Virtual sweatshops

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irtual sweatshops are a form of crowdsourcing in which companies break large tasks down into smaller tasks that can then be outsourced online to independent contractors. These smaller tasks require human intelligence that computers, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are unable to solve. The first company to use virtual sweatshops cannot be traced, however, the trend began in the early 2000s. Most companies that use virtual sweatshops are not transparent about the process. Nonetheless, the phenomenon gained media attention in December of 2014 when the workers at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a form of a virtual sweatshop, protested against the company’s owner. Virtual sweatshops came under scrutiny in the latter half of the 2010s in regards to ethical concerns - working conditions, policy gaps, and virtual trust decreasing.

Background

The word “virtual sweatshop” derived from the term “sweatshop” which was coined in 1884 and signifies a shop or factory in which employees work for long hours and low wages. Virtual sweatshops are often likened to sweatshops in the Industrial Revolution, except virtual sweatshops are accessible online and can hire on a global scale. Defining attributes of virtual sweatshops include: employees working on tasks outsourced by a company, receiving low compensation for completed tasks (in US currency, wages can start as low as 1 penny), and all work is completed online.

The origins of virtual sweatshops have not been traced to a particular instance in history, however, their usage and popularity emerged in the early 2000s. In 2013, the online outsourcing industry was estimated to have earned $2 billion in revenue, and expected to increase to $25 billion by 2020. This market, comprising of sites like Clickworker, UpWork, Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, and more, has grown immensely since the early 2000s and is anticipated to continue to prosper well into the 2020s.

Applications

Virtual sweatshops can serve many purposes and are most frequently utilized by large companies. Companies typically outsource small tasks — such as tagging photos, taking surveys, or verifying URLs — to workers all around the world. These tasks can be very simple for humans to complete, but are ones that computers are not yet equipped to handle. Once employees have passed a computer skills and reading comprehension test, they are put to work.

Virtual sweatshops can also be used as a platform for companies to challenge scientists in solving complicated problems for financial rewards. This application is the most lucrative form of employment in virtual sweatshops, as these companies are willing to pay high for problems their immediate staff were unable to solve. Virtual sweatshops have also revolutionized data collection for researchers, who’s online surveys can reach a more representative sample of the population.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk was launched by the company Amazon in 2005 and is one of the largest virtual sweatshops in the U.S., with over 0.5 million virtual workers. Workers are referred to as “Turkers” and complete HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that are posted on Amazon’s site. The Turkers are able to choose which tasks to complete and are paid in credits for Amazon.com. Turkers can be located anywhere in the world, but their employers must be located in the United States. Employers, also known as Requesters, are able to set the criteria to be hired, and can accept or reject the final product the Turker submits.

Mechanical Turk was originally the most successful form of crowdsourcing at the time of its release, but other companies followed suit in the later half of the 2000s and in the 2010s to harness the utility and power virtual sweatshops can provide One can argue that this type of acess brings along disadvantages as "its expensive, difficult, slow, and it's not obvious if its produces better outcomes"

Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge Analytica was a company that developed out of the SCL Group in 2013. Its main purpose was to collect data on people’s personalities so that an algorithm could be constructed for campaigns to more effectively target viewers. The company played an important role in Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential campaign and in Britain’s EU membership referendum Leave campaign.

Cambridge Analytica is an instance in which virtual sweatshops were used for analytical and research purposes. To acquire personal data, the company utilized Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Qualtrics, a survey tool, to hire Turkers to take personality quizzes. The quiz paid Turkers $1 to $2 to complete the survey and give access to their personal Facebook data. Around 320,000 Turkers participated in the survey, and unknowingly gave Cambridge Analytica access to at least 160 Facebook profiles per Turker. This data was then used by the company in developing their algorithm.

Reception and Awareness

Virtual sweatshops remain largely out of the media and the general public’s knowledge — many companies that use virtual sweatshops ask workers not to disclose that they have worked for them. This form of labor can allow workers more flexibility in their schedules, as the workers are the ones choosing which tasks to complete and when. Since virtual sweatshops are by nature virtual, they also allow employees to work from home. Flexibility, location, and simpleness of tasks are the main motivations why employees work for virtual sweatshops.

A Christmas email campaign, initiated in December 2014 on behalf of Amazon’s Turkers, began protesting against the terms of virtual labor. The campaign, directed at Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezo, demanded better representation and recognition for workers, and also for more regulation. It protested against the lack of legal consequences, such as employers being able to not pay their employees, and requested for minimum payment rates for work. In response to these kinds of working conditions, online forums have been created for virtual workers to trade tips and to evaluate sources of work.

