On Amazon Mechanical Turk, thousands of people are happily being paid pennies to do mind-numbing work. Is it a boon for the bored or a virtual sweatshop?By Katharine Mieszkowski
July 24, 2006 | A picture of a woman's pink shoe floats on my computer screen. It's a flat, a street version of a ballet shoe. My job is to categorize the shoe based on a list of basic colors: Is it red, blue, pink, purple, white, green, yellow, multicolored? A description next to it reads "Pink Lemonade Leather." This is not exactly a brain-busting task; I'm doing it while talking to a friend on the phone. With the mouse, I check a box marked "pink." In the next split second, a picture of a navy blue shirt appears. I check "blue." Assuming my answers jibe with those of at least two other people being paid to scrutinize the same pictures, I've just earned 4 cents.
With my computer and Internet connection, I have become part of a new global workforce, one of the thousands of anonymous human hands pulling the strings inside of a Web site called Amazon Mechanical Turk. By color-coding the clothing sold by the online retailer, which helps customers to search for, well, pink shoes, I can now call myself a Mechanical Turker. In this new virtual workplace, everything is on a need-to-know basis, including who is doing the work, what the point of the work is and, in some cases, the very identity of the company soliciting the work.
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The 21st century twist on the Turk, conceived by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, doesn't try to hide the people inside the machine. On the contrary, it celebrates the fact that we have become part of the machine. For fees ranging from dollars to single pennies per task, workers, who cheekily call themselves "turkers," do tasks that may be rote, like matching a color to a photograph, but they can confound a computer. Conceived to help Amazon improve its own sites, Mturk.com is now a marketplace where many companies have solicited workers to do everything from transcribing podcasts for 19 cents a minute to writing blog posts for 50 cents. Amazon takes a cut from every task performed.
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Of course, for all its rhetoric about artificial intelligence, Amazon did not launch Mechanical Turk for the good of science. For every task a worker completes for another company, the retailer collects a 10 percent fee from that company. For cheap HITs that pay just a penny, Amazon charges the company half a cent per HIT. Companies need not know the real name, much less the address or Social Security number, of turkers. Unless a worker earns more than $600 from a given company, the business has no obligation to issue the worker a tax form, or report the earnings to the Internal Revenue Service. Few workers cross that $600 threshold with any one company. Yet workers are required to report the money they earn on Mturk.com to the IRS as income -- yes, even the $1.45 I made -- to be taxed at the high rates of the self-employed. There's no chance that a worker might land a full-time job with a company through Mechanical Turk, since it's expressly forbidden in the site's "participation agreement," which requires workers to submit all work through the site, and not directly to the requester.
To a labor activist like Marcus Courtney of WashTech, a tech workers union, the whole arrangement represents a dystopian vision of a virtual sweatshop. "What Amazon is trying to do is create the virtual day laborer hiring hall on the global scale to bid down wage rates to the advantage of the employer," he says. "Here you have a major global corporation, based in the United States, that's showing the dark side of globalization. If this is Jeff Bezos' vision of the future of work, I think that's a pretty scary vision, and we should be paying attention to that."
much more here:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/index.html 
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