framework could ‘create career ladders’ and ‘facilitate learning’, but they don’t question whether a crowd workplace could really match the career progression and learning opportunities available within a conventional workplace. The major problem is that the authors have omitted to sufficiently consider the underlying political landscape. The workplace, in this country at least, has been shaped to a large extent by the labour movement’s hard fought victories. This has brought us the minimum wage, sick pay, maternity provision and a whole host of other legislation that aims to protect workers, and so any change to the employment landscape that can erode or circumvent these hard won rights should, I believe, be opposed. And whilst academic research could legitimately view crowd workplaces through a different lens, if you state that you are focussing your work around the question ‘Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate?’ then the question of whether a globalised crowd workplace just creates a ‘race to the bottom’ should be addressed.    

Perhaps if this had been more of a cross disciplinary study, including for example experts on Precarious Work, then the authors framework may have been very different and might have sighted political protections for workers as a prerequisite before any positive future crowd workplace could be envisaged.