Valuing Crowdwork’s Invisible Engine: The Role of Worker Collaboration in Platform Economies & On-Demand Labor Markets
Mary L. Gray
Microsoft Research New England/The Media School, Indiana University
Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She maintains an appointment as Associate Professor of the Media School, with affiliations in American Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her research looks at how media access and everyday uses of technologies transform people's lives. Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York University Press, 2009) looked at how young people in the rural United States use media to negotiate their sexual and gender identities, local belonging, and visibility in national LGBT politics, more broadly. Mary's current book project, co-authored with computer scientist Siddharth Suri, uses case studies of present day crowdwork on four different crowdsourcing platforms, comparing workers' experiences in the United States and India, to think through the social impact of digital workforces on the future of employment.
Abstract
On-demand labor—work sourced, scheduled, and paid through website and mobile app accounts—has become the core “operating system” for a range of on-demand services, from TaskRabbit and Upwork to Uber. On-demand labor is... [ view full abstract ]
On-demand labor—work sourced, scheduled, and paid through website and mobile app accounts—has become the core “operating system” for a range of on-demand services, from TaskRabbit and Upwork to Uber. On-demand labor is also vital to the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) systems built to supplement or replace humans in industries ranging from tax preparation, like LegalZoom, to digital personal assistants, like Facebook M. Our research starts from the position that on-demand “crowdwork"—intelligent systems that blend AI and humans-in-the-loop to deliver paid services through an API—will dominate the future of work by both buttressing the operations of future enterprises and advancing automation. This talk shares key findings from a multi-method, 2-year joint research project conducted with computer scientist, Siddharth Suri. Specifically, combining 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing with surveys and computational analysis of backend metadata, we present the demographics, motivations, resources, skills and strategies workers drawn on to optimize their participation in this nascent but growing form of employment. This talk lays out the evidence we have that, despite the designs of on-demand platform-driven crowdwork to maximize efficiencies through atomized, autonomous workflows, the most active crowdworkers are not the independent workers they are assumed to be. Instead, workers collaborate extensively to address both technical and social needs generated by the platforms they work on. Specifically, crowdworkers collaborate with members of their networks to 1) manage the administrative overhead associated with crowdwork, 2) find lucrative tasks and reputable employers and 3) recreate the social connections and support often associated with brick-and-mortar work environments. Our research suggests that on-demand platform services’ successes are driven as much by the invisible labor of organic collaboration among workers as the matching and routing capacities of an API. We argue that before we can improve the technical capacities of on-demand systems, we need a clearer sense of the people doing this work, what it means to them, and how it fits into their daily lives. In short, we should recognize that crowdwork systems are not, simply, technologies. On-demand platform-driven economies are sites of labor with complicated social dynamics that, ultimately, hold value.
Session
KN-3 » Keynote: Mary L. Gray (09:25 - Monday, 1st August, Auditorium, Spangler Center )
