Crowdsourcing Wage Pledge

Project Type

Crowd-working platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk often pay workers around two dollars per hour and most requesters pay less than five dollars. This project developed a Crowdsourcing Wage Pledge to improve wages for crowd-workers, and to thus ensure fairer futures for digital workers in the platform economy. 

Over 100 people responded to a survey to better understand how the pledge could be instituted internationally, to discover their needs and concerns, and to help draft the wage pledge. The respondents were mainly from the US, however respondents were also recruited from the UK, Japan, Mexico, Canada, and the Middle East.

Academics involved in crowdsourcing were also recruited to take part in consultative meetings and workshops. The project developed guidance on crowd-workers’ pay recommending a target wage of $16.54 per hour, the living wage in the United States, calculated in March 2020. The guidance on wages has already been used by academic requesters with their university boards as a reference in discussions about establishing university policies on the ethical use of crowdsourcing in the UK. The team plan to focus on raising awareness about the Crowdsourcing Wage Pledge and recruiting signatories.

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