MN7181 PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS - CROWD WORKING
CROWD WORKING
Crowd employment is a new form of employment that uses an online platform to enable
organizations or individuals to access an indefinite and unknown group of other
organizations or individuals to solve specific problems or to provide specific
services or products in exchange for payment’. Crowd employment is also known
as crowd sourcing or crowd work, and aims to organize the outsourcing of tasks
to a large pool of online workers rather than to a single employee. Technology
is essential in this new employment form, as the matching of client and worker,
as well as task execution and submission, is mostly carried out
online. This form of employment is based on individual tasks or
projects, rather than on a continuous relationship. A larger task is
divided into smaller subtasks that are relatively simple or standardized, can
be done independently of the other tasks and have a specific output.
Crowd Work Basics
1. What is this “crowd-, platform-, and app-based work”?
We use this term to refer to work delivered or managed through a
digital service (website, app, or “platform”) that functions as a matchmaker or
intermediary.
Well-known examples include Amazon Mechanical Turk, Clickworker,
CrowdFlower, content.de, Upwork, Freelancer.com, Uber, Lyft, AppJobber,
Streetspotr, Testbirds, 99designs, Jovoto, TopCoder, Helpling, Deliveroo,
Foodora, Ohlala, and TaskRabbit.
Some of these “platforms” let clients post a task to be
completed by anyone meeting certain criteria (the “crowd”). Others, especially
freelance platforms such as Upwork and Freelancer.com, help clients find
individual freelancers qualified to do the work they want done.
2. Is crowd work new?
The oldest microtask crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical
Turk, launched in 2005. The oldest freelance platform, Elance, launched in
1999. (Elance merged with oDesk in 2014-15 to become Upwork.)
Some kinds of crowd work (especially microtasking) can, however,
also be seen as the combination of globalization and “digitalization” with the
logic of existing systems of work organization, such as the piece work system.
3. What is good and bad
about this kind of work organization?
From a client perspective, two major potential benefits of
platform-based work are speed and convenience. Because many platforms have many
workers “on call” at any given time, work posted to labor platforms is often
completed very quickly.
Different kinds of platform-based work have different benefits
and problems.
With work that is delivered digitally, clients can potentially
recruit workers anywhere in the world to do work. From a client perspective,
this can be an advantage, as it may allow them to recruit talent they would not
otherwise have access to. It can be a major advantage for some workers,
especially those who would not otherwise have access to work. International
platforms such as Upwork and 99designs often attract many workers from
“developing” countries, who may be able to work for clients in “developed”
countries and earn good wages for their location. For workers in established
labor markets, however, especially “developed” countries with strong worker
protections, labor platforms may pose a threat to their pay and working
conditions, as the platforms may put them into competition with workers in
other countries with lower costs of living and fewer worker protections.
A major benefit for workers doing work that is delivered
digitally is that workers can work from anywhere they have a computer and an
internet connection — for example, from home — and can to some extent work when
they want. Platform-based work can be a major income source for workers living
in rural areas, workers who must stay at home to care for children or other
family members, and workers living with illness or disability.
Additionally, especially on microtask crowdsourcing platforms,
workers typically do not have to go through an interview process before
starting to work, and may even be relatively anonymous: on microtask platforms,
a worker’s gender, age, education, ethnicity, criminal record, and sexual
orientation are typically not known to the client. These platforms can
therefore provide access to paid work for workers who face discrimination in
the offline labor market.
The major problems with platform-based work have to do with the
lack of worker rights. Because most platforms require workers to agree that
they are self-employed or independent contractors, not employees of the
platform or client(s), most platform-based workers are not entitled to minimum
wage; paid vacation, parental leave, sick leave, or overtime;
employer-supported health insurance; protection from unfair dismissal; or
compensation in the event of work-related illness or injury; nor are they
entitled to organize and negotiate collective agreements with platform
operators or clients.
As a result, many platform-based workers in “developed”
countries earn less than their national minimum wage.
4. What kinds of work can be
“crowdsourced”?
Microtask platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Clickworker,
and CrowdFlower are used to crowdsource many kinds of information processing
tasks, including photo tagging, product categorization, transcription,
translation, web research (including market and sales research), and improving
search results.
Computer science researchers have also developed techniques to
use microtask platforms to crowdsource creative work such as fiction writing
(e.g., Joy Kim et al., “Mechanical Novel: crowdsourcing complex work through reflection and
revision”).
Computer science researchers have also used freelance platforms
to automate recruitment and management of expert workers in order to
automatically crowdsource complex tasks requiring input from multiple workers
with different skill sets, such as film production and mobile phone application
development (e.g., Daniela Retelny et al., “Expert crowdsourcing
with flash teams”).
5. Are there any kinds of
work that cannot be “crowdsourced”?
It would be hard to argue that there is any kind of work that
cannot, in principle, be crowdsourced, at least in the sense that a freelancer
could be hired to do the work via a freelancer platform such as Upwork. Even
for highly skilled, highly professionalized work such as health care and law,
rating systems already allow customers to rate service providers. While these
rating systems are not labor markets, they influence the labor market and could
conceivably evolve into platforms that distribute work.
7. Is crowd work growing?
Yes.
For example, data for the United States collected and reported
in February 2016 by Diana Farrell and Fiona Grieg at the JP Morgan Chase
Institute (Paychecks, Paydays, and the Online Platform Economy,
p. 5) show that participation in online labor markets grew dramatically between
late 2012 and late 2015
8. Who uses
crowdsourcing?
Private individuals and all kinds of organizations — small
businesses, startups, non-profit organizations, and even government agencies —
use crowdsourcing.
9. Are there some
platforms with better working conditions than others?
Yes. However, because different workers have different life
situations and reasons for doing crowd work, it is not easy to create a
set of criteria for evaluating working conditions that everyone will agree on
perfectly.
Additionally, it is not always easy to survey workers for their
experiences and opinions about platform based work.
On this website we try to rate working conditions on different
platforms using a process that uses answers to our 2017 crowd worker survey as
inputs. This is not perfect but it is a starting point.
REFERENCES
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjausuIwaHmAhUa4XMBHbfoDTUQjRx6BAgBEAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.slideshare.net%2Fyannigroth%2Fcrowdsourcing-in-the-production-of-video-advertising&psig=AOvVaw1yi18O0LKCHG5NiurhKebU&ust=1575738239338905
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Every company has its own unique personality, just like people do. The unique personality of an organization is referred to as its Peoples.
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