The Perpetual Work Life of Crowdworkers

Abstract

Crowdworkers regularly support their work with scripts, extensions, and software to enhance their productivity. Despite their evident significance, little is understood regarding how these tools affect crowdworkers' quality of life and work. In this study, we report findings from an interview study (N=21) aimed at exploring the tooling practices used by full-time crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our interview data suggests that the tooling utilized by crowdworkers (1) strongly contributes to the fragmentation of microwork by enabling task switching and multitasking behavior; (2) promotes the fragmentation of crowdworkers' work-life boundaries by relying on tooling that encourages a 'work-anywhere' attitude; and (3) aids the fragmentation of social ties within worker communities through limited tooling access. Our findings have implications for building systems that unify crowdworkers' work practice in support of their productivity and well-being.

How Crowd Worker Factors Influence Subjective Annotations: A Study of Tagging Misogynistic Hate Speech in Tweets

“…Our second MTurk study draws on previous approaches to ethnographic research with crowd workers such as that outlined by Gray et al (2016) and Williams et al (2019). We conducted semi-structured interviews via remote video meetings.…”

The Life Course: An interdisciplinary framework for broadening the scope of research on crowdwork

“…Some studies combined interviews with document analysis, for example review of publicly available platform policies and materials (Barnes et al, 2015) or case study development (D'Cruz, 2017). The majority of interview studies in our sample focused on online freelancers, mostly from Upwork; three interview studies focused on microworkers, from MTurk (Deng & Joshi, 2016;Sannon & Cosley, 2019;Williams et al, 2019). In the majority of interview studies, the workers were drawn from specific countries, such as Austria (Schörpf et al, 2017), India (D'Cruz, 2017;D'Cruz & Noronha, 2016) or the US (Sannon & Cosley, 2019).…”

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Digital microwork as a livelihood strategy in a Namibian informal settlement

“…The outside factors that force workers to use these platforms for their livelihoods are more powerful motivators than the characteristics of other microwork platforms that could otherwise attract workers (Malik et al, 2018). Indeed, the tasks offered on these platforms are typically monotonous (Williams et al, 2019), and the profits are uncertain (Anwar & Graham, 2021). The availability of vulnerable job seekers allows the platforms to continue to act in their own interests rather than building policies that would support workers (Anwar & Graham, 2020).…”