Kristy Milland: The state of microwork

Kristy Milland: The state of microwork

Q&A with Kristy Milland

Recently, I did a Q & A with Kristy Milland about the state of microwork. Kristy is currently working towards her Juris Doctor degree at the University of Toronto, and taking a break from activism to focus on her studies. Her research focuses on the current labour and employment schemes of North America and its direct impact on gig economy workers. Previously, she was the community manager of Turker Nation, the oldest community for Amazon Mechanical Turk crowd workers.

In this role, Kristy had her finger on the pulse of the Turker population. As a community manager, she gained a deep understanding of the labour issues that surrounded microtask crowd work. When she was a gig worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk, Kristy experienced the precarity of this form of work first-hand. Ever since, she has spoken around the world about the exploitation of crowd work, and the importance of crowd work regulation.

– Marco Campana

More about Kristy >

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The interview

Q: What do you think the state of microwork in Toronto currently is?

Kristy: The state of microwork is invisible. 

I know Statistics Canada is trying to figure out how to measure it. How do we measure it just in the Canadian labour market? How many people are doing this? Who is doing this? And so the problem right now, I think, in assessing the market here is that no one knows.

In my experience, which is with the Amazon Mechanical Turk’s community, I was the only one in Toronto. There were others in Ontario, there were others throughout Canada. But as far as I knew, on Mechanical Turk, I was the only Torontonian that was part of the community.

Now, that leaves out between 40,000 and 90,000 people. One of them could be from Toronto, but it seems to be pretty low scale, as far as something that is kind of the stereotypical platform like Mechanical Turk. When discussing the state of microwork, there are a lot of platforms that we don’t know about. And the reason is the platform is only here for the work and then gone once it’s done. 

So who is doing that kind of microwork? Probably a larger percentage of people. Especially if you start looking to people who might be doing it as immigrants or students. People who are looking for jobs and maybe are typically or traditionally excluded from the labour market. And they are the people that are the hardest to reach. The hardest to find and count.

On Mechanical Turk, there’s a decent percentage of people who are doing microwork on a beer money basis. So they’re here and there, up to a full-time basis. I think there are way more at the bottom end of that. But there are definitely people out there doing it. And I think the major problem is how do you even ask them if they do this work?

Q: So when you say the bottom, do you mean the beer money folks?

Kristy: Yeah, beer money is going to be the largest amount of people. And these are the people who are going to identify as a microworker and are the least likely to think about it as being work. 

So, again, it’s hard to find them and reach them as a result. But I would say, people who dabble in it, even for a short amount of time and give up on it. They’re going to be the greatest number of workers at any given time.

When you look at that, it’s also about the definition of microwork. For example, surveys on sites like SurveyMonkey. These sites pay you in gift cards and things like that. That’s still microwork.

And when you start including that, the numbers are going to go up dramatically. Especially if you look at specifically surveys or contests, which I personally also view as microwork. Because they entail a lot of work on social media. Maybe you run a website, things like that. So if you start to broaden the definition of microwork, and include people tiny tasks for money, you’ll include a larger number of people.

Q: The Toronto Workforce Innovation Group’s stakeholders are broad; government, employers, social service groups, labour groups. What do you think they should be doing to prepare Toronto for microwork in 10 years?

Kristy: As a law student, legally we are woefully unprepared. And that is not just labour legislation. It’s also tax, health, and safety legislation. We need to sit down with the laws we have in place and question are these going to be adequate. Because it goes beyond microwork. It goes to all independent contractors. Microwork is a small section of this bigger problem.

You mentioned social services, individuals who do microwork. They’re paid so little. Obviously they don’t do microwork because they could do something else, right? So these are people in desperate situations. They’re the ones who are more likely to access the welfare state. And as a result, they’re going to be a larger drain on government funding, but they make so little they don’t pay back into it.

And also their employers don’t pay into it, right? They have no ability to give back. They’re not built for giving back. So the problem becomes who’s going to pay for this and protect these workers. 

I am permanently disabled because of my work. Who pays for that? I didn’t have workers comp, but live in Ontario and have health coverage. But who pays for that health coverage? I was paying income taxes, and I was paying a lot of income taxes, but for workers who might have been making less than I was, who’s paying to make these services available to me? And if we’re not helping workers who are hurt, then we’re losing workers and suddenly our unemployment goes up. And these are people in now on welfare and ODSP. This is a spiralling problem.

There are so many great suggestions on this from academia, but addressing it is about labour legislation. Who is responsible for these people and for paying into the state to give them benefits? Who takes care of these people when they’re hurt, sick, or unemployed? And then looking beyond that, how do these people pay their taxes? And how did the companies that employ them pay taxes if they’re not necessarily in Canada? 10 years is a very good timeline to start thinking about this. Because if we don’t start looking at this quickly, the government is going to be in dire straits financially. Both in supporting these people and in the fact that just the money won’t be coming in.

