Gray explains ‘crowd workers’ in digital labor markets
On-demand digital labor markets open up a number of opportunities for collaboration but raise questions about supporting workers, according to Microsoft senior researcher and associate professor Mary Gray.
Gray presented her research, “What Goes On Behind the API? Political Economies and Worker Collaboration in On-Demand Digital Labor Markets,” as part of the Media School’s weekly talk Dec. 9. The talk was in conjunction with the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics Speakers Series.
“To be honest, I’m still in the thick of ‘what do I want to make of it?’” Gray said about the data.
She explained her key questions in assessing digital labor markets and automated systems through this work: What does “on-demand” work look like, and is it growing? Who are the people doing on-demand work? How do on-demand jobs impact people’s lives and liveliness? How could the workplace better support on-demand work and workers?
Gray collected datasets over time through Amazon Turk, analyzing attributes of 10,000 participants and crowd workers. Their mean age is 31.9, they are more likely educated, and more than half rely on other sources of income beyond crowd work.
Gray also assessed why crowd workers get into this kind of work in the first place.
“Is money the only reason we come into our day job?” she said. “Hopefully, many of us are saying ‘no.’”
Crowd workers are drawn to their jobs, she argued, for a number of other reasons: to gain experience, to many money, to have something to do with their spare time, to have a sense of purpose, and to be one’s own boss and control one’s own schedule.
Gray found that crowd work in the United States varies from crowd work elsewhere. In India, for example, crowd workers may be more likely to refer to themselves as entrepreneurs, where as American crowd workers are more likely to say they are self-employed or that they work at a start-up, even though these professionals are all doing essentially the same work.
She also found that crowd workers collaborate in at least three key ways: administrative overhead, investing in gaining experience for the future and creating social connections. Crowd workers rely heavily on their networks, she said, projecting a “hairball” visualization map of these collaborations.
“One of the most important things we found was how do they collaborate,” Gray said. “So not just what they do, that they’re connected in that beautiful hairball, but that they do it for very particular work.”
Gray said the implications of this research can lead to better understanding how to support on-demand workers, including how to understand collaboration as a feature, not a bug. She also underscored the importance of understanding and valuing on learning focused on learning rather than learning focused on simply skilling up.
“It’s not going to be about valuing skill,” she said. “It’s about valuing presence and effort.”