What data work actually pays: 3.8 million tasks measured
On 14 December 2017 a preprint appeared that measured hourly pay on Mechanical Turk by recording the work rather than by asking: 2,676 workers, 3.8 million tasks. The median came to about $2 an hour, and only 4 per cent earned more than the US federal minimum of $7.25.
Why it matters
Until then low pay in data work rested on self-reports, and their spread - $1 to $6 an hour - left room for any conclusion. Here pay was computed from actual working sessions including unpaid time, which made the gap between what a requester pays and what a worker receives a measurable quantity.
The data came from the Crowd Workers Chrome plugin, used by workers on an opt-in basis, between September 2014 and January 2017. Requesters paid $11.58 an hour on average (median $4.57). Unpaid time eats the difference, and the authors name three sources of it: searching for tasks, working on tasks that are rejected, and working on tasks that are never submitted. The figure $2.11 needs stating precisely. It is not "the median": in the paper the per-worker median lies between $1.77 and $2.11 an hour depending on the method of counting, and $2.11 is the top of that range. The authors' own summary is about $2 an hour at the task level, with an estimate that 96 per cent of workers earn below the federal minimum.