There’s a Problem With ‘Crowd Labor’

Summary

Online outsourcing comes with costs.

If the online labor platform Mechanical Turk is any indication, the workplace of the future has no walls, no national borders, and virtually no limits to growth. Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, is a rapidly expanding “crowd labor” service run by Amazon, which harnesses the networked nature of our world to create a mammoth transnational hiring hall. But is this digital workplace without limits also operating without sensible labor rules?