{"id":920,"date":"2021-03-09T23:58:42","date_gmt":"2021-03-09T23:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.turkopticon.info\/?p=920"},"modified":"2021-03-10T19:02:27","modified_gmt":"2021-03-10T19:02:27","slug":"tech-workers-in-solidarity-with-turkers-living-in-the-hidden-realm-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/?p=920","title":{"rendered":"Tech Workers in Solidarity with Turkers: Living in the Hidden Realm of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Tech workers in other parts of the industry care are in solidarity with Turkers. Over the last years, our software team has grown with several engineers from Tech Workers Coalition. Tech Workers Coalition<\/a> exists to build worker power in the tech industry. This week, they published a story by lead organizer Sherry Stanley in their newsletter. Read the cross-posted story below or read the story over at Tech Workers Coalition’s Newsletter<\/a>! And, as always, email volunteercoms@turkopticon.net<\/a> to help strengthen our movement.<\/p>\n

Today we have allied perspectives from workers in AI.\u00a0Sherry Stanley<\/a>, a Turker who lives in rural West Virginia, talks about worker-led organizing against poor treatment by Amazon Mechanical Turk and requesters who post tasks. She and other Turker-Organizers contribute labor essential to building machine learning systems, but don\u2019t get rewards or credit. They ask fellow tech workers and AI researchers to support their campaigns and infrasturucture with recurring donations to\u00a0Turkopticon<\/a>, the forum they run. We have a statement by organized Google workers in solidarity with Google\u2019s Ethical AI team co-leads, Dr. Margaret Mitchell and Dr. Timnit Gebru. It includes calls to protect workers and support them by \u201cwalking out\u201d on sponsorships and funding until we see real change for everyone working in tech and AI. <\/em><\/p>\n

The Worker\u2019s Perspective<\/h2>\n

By Sherry Stanley<\/em><\/p>\n

If you do anything with machine learning, your company or university probably hires workers like me to clean, organize, or make data to train algorithms. I live in West Virginia on a farm with chickens, and I help build tech by completing tasks posted by \u201crequesters\u201d on Amazon Mechanical Turk. But Turkers know what we need from Amazon, and we\u2019re organizing to get it.<\/p>\n

I know that the AI industry is worth trillions of dollars, producing \u201cscientific innovation\u201d off of our backs, without giving us fair pay or any credit for our work. And I am one of tens of thousands of workers who depend on Amazon Mechanical Turk to make a living. Some do this work as a side job to make ends meet, or to buy Christmas gifts, go to a nice dinner, just have some luxury. The reason I did it though was I had no other choice at the time. You may think everyone has a choice; I didn\u2019t. Around six years ago I didn\u2019t have any form of transportation and living in rural West Virginia in the downturn of coal mining was not the prime market to get a job. I was stuck home with a computer and no way really to pay the bills I had. Then a friend suggested Mturk, and away I went.<\/p>\n

Learning to Turk was the hardest job training I have ever endured because there is no training except Google searching and hoping you find the right task to make money. The work consists of a series of repetitive tasks and includes everything from data labeling, image classification, and social science surveys. I can remember some days of working on nothing but recording my voice saying \u201cHey Google\u201d with various other instructions knowing I was training something to recognize my West Virginia twang. Other days, some of the tasks would be explaining how pictures make me feel for hours or rate how toxic a tweet was. One thing I can honestly say is the work is definitely varying and more than likely has been included in your life one way or the other. In the beginning, MTurk was wonderful and I basked in the glory of being able to finally support my children. Then I started realizing I was working more and more hours and my life was becoming consumed with Turk. I set alarms that if I caught high paying work I would wake up in the middle of a dead sleep because I needed the money.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Turkers deal with the worst treatment on the platform. But it wasn\u2019t until I received\u00a0my first mass rejection<\/a>\u00a0that I thought this ain\u2019t such a good thing after all. Requesters are our employers on the platform. They post \u201cHuman Intelligence Tasks\u201d (HITs), and one requester simply mass-rejected over 80 tasks I completed without a reason and obviously without paying me. I knew I had done my job, but I had no recourse. Requesters can take our work without paying for it, and Amazon doesn\u2019t do anything about it. I know one Turker even had a requester find her real name and then threaten to send local authorities after her for harassment because she had contacted their IRB and had left them bad reviews. It\u2019s sad that requesters can use our own reviews against us and threaten to have our accounts shutdown, all just because we try to have places we can organize and protect each other. But the bigger problems are the bigger players.<\/p>\n