Q: So the state of microwork will have an impact on governments being able to even pay for services if their tax base is decreasing and this becomes a much bigger thing.

Kristy: Absolutely. And the Conservative government already thinks we’re a mess. I can only imagine how bad it’s going to get when over 50% of workers are independent contractors, and thus not privy to all of these legislations.

Q: One of the things we’ve looked at is whether the gig economy might lead to higher-skilled or higher-wage work. Have you seen any hope for that in microwork that you’ve been looking at? In your case, it happened. But are you an outlier? 

Kristy: I am definitely an outlier, who came from a middle-class family, went to exceptional schools, and was in a gifted program. Having a leg up and I think that set me apart in the microwork economy as well. I came into it using a computer since I was born, which a lot of people my age didn’t.

So I was programming, creating websites, building communities, and considered a super Turker.

There’s a group of us, less than 1% of the workforce. We come in with some sort of privilege, whether it be programming or confidence. There are so many things that make you a better microworker, but even I hit the ceiling.

I do not see that gig work necessarily gave me any opportunities. I made opportunities for myself. And I’m the one that was able to do that to leverage.

For example, the media helped get out there and then that helped me get into law school. But there’s some interesting work coming out of the US. It started with SamaSource attempting to use gig work to improve the skills of people in rural areas who couldn’t get work. It gave them an opportunity that they would never be able to find otherwise.

There’s Saiph Savage at UNAM in Mexico. She started to look at how we can use gig work to help people with their English, reading, or writing.

There are opportunities for that. But if we want to improve the state of microwork, it needs to be operationalized. You can’t just do that by going to Mechanical Turk. There are people who might say: “I’m focusing on writing this week. Because I want to get better at it. You’re going to get rejections if you’re not already good at it.”

You already have to have the skills in order to be able to leverage the work that uses those skills. It’ll be interesting to see how Saiph works with that. 

But otherwise, how do you put Amazon Mechanical Turk on a resume? And I have, I did, but I’ve removed it. Because explaining what I had done all those years wasn’t a benefit. Instead, I pretend I’m 27 and have only worked for a minute. It led to more questions than anything. What is Amazon Mechanical Turk? And now I’ve spent a 15-minute interview explaining that. They’re all horrified, but they don’t know anything about me. 

So, yeah, it doesn’t lead to bigger things. It’s not like starting in an Amazon warehouse and working your way up. James Blair, who works at Amazon is now head of AWS or something. He started on the warehouse floor. I would love to see a Mechanical Turk worker get hired at Amazon.

And we have programmers. 70% of the workers in the US have a college education. Over 80%, I think it might even be 85% of Indian workers have a degree. These are not people that shouldn’t be able to work somewhere else, do something better, and move up in the hierarchy. But they don’t. The only platform I’ve seen that happen on is Lead Genius. They allow you to work your way up to project manager and stuff like that. But even that has a ceiling. I don’t see people that have worked there in executive positions. I’m looking at something like Lead Genius, and thinking- how can we use this kind of work? There’s an interior design platform in Italy, I think it’s called 99 designs. When a student goes to an interior design college, they sign up there and build their portfolio.

And then once they have a portfolio, they can go into the real world. It’s horrible but mandatory. Because it gives them an opportunity.

Q: Mechanical Turk and other platforms aren’t interested in developing their workforce. They’re just expecting people to come with it. What can public institutions build in terms of support and skills development for microworkers? Especially if it becomes a precarious, and bigger number trend in the future.

Kristy: When I think about this, I kind of think about things like UBI [Universal Basic Income]. And I’m not a huge proponent of UBI. Because I think the money goes back to the same rich people. But this would be a situation where universal basic services come into play. Like free internet and free computer equipment upgrades with a fast connection, for example. Then, your wages would go further. Maybe that’s tied to something like social services? Training is hard. Definitely, English language training would be important for immigrants, and individuals who do not have a great education and want to do higher paid tasks. Like the move from Mechanical Turk to Upwork.

And then, I think, research as to what the high paying tasks are on sites like Upwork or similar, more niche sites will provide courses to individuals who want to do more than just labelling an image black and white or colour. Especially for younger workers.

Ontario has a powerful sector in the cooperative sector. So I would love to see government funding for cooperative gig work and microworking. Because if we can do that, we can support workers who are creating their own platforms . We can also offer training in marketing, social media, website design, etc and get them to own their own platform.

Now you have Canadian companies, paying Canadian taxes, employing Canadians to do this work. In many ways, they can be more competitive, offer greater quality services, and draw in customers. And that’s super easy to do. There are people now who are affiliated with The New School New York.

They are looking at this in the Cooperative Platformation movement. Google is paying them a million dollars to create modules. Because they want people to build cooperatives.

