The challenges and future of digital work
The challenges and future of digital work
Published 1 May, 2019
In brief
- Unfair requestors and unpaid tasks are the main reasons for underpaid workers.
- Online crowdsourced work offers workers new opportunities to work. In addition, the work style could benefit people traditionally not included, such as people with disabilities. However, crowdsourcing has problems; aside from low wages, workers cannot move up a career ladder or have legal protection or benefits that direct employees get.
- Technologies are being designed and developed to improve the crowdsourcing platforms, but more can be done to address the existing issues.
Assistant Professor Kotaro Hara from SMU’s School of Information Systems shares why crowdsourcing platforms for work, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, contribute to low wages for workers in the gig economy, and what could potentially be done to improve the efficacy of these platforms.
Crowd work or crowdsourcing, an emerging form of online contracting work, is growing. About 600,000 workers participate in the online gig economy annually and the number is growing rapidly. Crowdsourcing facilitates new ways of working. Its remote and asynchronous work style – unbounded by time and location – could enable people with disabilities and stay-at-home parents to work.
On the other hand, many are concerned that workers in crowdsourcing markets are treated unfairly. Researchers are particularly concerned about low wage of crowd work. For example, past research has found that workers typically earn US$2 an hour.
In this podcast, Assistant Professor Kotaro Hara from SMU School of Information Systems discusses his research on why crowdsourcing platforms for work, which includes Amazon Mechanical Turk, contribute to low wages for workers in the gig economy, and what could potentially be done to improve the efficacy of these platforms.
Additional information for reference:
- A data-driven analysis of workers' earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk - by Kotaro HARA, Abigail ADAMS, Kristy MILLAND, Saiph SAVAGE, Chris CALLISON-BURCH and Jeffrey P. BIGHAM.
Originally published at https://engage.smu.edu.sg/challenges-and-future-digital-work.