Introduction
Paid Crowd Work: An Overview
Definitions: Crowd Work, Requesters.
Examples: general purpose vs. specialized marketplaces
Pros v. Cons of Globalized Workforce
Pros: Economic and Social Mobility, Flexibility, geographically distributed workforce
Cons: Dead-end jobs, low wages
Future of Crowd Work
Establish Career Ladders
Improved Task Design
Facilitated Learning
Conclusion
Introduction
Over the last decade, paid, online crowd work (defined as a work platform that distributes work tasks between a crowd of workers, who receive financial compensation upon the successful completion of each task they perform in accordance with the task requirements specified by an individual, group or organization) has quickly emerged as a cornerstone of the modern workforce. Online crowd work exists in marketplaces that connect a broad cross-section of requesters (i.e. self-employed individuals, small businesses, non-profits, organizations) with online freelancers seeking on-demand, work-at-home opportunities. Popular marketplaces run the gamut, from general-purpose platforms (such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Clickworker, Freelancer, oDesk) to specialized marketplaces for highly-skilled workers (e.g. TopCoder, 99Designs, Upwork). Overall, crowd work has the potential to become the cornerstone of the 21st century workforce because it promises to offer companies many opportunities for streamlining work tasks (and thus improving worker productivity), competing in a rapidly changing global economy by allowing firms to employ a geographically diverse workforce capable of completing complex work tasks on demand and at scale, which is likely to have an appreciable effect on the firms’ bottom line. Overall, the appeal of crowd work can be traced to the potential of its successful application to facilitate a flexible workforce all the while mitigating many of the challenges in industries where job vacancies abound as a result of a relative scarcity of qualified experts in high-demand fields (e.g. IT and engineering work) or in certain geographic locations. At the same time, crowd work also has the potential to redound its benefits down to individuals by expanding income and social mobility in regions of the world where local economies and labor markets might be depressed.
Of course, it is also true that crowd work has the potential to be a double-edged sword, just as likely to enhance as it is to decrease the social desirability of such work. For instance, some forms of globally distributed crowd work is not immune from analogies to the unfair labor practices in some developing countries, with general-purpose crowd work platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk effectively paying workers on average an hourly wage (reported to be as low as $2/hourly) less than a third of the federal minimum wage. In truth, the vast majority of crowd work marketplaces employ a per-task pay schedule that is problematical for the simple fact that it encourages gaming behavior, which has the predictable effect of discourages quality work. What’s more, it is no secret that most crowd work markets today amount to dead-end jobs, providing very few opportunities for career advancement and economic mobility in the long-term, especially in developed economies where the cost of living continues to rise as wages largely remain stagnant.
Next Steps: The Future of Crowd Work
For the above reasons, there are many challenges within current crowd markets that should be addressed before crowd markets are able to realize their potential to unlock limitless opportunities for expansion in career opportunities for skilled workers. What challenges stand in the way of crowd work realizing its goals? A good place to start looking for answers is the emerging research that draws on organizational behavior theory and distributed computing concepts to provide frameworks for designing crowd work markets that are complex, collaborative and sustainable (Felstiner). Consistent with these goals, academics identify three essential components of a future crowd work platform that achieves these objectives: career ladders, improved task design through better communication, and facilitated learning.
Establish Career Ladders
At present, most crowd work markets are not structured in a way to offer career advancement for seasoned workers, which limits the economic mobility for people for whom crowd work is their primary means of earning a living. Both experience and theory suggests that it would be profitable for crowd work markets to implement systems that track the demonstrated aptitude and diligence of its workforce. Such a system would benefit both requesters and workers by having systems in place that allow proven workers to take on new tasks that require greater skill and responsibility. Since economic benefits redound to organizations capable of making best use of the varied skilled sets of its employees, skilled workers should receive pay that matches their competence, and motivated to train less skilled coworkers: for instance, MobileWorks uses job performance statistics to promote skilled workers to management jobs .
Better Task Design
Contrary to the popular perception that inferior quality work on some crowd work markets is reducible to incompetent workers, most quality control issues arise from ambiguously designed crowdsourcing tasks. For instance, in a number of well-documented cases, poor quality has synced with incomplete or unclear task instructions, with little, if any, guidance for boundary cases, or do not provide adequate examples for expected input-output. One way to address this issue is to provide requesters with best practices for task design, to improve quality assurance across tasks.
Facilitate Learning
Conclusion
Globally distributed crowd work promises to transform global economies and labor markets by streamlining worker productivity and allowing a geographically dispersed workforce to collaborate and complete complex on demand job tasks at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will not progress beyond its current structure that is akin to assembly-line piecework. And so, the question of whether future crowd work will achieve its goals of establishing a workforce that is complex, collaborative and sustainable, will largely hinge on successful application of the emerging research on organizational behavior and distributed computer, which suggests that three goals should underline future crowd work markets: 1) creating career ladders; 2) improved task design with clear instructions based on best practices, and: 3) facilitated learning.
Works Cited
Anderson, M. "Crowdsourcing Higher Education: A Design Proposal for Distriubted Learning ." MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (2011): 576 - 590.
Chen, Jenny J., Natala J Menezes and Adam D Bradley. "Opportunities for Crowdsourcing Research on Amazon Mechanical Turk." Interfaces (2012).
Felstiner, A. "Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry." Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L. (2011): 143.
Kulkarni, A., et al. "MobileWorks: Designing for Quality in a Managed Crowdsourcing Architecture ." IEEE Internet Computing . 2012.
