Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 171

them to realize that, as one complained, “they make it sound like you can
just do a few tasks in your free time in between other things, but if you
worked like that, I believe you would make about a dollar a day” (ibid.).
Because companies have an enormous workforce to draw from, they can
pay the lowest possible rates— $1 or $2 an hour is not unusual—and
demand swift and accurate completion of jobs. Workers who mess up a
job are dropped or banned from reapplying. In January 2013 Amazon
stopped accepting new applications from international Turkers because of
what the company deemed unacceptable levels of fraud and poor worker
performance (“The Reasons Why Amazon Mechanical Turk No Longer
Accepts International Turkers” 2013). Since international workers are
more likely to accept the low pay and constant demands, requesters have
begun to set up their own Turk operations.
Upset about the system, Turkers use their online world to vet requesters
and contact other Turkers. The result is Turkopticon, a piece of software
that adds functionality to sites that post HITs by adding ratings, reviews
of employers, and advice to exploited Turkers. 8 According to one scien-
tist who has worked on AMT 28,000 times, “There's no sick leave, paid
holidays, anything like that on Turk. There is no arbitration, no appeal if
you feel that you have been unfairly treated, apart from a stinging review
on Turkopticon” (Hodson 2013). Furthermore, worker complaints, fraud,
and a host of negative consequences resulting from AMT's sweatshop in
the cloud have encouraged other irms to set up somewhat more hospi-
table operations. For example, the irm MobileWorks pays the minimum
wage in effect in the country where the work is being done, assigns each
worker a manager to deal with problems, and provides opportunities for
worker mobility (ibid.). It is uncertain whether the emergence of more
worker-friendly companies will restore some credibility to online piece-
work. Much will depend on whether big companies like Amazon reform
the labor process in the cloud. It appears to be in their interest to do so
because it has become clear that the race to the bottom for wages and
working conditions creates problems for the company as well as for workers.
Worker organizations, especially trade unions, are not often discussed
alongside cloud computing. Only a handful of cloud providers, mainly the
older computer and telecommunications irms such as IBM and Verizon,
have to deal with organized labor. But as we have seen in the case of
Apple's experience with Foxconn in China and Amazon in Germany, cloud