Voices of Workers: Why a Worker-Centered Approach to Crowd Work Is Challenging

TL;DR

This paper explores the complexities of understanding and supporting the diverse, often invisible crowd workforce, highlighting tensions with media portrayals and the challenges of adopting a worker-centered approach.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights from online observations and discusses the difficulties in implementing a worker-centered approach due to crowd diversity and invisibility.

Findings

Diverse crowd experiences challenge one-dimensional representations

Tensions exist between crowd workers and media portrayals

Invisibility and resistance complicate worker-centered support

Abstract

How can we better understand the broad, diverse, shifting, and invisible crowd workforce, so that we can better support it? We present findings from online observations and analysis of publicly available postings from a community forum of crowd workers. In particular, we observed recurring tensions between crowd workers and journalists regarding media depictions of crowd work. We found that crowd diversity makes any one-dimensional representation inadequate in addressing the wide-ranging experiences of crowd work. We argue that the scale, diversity, invisibility, and the crowds' resistance to publicity make a worker-centered approach to crowd work particularly challenging, necessitating better understanding the diversity of workers and their lived experiences.