Design Activism for Minimum Wage Crowd Work

TL;DR

This paper explores the perspectives of crowd workers and Requesters on enforcing minimum wage standards in online gig work through a survey and design activism, highlighting regional differences and proposing tools for implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel survey and experimental approach to gauge opinions on minimum wage enforcement in crowd work and provides a practical API for Requesters to support fair pay.

Findings

Two-thirds of Indian workers support minimum wage enforcement.

Two-thirds of American workers oppose minimum wage enforcement.

Majority of Requesters support but few would enforce minimum wage.

Abstract

Entry-level crowd work is often reported to pay less than minimum wage. While this may be appropriate or even necessary, due to various legal, economic, and pragmatic factors, some Requesters and workers continue to question this status quo. To promote further discussion on the issue, we survey Requesters and workers whether they would support restricting tasks to require minimum wage pay. As a form of design activism, we confronted workers with this dilemma directly by posting a dummy Mechanical Turk task which told them that they could not work on it because it paid less than their local minimum wage, and we invited their feedback. Strikingly, for those workers expressing an opinion, two-thirds of Indians favored the policy while two-thirds of Americans opposed it. Though a majority of Requesters supported minimum wage pay, only 20\% would enforce it. To further empower Requesters, and to ensure that effort or ignorance are not barriers to change, we provide a simple public API to make it easy to find a worker's local minimum wage by his/her IP address.