How digital platforms use underpaid microworkers

Tech­no­logy is not going to erad­ic­ate work for humans. Quite the oppos­ite, in fact – there is a strong risk that it will “pro­let­ari­an­ise” it, by mak­ing that work invis­ible and lim­it­ing it to small, repet­it­ive, under­qual­i­fied tasks. This is the argu­ment put for­ward by digit­al soci­ology research­er Ant­o­nio Casilli.

Who are France’s microworkers?

They are work­ers who log on from home to plat­forms like Amazon’s Mech­an­ic­al Turk to com­plete so-called “human intel­li­gence” tasks paid on a per job basis. They nev­er know who they are work­ing for, or to what end, because most of the time com­pan­ies pub­lish their jobs anonym­ously. The tasks, which are often used to sup­ple­ment arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, are repet­it­ive and require few qual­i­fic­a­tions – circle toma­toes in a photo to assist nutri­tion applic­a­tions, tran­scribe receipts, cal­ib­rate vir­tu­al assist­ants by assess­ing the qual­ity of speech syn­thes­is, copy and paste, say words aloud, indic­ate the col­our of a char­ac­ter, and so on – all for a few cents.

Accord­ing to the “Micro­work in France” study that I con­duc­ted with my research group DiPLab (short for Digit­al Plat­form Labour), there were approx­im­ately 260,000 people micro­work­ing at least occa­sion­ally in France in 2019¹. The major­ity are women (56%) who are 25–44 years old (63%), and nearly half of people sur­veyed said they resort to this kind of work out of fin­an­cial need. Hence, micro­work is often a source of extra income, even though the aver­age monthly pay was only €21. Even more sur­pris­ingly, these “click­work­ers” have more qual­i­fic­a­tions than the aver­age French per­son – 43.5% have done min­im­um two years of post-sec­ond­ary stud­ies. Yet, des­pite their sig­ni­fic­ant num­bers, these work­ers remain com­pletely invisible.

Why are they more invis­ible than oth­er work­ers in the digit­al space, like food deliv­ery or ride­share drivers?

Firstly, it’s because of the very nature of their job. In real­ity, micro­work is just remote work­ing pushed to the extreme. It’s a remote activ­ity, but for bosses and with col­leagues who are often com­pletely anonym­ous. On the oth­er hand, Uber and Deliv­eroo drivers have been seek­ing out col­lect­ive solu­tions and form­ing uni­ons to make their voices heard. This is even more the case since they are vastly more vis­ible than before when they roam the deser­ted streets of cit­ies under Cov­id lock­down. But, unlike these work­ers, micro­work­ers have zero pres­ence in the pub­lic sphere. And the super-strict con­fid­en­ti­al­ity agree­ments that they may have to sign make it harder for them to seek recog­ni­tion for their work.

More and more coun­tries, such as Spain, the UK and France, are requir­ing plat­forms (par­tic­u­larly Uber) to recog­nise the employ­ment status of their work­ers. Yet the many hands that train our AI in the form of micro­work are still ignored. I think efforts to reg­u­late the industry come in large part from work­ers’ vis­ib­il­ity, and from the phys­ic­al prox­im­ity between deliver­ers and cli­ents. It’s quite a para­dox, as there are sig­ni­fic­antly more micro­work­ers, both in France and inter­na­tion­ally, at least accord­ing to our estim­ates and those of our col­leagues at Oxford Inter­net Insti­tute². 

What we do know is that phys­ic­al effort is not the only way that deliver­ers pro­duce value. They, too, per­form invis­ible tasks, pro­du­cing data for the plat­form and thereby feed­ing the algorithms and AI that serve in part to improve algorithmic solu­tions. This data must then be pro­cessed and, con­trary to what you might think, it can­not be pro­cessed without the sup­port of a large human work­force – which does not need to be loc­ated in the coun­try of pro­duc­tion. While France has 260,000 micro­work­ers, these plat­forms have more than 100 mil­lion people signed up inter­na­tion­ally. The vast major­ity of these “crowd­work­ers” are found in devel­op­ing coun­tries, in Indi­an, South­east Asi­an, Afric­an and Lat­in Amer­ic­an “click farms”. 

This huge level of out­sourcing is rede­fin­ing the geo­graphy of the future, but it also influ­ences the recog­ni­tion of this work. There are purely polit­ic­al stakes with regards to the issue of the invis­ib­il­ity – not only are these work­ers not vis­ible in the pub­lic sphere, but the over­whelm­ing major­ity also can­not vote in their (developed) coun­try of res­id­ence, unlike deliv­ery and ride­share drivers. Con­sequently, their recog­ni­tion is not a polit­ic­al priority.

Are you in favour of a “digit­al social income”?

The auto­ma­tion and “plat­form­isa­tion” of the eco­nomy is caus­ing human work to explode, not die out! We are all micro­work­ers in our own way – when you com­plete a CAPTCHA or add a hasht­ag on Ins­tagram, you’re help­ing to train a com­puter vis­ion sys­tem or provid­ing a cat­egory for your post, instead of the plat­form doing it.

This is why there has been dis­cus­sion in France since 2012 about the fisc­al recog­ni­tion of this “free work” done by app users³. Of course, it’s not the users who should pay these taxes, but the com­pan­ies that own the plat­forms. Some 93% of French people use Google, and the com­pany should pay taxes in pro­por­tion to the amount of data pro­duced by French cit­izens. This fisc­al rev­en­ue could then be used to fund redis­tri­bu­tion policies, includ­ing a “digit­al social income”.

The aim of this income would be to divide up the value gen­er­ated by click­work­ers, micro­work­ers and ordin­ary users, in an uncon­di­tion­al way with all social ser­vices con­sidered equal. The aim is not to com­pensate people indi­vidu­ally accord­ing to the amount of time spent on plat­forms. The con­sequences of that would be dis­astrous, with super­power plat­forms pay­ing pea­nuts for our clicks while we slave away over micro­jobs! The aim is simply to redis­trib­ute the value pro­duced, which until now has been hoarded by plat­forms, to pre­vent the “pro­let­ar­isa­tion” of human work.

Interview by Juliette Parmentier