Online frila platforms do not guarantee fair work – 07/19/2023 – Tec

Online freelance platforms that offer services to big techs like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have failed to guarantee fair work to professionals.

This is what a report by the Fairwork project shows, an initiative based on the Oxford Internet Institute that evaluates employment conditions on digital platforms around the world to assign an individual score to each company.

The study polled 750 workers from 94 countries active on 15 online freelance sites. None of the analyzed platforms reached more than five points out of ten possible.

One of those assessed was Mechanical Turk, from Amazon, which scored zero on the test. According to the researchers’ criteria, the platform failed to guarantee fairness in pay, working conditions, contracts, management and representation of workers.

On the site, workers perform menial tasks that computers fail to deliver with the necessary finesse or precision.

Amanda, 26, from Rio de Janeiro, is one of those who use the Amazon platform. She —who is a nursing technician and asked to have her name preserved— started doing “digital jobs” on Mechanical Turk in 2019. Today, she says she sees fewer job offers on the site, which had helped her to deal with the difficulty of settling down. consolidate as a health professional.

According to Amanda’s report to Fairwork, the number of contractors on the Amazon website dropped after changes in the platform’s rules.

Sought by the report, AWS (Amazon Web Services), responsible for Mechanical Turk, did not answer what guarantees it gives to people looking for work on the platform. The company also does not inform how many workers are registered on the site.

Oxford Internet Institute research shows that remote freelance platforms had 163 million users in 2021.

These companies have global reach or are regional leaders and offer services to the biggest players in the world’s artificial intelligence market, such as the trillionaires Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia.

The origin of the name of Mechanical Turk exemplifies the routine of people who do remote work jobs. It was an 18th-century machine that appeared to be playing chess autonomously while being controlled via levers by a man in a trapdoor.

One of the coordinators of the Fairwork project, the Brazilian Jonas Valente says that, as well as the evolution in computational capacity, the availability of cheap work on the internet was essential to develop new models of artificial intelligence.

People described images, evaluated behaviors, transcribed audios and videos that served to guide algorithms. The low price was made possible by the possibility of remote work. “Someone who lives in the UK competes for the same task as a worker based in Lagos, Nigeria,” says Valente.

At the same time, workers in the global South were able to receive hard currency, which ensured wages above the local average. Amanda herself praises the remuneration guaranteed by Amazon Mechanical Turk. “I’ve never had a problem with payment,” she says.

Fairwork’s results dismantle what Valente calls the “digital nomadism hoax”, a life of luxury available to a very small portion of high-income workers.

The research shows that the instability of the freelance offer on this platform, for example, puts at risk the guarantee of receiving a minimum wage in the month. It also indicates the time that workers spend without pay on the platform in training or looking for jobs.

The five worst evaluated platforms were Appen (score 3), Clickworker (1), Scale/Remotasks (1), Microworkers (0) and Amazon Mechanical Turk (0).

Across these five sites, people were able to work an average of 23.30 hours a week, of which 6.18 hours were spent on unpaid activities — which equates to more than a quarter of the time.

On Mechanical Turk, Amanda says she has problems with tasks that are unavailable for countries in South America and complains about the existence of a mastery seal on the platform, required for some tasks. According to her, Amazon does not explain how to obtain this symbol of competence.

Valente, on the other hand, states that residents in countries that have English as their first language have an advantage in the competition for positions, since most contractors work with the language.

Workers also have to adapt to the hours when jobs are offered. A profile drawn by Professor Matheus Viana Braz, from UEMG (State University of Minas Gerais), shows that Brazilians connect at dawn to get jobs.

The results are part of the second round of evaluation carried out by Fairwork with exclusively remote work platforms. Prolific, aimed at academic projects, was the best evaluated platform in 2022 and lost two points. The French Comeup managed to improve in terms of management and contracts and jumped from two to five points. Mechanical Turk zeroed out on both occasions.

Valente explains that Fairwork is action research. The researchers rate companies based on workers’ responses and then question the companies on the complaints found. The platforms have up to 15 days to submit answers and obtain points in the areas where they fell short.

ComeUp and Nigeria’s TeraWork, for example, adopted policies to guarantee payment of the local minimum wage after being approached by Fairwork.

People who work directly for Amazon voted the retail giant the best company to work for in the United States, according to a survey by LinkedIn.

This year, at the same time, Mechanical Turk workers begin to turn to generative artificial intelligences to deliver more tasks and are replaced by technology.

An article by Professor Fabrizio Gilardi, from the University of Zurich, in March, shows that ChatGPT does the job of annotating data 20 times cheaper than a person in Mechanical Turk. However, not every task available in Mechanical Turk is yet achievable by computers.