I think Canada could lead this sector because our cooperatives are well supported. Legislatively, there’s a really well-built infrastructure. If we could get workers into those roles, and leaders are willing to do this, we’d solve a lot of problems right off the bat. And then you’d have a community of workers, willing to answer questions about the state of microwork.

Right now, we’re relying these workers are relying on unaccountable companies in other countries. We don’t know who they are. The biggest issue with the state of microwork is the people who use the platform. Like customers of the platform and businesses, for example. Because they’re in the same boat. If we provide accountable, Canadian solutions to both of these groups, we’ll benefit everybody involved. I think it would really move the industry up in stature and make it better all around. It’s also something that we might be able to respect a little more than (we do) right now.

Q: Do you see room for a positive future? It sounds like in 10 years, this could be a more positive future where Canada has a more active nonprofit and workforce sector built with microworkers. Is that fair to say?

Kristy: Yeah, absolutely. I think Amazon Mechanical Turk, for example, I liken it to Paypal. It’s a platform. PayPal and Amazon Mechanical Turk don’t instinctively say: ” we’re going to have bad actors and bad pay! It’s going to be terrible!”

There are some things that are built into the system which can lean one way or the other. That’s problematic, but it’s just a platform and microwork is a form of work. And it’s about how you use it and how you build the platform, and how you access it as a customer (a business). That’s what makes the state of microwork bad or good.

So whether it’s positive or not depends on the actors involved. That of course, is tripartite: employers, employees, and then the government. The state of microwork is up to them.

Q: How do microworkers identify themselves in the context of occupations? Do they see themselves as a distinct type of worker category or is microwork just how they work in whatever field they’re in.

Kristy: I think it definitely depends on I would say the class system and microwork. So, if they are low paid microworkers, they’re associated with where they work. For example, a lot of the low paid workers will be on Crowdflower or Amazon Mechanical Turk. And so they will refer to themselves as Turkers, or as Crowdflower Workers. 

If they are higher paid, they will work on multiple sites, and see themselves as entrepreneurs, independent contractors, or consultants. It depends a lot on how much they’re making, how they’re working, and how much they’re working. But people who do this for beer money are hobbyists. They won’t think about it at all. If you ask them what their job this will tell you their main job. You say: “what about this?” They’ll say: “It’s just something I do at night while watching TV”. They will have zero identity.

It’s kind of multifaceted how they see themselves. I’ve never heard anyone call themselves a microworker. Crowd Worker maybe. I think that would probably be the most common term I’ve heard from workers themselves. Otherwise, it’s always: “I’m a Turker” or: “I do work on Upwork”. But again, the higher the pay, the more likely they are to say: “entrepreneur”. Those American Dream type terms.

Myself when I put it on my resume, I put microwork consultant or microtasking. Micro Tasker is one I’ve heard before, but again, I think it’s pretty rare. It’s mostly Crowd Worker.

Q: Delving more into the demographics is a key part of TWIG’s state of microwork investigation. We want to see if there are groups below the surface who do this kind of work, but not naming it. Any thoughts or suggestions for TWIG as they move forward-thinking about this?

Kristy: Identifying them is going to be difficult. I know Statistics Canada is doing focus groups right now. I would highly recommend getting in touch with them and seeing what kind of data they’re producing. That might help. I had a chat with them about the state of microwork. Because they’re really struggling with the state of microwork. But they might help you find these people, figure out what terms they are using, and what sources there are to get access to them. That is probably your best bet.

When discussing the state of microwork, It’s really tough to nail down workers, but they’re going to be the ones that you most need. There’s not a lot being done in this, which is a shame. 

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About Kristy Milland

Kristy Milland is currently working towards her Juris Doctor degree at the University of Toronto. Previously, she was community manager of Turker Nation, the oldest community for Amazon Mechanical Turk crowd workers. In this role, Kristy had her finger on the pulse of the Turker population, with a deep understanding not only of how to get the best work quality on the platform but the labour issues that surrounded microtask crowd work. As a gig worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk, Kristy experienced the precarity of this form of work first-hand. She took it upon herself to get as much attention to the issue as possible so that nonprofits, unions, academics, government, and industry might take up the cause and determine how to make crowdwork a job people could be proud to have.

She has spoken around the world about the ethics and exploitation of crowd work, how to use Amazon Mechanical Turk effectively while still respecting the workers, and the importance of regulation of crowd work as more and more jobs are being taken away from skilled, educated workers and given to the crowd. She has stepped back from her activist role to focus on law school. Her research interests involved whether the current legislative schemes of Canada and the U.S. concerning labour and employment were of use to gig economy workers, and, if not, how they could be changed to ensure that all gig workers could be protected from exploitation. 

Contact Kristy

website: http://kristymilland.com/ 
twitter: @TurkerNational

Photo of Kristy Milland at the 2016 Platform Cooperativism Consortium conference by Christopher Chavez