Bad news if that guy wins... if requesters are required to pay minimum wage, why would they put up HITS on mTurk when they could just hire someone for the same price?
I agree. This would be a nightmare situation for US crowdsourcers. Keep in mind that some states have minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage. We might see requesters geotargeting workers in states that only have the federal minimum. We might see requesters geotargeting workers outside the US. We might see requesters hiring physical people instead of crowdsourcing. Personally, I don’t think the suit has much chance. But there surely are a lot of ways it can go wrong for current Turkers. I would be very interested in knowing just how much time Otay spent on CrowdFlower HITs and how much he is after in this suit.
Some fast food chains already outsource drive thru ordering to states which have lower minimum wages. So if the minimum wage in your state is something like $11, these companies out source to a state that is on the cusp of the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Two of the comments at the bottom of this article said it best.
In order to do what turkers do, it would cost them a fortune--even if they were paying minimum wage because they would have to hire dozens of people or more to get the work finished on time. Then when the work was done, they would still have to pay them to mope about until another big project comes along. No matter how you slice it, crowdsourcing is still the cheapest, quickest way to accomplish this work--even if the Requestor DOES have to pay us at a rate that would equal minimum wage. Which quite frankly, I think they should!
I am not going to argue that CrowdFlower's pay is low, however, who is to decide what is fair? Minimum wage is not the answer. Someone will come up with an arbitrary number and say doing X amount of these HIT's will pay $7.25 an hr so now each HIT has a minimum value of X each. Who's to say that Person A can do the task at the same speed as Person B? Next thing you know, Person A is complaining that they are only making $5 an hour compared to Person B's $7.25 (or even higher). These companies will just move overseas to avoid paying higher wages and someone will still continue to do them because they pay better than the factory job down the street. No one forces American's to do their HIT's; it's a personal choice if any American turker does..
This is disgusting. Are we not considered sole proprietors of our own company? This is how we pay taxes if we get a 1099! This is a bogus suit!
This is ridiculous. We're not employees. If I decide not to turk for two weeks, no requester is going to care. If I spontaneously don't show up at my office for two weeks, though, there would be a big problem. Besides, CF isn't asking people to spend hours at a time on the HITs. If the plaintiff isn't making minimum wage, it's his own fault. Not because the HITs are too cheap, but because HE is too cheap. The HITs clearly say how much they pay, and he never had to do them. He could have used that time for literally anything else that would make money. But he's seriously going to come up against CF because they aren't paying enough? Talk about entitlement. That's like suing The Gap because you think their clothes are too expensive, even though the price tag is right in front of your face. Just don't bloody go there if you don't like their terms!
We live in such a litigious society. It seems now that even if you do not exert any energy to further your stake in life, it is someone else's fault. If a person does not want to work for Crowdflower or in any other virtual marketplace, just don't do it. Go work for someone else and enhance their bottom line, open your own business, or carve out a new niche based on your skills and ambitions. Just don't complain and act as if you have some God-given right to work at a salary you dictate. As a new worker in this online environment, I like the fact that how much I earn depends solely on my efforts...after years of working in the traditional marketplace, this work suits me and my desires to live a simpler life, and earn a little spending change at my own pace. Navigating this new way of working is not easy, but I constantly remind myself of what is involved in the day-to-day rat race, and I choose to say "No, thank you."