Design Activism for Minimum Wage Crowd Work
This addresses the problem of fair compensation in crowd work for workers and Requesters, but it is incremental as it focuses on promoting discussion and providing tools rather than implementing systemic change.
The study investigated the issue of low pay in entry-level crowd work by surveying and confronting workers with a policy requiring minimum wage, finding that two-thirds of Indian workers supported it while two-thirds of American workers opposed it, and only 20% of Requesters would enforce such a policy despite majority support.
Entry-level crowd work is often reported to pay less than minimum wage. While this may be appropriate or even necessary, due to various legal, economic, and pragmatic factors, some Requesters and workers continue to question this status quo. To promote further discussion on the issue, we survey Requesters and workers whether they would support restricting tasks to require minimum wage pay. As a form of design activism, we confronted workers with this dilemma directly by posting a dummy Mechanical Turk task which told them that they could not work on it because it paid less than their local minimum wage, and we invited their feedback. Strikingly, for those workers expressing an opinion, two-thirds of Indians favored the policy while two-thirds of Americans opposed it. Though a majority of Requesters supported minimum wage pay, only 20\% would enforce it. To further empower Requesters, and to ensure that effort or ignorance are not barriers to change, we provide a simple public API to make it easy to find a worker's local minimum wage by his/her IP address.