Two infamous requesters are Chris Callison Burch at UPenn and Jeffrey Bigham at CMU. They\u2019ve received grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to \u201chelp Turkers,\u201d but then they used that money to put HITs with terrible pay! And when TO asked them for donations and support, they ignored me and made me feel like they were saying, \u201cNah. But we\u2019ll go to the NSF and say we\u2019ll get more money to help.\u201d They\u2019re getting famous making scientific breakthroughs by breaking our backs.<\/p>\n

Requesters almost never communicate with us when we have questions or concerns. But don\u2019t worry, Amazon doesn\u2019t communicate with us either. We send them messages that go into a black hole. We also get stonewalled by Amazon all of the time – \u201cour internal privacy policy restricts us from sharing this information.\u201d Every time I see that I want to cuss these people all to pieces! But some of us really need Turking and are afraid to lose out on the work by speaking up, even mentioning \u201cAmazon\u201d online, because we can be let go for everything. We don\u2019t even know why people get axed – Amazon gives us no reason. It can be a tweet, a Reddit post, and so on. I know Amazon monitors Reddit because they\u2019ve told Turkers to take down certain posts.<\/p>\n

So although Amazon and requesters like Chris and Jeffrey don\u2019t respond, we\u2019re trying to fix that by reviewing and rating requesters. We use Turkopticon, which is like Yelp! for us to express our frustrations, meet each other, and organize. 10 years ago, Lilly Irani and Six Silberman started\u00a0Turkopticon<\/a>\u00a0as a student project, and developed it into a site where Turkers could finally have a place to vent and share information. We use it to post reviews, to find requesters who are mass rejectors, and reach out and ask them why they\u2019re doing it. And because we are now organized, Turkopticon workers are able to get some response from Amazon.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to kill the MTurk platform because so many people depend on it for work. It\u2019s just that Amazon is so sensitive – worse than my teenage kids, they give me better answers!<\/p>\n

Without Turkopticon we wouldn\u2019t have an open line to Amazon. We reinstated our first wrongfully-suspended Turker, a worker in India. But we still have the mass rejections with no reason given, suspensions, and other privacy policy mysteries. There\u2019s a lot to work on, but we are organizing and working on it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so hard to have any connections in the Turk World. People don\u2019t understand that even though, as we are independent contractors, and that means we don\u2019t have employee rights, we still deserve human transparency. What I mean by that is we deserve to know the who, what, why and where of our work: why work is rejected, what our work is building, why our accounts are suspended, where does our data go when not it\u2019s not paid and most of all we deserve to know who we are working for. Turkers know what we want.<\/p>\n

Right now, we\u2019re working to migrate Turkopticon from a university server and make it 100% worker-run. We\u2019re recruiting other Turkers for one-on-one conversations to build solidarity among us. We have forum moderators who help Turkers who get really upset and vent at Turkopticon to channel their anger back at Amazon. We\u2019re also developing campaigns for real change around account suspensions, to actually see the policies Amazon uses to guide how they treat us, and protect workers from mass rejections. Eventually we\u2019ll invest in overhauling our Turkopticon requester review system.<\/p>\n

So today, we Turkers are the requesters! We\u2019re requesting monthly recurring donations to support our organizing and infrastructure.<\/p>\n

As a worker who builds tech, there\u2019s a lot you can do to support our work. Our main request is for you to\u00a0make a recurring donation<\/a>\u00a0and provide a steady flow of resources for organizing. If you want to share what you know about how Mechanical Turk policies, technologies, or how requesters work,\u00a0contact a Turkopticon organizer like me<\/a>. Or if you just want to help strengthen our organizing generally,\u00a0please get in touch<\/a>. Workers know what we need for better work conditions, and we need to help each other and stand together to get there.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tech workers in other parts of the industry care are in solidarity with Turkers. Over the last years, our software team has grown with several engineers from Tech Workers Coalition. Tech Workers Coalition exists to build worker power in the tech industry. This week, they published a story by lead organizer Sherry Stanley in their … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Tech Workers in Solidarity with Turkers: Living in the Hidden Realm of AI”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=920"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1000,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions\/1000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.turkopticon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}