Quantifying the Invisible Labor in Crowd Work

Abstract

Crowdsourcing markets provide workers with a centralized place to find paid work. What may not be obvious at first glance is that, in addition to the work they do for pay, crowd workers also have to shoulder a variety of unpaid invisible labor in these markets, which ultimately reduces workers' hourly wages. Invisible labor includes finding good tasks, messaging requesters, or managing payments. However, we currently know little about how much time crowd workers actually spend on invisible labor or how much it costs them economically. To ensure a fair and equitable future for crowd work, we need to be certain that workers are being paid fairly for all of the work they do. In this paper, we conduct a field study to quantify the invisible labor in crowd work. We build a plugin to record the amount of time that 100 workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk dedicate to invisible labor while completing 40,903 tasks. If we ignore the time workers spent on invisible labor, workers' median hourly wage was $3.76. But, we estimated that crowd workers in our study spent 33% of their time daily on invisible labor, dropping their median hourly wage to $2.83. We found that the invisible labor differentially impacts workers depending on their skill level and workers' demographics. The invisible labor category that took the most time and that was also the most common revolved around workers having to manage their payments. The second most time-consuming invisible labor category involved hyper-vigilance, where workers vigilantly watched over requesters' profiles for newly posted work or vigilantly searched for labor. We hope that through our paper, the invisible labor in crowdsourcing becomes more visible, and our results help to reveal the larger implications of the continuing invisibility of labor in crowdsourcing.

The ethical ambiguity of AI data enrichment: Measuring gaps in research ethics norms and practices

“…Crowdsourcing platforms are often utilised due to their low costs, and consequently many critiques of crowdwork relate to payment [54]. MTurk allows requesters to place tasks online for as little as $0.01 per task, with mean payment rates estimated to be around $3 per hour [27,46,68]. Considering around 75% of MTurk workers are based in the US (with 16% based in India), this is far below federal minimum wage levels [20].…”

All That’s Happening behind the Scenes: Putting the Spotlight on Volunteer Moderator Labor in Reddit

“…First, researchers may collaborate with workers directly (like moderators) and deploy tools that collect their log data with strict privacy protection. In the crowdwork domain, tools have been developed to allow crowdworkers to see their hourly wage and simultaneously quantify invisible, unpaid labor for researchers (Hara et al, 2018;Toxtli et al, 2021). Future work may explore how this approach could benefit uncompensated digital labor, such as volunteer content moderation and peer production while helping moderators conduct their own "time studies" (Khovanskaya et al, 2019).…”