Newsletter 17 – March 2022

March has been a great month for Turkers. Read on to learn more.

To leave reviews please visit our homepage turkopticon.net.

Have you been affected by a mass rejection? We’d love to hear your story. Please contact us.

If you have articles you would like to publish please see the bottom of the newsletter for more information.

See the bottom of the newsletter for how you can submit short articles.

 

Turkopticon calling for Turkers 

Turkopticon recently launched a petition calling on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) leaders to end the harm of mass rejections. During the last two months, we have gathered over 2200 signatures and we are still actively gathering more from turkers, requesters, tech workers, and other supporters.

 

Our message is simple and we need more supporters to lend their voice to our cause. We are not going to stop until we see changes implemented that make turk work GOOD work. Mass rejections often result in wage theft and wage theft is illegal. It has to stop today!

 

Our demands were simple:

• Limit the number of rejections the platform will allow to affect a worker’s approval rating when a requester rejects all work (i.e. 10 rejections per day would affect the approval rating. The others would, of course, still be rejected but only the first 10 would affect the worker’s rating.)
• Consult with the coalition of worker forums to problem-solve together to create solutions and improve AMT for everyone

 

Amazon did agree to a meeting and that is all we have gotten at this point. The meeting itself lasted only for 30 minutes. They did listen to what we had to say but wouldn’t say much in return. At this point we don’t have any results nor do we have the promise of any results.

 

If you have thoughts on Turkopticon’s mass rejection campaign or any other issues facing turkers, we would like to invite you to our open community forum on Monday, March 28th. Turkers can stop by between the hours of 2-4 pm EST. As always, we will try to answer questions about the platform itself, turker tools and forums, how to get started on AMT, and more. Please fill out the registration form at the link below and we will provide the Zoom link. Camera use is optional. Feel free to come for 2 minutes or the full 2 hours. We look forward to chatting with you all next week!

Signup at https://turkopticon.net/open-forum

If you want to learn more or have questions, please email at volunteercoms@turkopticon.net.

Turkopticon is looking for suggestions!

Do you have suggestions for how to make Turkopticon better and would like to share them with us?

 

Please email volunteercoms@turkopticon.net and someone will be in contact to further hear about your suggestions and see how we all can work together to make Turk better for all of us.

 

Even if you think your ideas are ones we should know please don’t be afraid to send them our way because we listen to all suggestions and want everyone to be heard!