Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 170

decisions to global logistics planning. One business publication, not known
for harsh attacks on workplace practices, cites people in one U.K. Amazon
plant who complain about the company's practices. A local oficial, who
fought to bring the company to his town with a high unemployment rate,
concludes, “They're not seen as a good employer. It's not helpful to our
economy; it's not helpful to the individuals” (S. O'Connor 2013). Another
uses stronger language: “The feedback we're getting is it's like being in
a slave camp.” Even an Amazon manager admits, “You're sort of like a
robot, but in human form.” In the words of one technology reporter,
“Digital capitalism produces few winners. Apple, Amazon, Facebook and
Google might post huge proits, but many of their staff see little inancial
beneit” (Naughton 2013).
Amazon labor is restive not only in the material workplace. The com-
pany operates a global system of piecework in the cloud that critics have
called a “digital sweatshop” (Cushing 2013). The Amazon Mechanical
Turk (AMT) employs a large body of “crowdsourced” workers, whom
Amazon calls “providers” (also known as “Turkers”). They carry out
minute tasks online for “requesters,” who pay Turkers piece rates for writ-
ing product descriptions, identifying individuals in images, or producing
spam (a 2010 study by New York University researchers determined that
spam constitutes as much as 40 percent of the jobs) (Ipeirotis 2013).
Amazon originally set the system up to carry out work that could be
done online but required some human involvement. The typical job
was sorting merchandise into categories based on color or style for the
company's massive online warehouse. It was so successful that Amazon
decided to become a job broker for corporations needing people to do
things like look up foreign zip codes or transcribe podcasts.
For managing the service, Amazon receives 10 percent of the value
of a completed job, or human-intelligence task (HIT). Although Turk-
ers include professionals, the vast majority are semiskilled workers who
provide their credentials to requesters and, once cleared, choose among
posted tasks. Workers in the United States are paid in cash, but many
foreign workers are primarily given the option to accept gift certiicates.
Exact igures are hard to pin down, but it is estimated that the industry
employs over 200,000 workers and, by 2011, was earning about $375
million annually (Cushing 2013). There is also growing evidence that
workers are less than happy with the system. It did not take long for