Virtual Sweatshops and Research

Interestingly, crowdsourcing is very popular when it comes to research as it allow access to multiple people and gain results quicker. It is true that Amazon's Mechanical Turk is well known especially when it comes to research. However, it does raise some red flags as its meant to be used for educational purposes and potentially make growth in their research. Yet, there are some concerns due to this "virtual sweatshop" concept that some may not want to admit. From the researchers' perspectives, they can easily access a wider variety of "subjects" or "participants" at any time and/or day. This type of perspective can easily make a lot of people not realize the negative side of crowdsourcing because they view pros and a different set of cons that differ from the those who work in "virtual sweatshops". It makes one wonder if we getting closer to the point where people can cross over and look at the cons from the standpoint of it is a virtual sweatshop and hope to make improvements for the better. If we can make some changes with physical sweatshops it doesn't hurt to believe that these changes can be made in the virtual world as well.

Ethical Concerns

Policy Gaps and Job Exploitation

Virtual sweatshops are not under the same legislation and regulation as is physical human labor. Many virtual sweatshop employers do not have to file forms for payroll taxes, set minimum wages, compensate overtime, or offer benefits to its workers. Job security is not ensured and companies can cancel or refuse to pay any work that they requested. This lack of regulation can best be explained by the policy gaps that form when new technologies emerge.

The advent of the computer revolution brought changes to technology that ethical policies had not yet been developed or prepared for. As seen in virtual sweatshops, the move from physical labor to online labor was not anticipated, and did not have guidelines or laws in place to handle the virtualization of labor. Moor's Law defines a linear relationship between social impact and ethical problems, in which technological revolutions that have greater social impact also create more ethical problems. Virtual sweatshops are in accordance with Moor’s Law in that the more widespread they became, the more ethical problems they generated. This phenomena can be evidenced by Cambridge Analytica’s exploitation of virtual sweatshops, as they used virtual sweatshops (which already faced ethical concerns regarding payment and job security) to access other users’ Facebook data, thus creating more ethical ambiguity and concern regarding privacy and accessibility.

There has been much debate in the 2000s and 2010s about how to facilitate ethics in online discourse, especially among virtual laborers. Even after almost two decades of existence, virtual sweatshops still maintain their unethical practices with little improvement. In part, this is due to the lack of transparency under which companies work — companies that use virtual sweatshops often require that their employees refrain from mentioning their affiliation and take measures to avoid drawing public attention, thereby obscuring the processes in which they are obtaining their labor force. Transparency in the form of information invisibility is enabling companies in their unethical actions, and hindering the formation of tighter regulation.

Without regulating this online labor force to the extent that physical jobs are regulated, this policy gap continues to exist in virtual sweatshops, though movements like Amazon’s Turkers email campaign advocate for change.

Governance and Decentralization

Virtual sweatshops typically do not adhere to formal law, but they can be regulated by company guidelines, the market, and the architectural structure embedded in the technology. Wikipedia has undergone a phenomenon in which its governance has increasingly decentralized as a result of the freedom and flexibility in its technological design and organization. Virtual sweatshops have experienced a similar trend, in that companies have been able to self-prescribe the mechanisms and expectations under which virtual employees work. Since virtual sweatshops solely exist online, companies have been able to forfeit bureaucratic hierarchical work structures in favor of software programming schemes that organize the virtual work environment for them.

This restructuring of governance has allowed virtual sweatshops to operate decentrally, which aids company growth and production, but presents ethical problems by dispersing accountability. Without the presence of formal law, virtual sweatshops can only be held to the standards the company establishes for themselves. The globalization and decentralization of virtual sweatshops have made it a challenge for those seeking more regulation because they must confront the different legal frameworks workers have depending on their location. Virtual sweatshops are able to outsource their labor to many different nations and organizations that do not adhere to the same forms of government, and thus create a loophole against opponents of virtual sweatshops. This lack of uniform regulation is of ethical concern as it creates space in the virtual work environment for discrimination, fraud, tax evasion, low wages, and job insecurity to exist.

Virtual Trust

Virtual sweatshops have been able to maintain a steady workforce, despite not offering workers the same benefits and stableness that physical jobs provide. Virtual trust plays a large role in attracting workers to virtual sweatshops, as workers have the expectation that their employers will compensate them for their work. Without this trust, virtual sweatshops could not thrive. Many theorists who study ethics debate over whether virtual trust can be trusted, and virtual sweatshops show that sometimes it can be.

Virtual sweatshops demonstrate the concept of “verkeersbordvrij”. Verkeersbordvrij is a dutch term that means “free of traffic signs”, and is used to characterize a scientific study of traffic management in the Dutch city of Drachten. The study removed all street signs to see if drivers would still operate ethically and with the safety of others in mind. What the study proved was exactly what has been occuring in virtual sweatshops — that despite the lack of regulation, transactions between workers and employers can remain ethical, and demonstrate trust. This virtual trust can be invested in the actual people behind the screens or the processes themselves, but nonetheless functions to maintain company production and a steady workforce. In this sense, virtual trust acts as an unspoken contract that binds participants into an employer-employee relationship, and ensures payment and reliability. Virtual trust, however, is not legally contractual, and can be easily broken. Due to this ethical uncertainty, many virtual sweatshop workers prefer there to be regulation and laws in addition to virtual trust to guarantee that their work is compensated.

See Also

• Crowdsourcing
• Cambridge Analytica
• Mechanical Turk