Kristy Milland is a student at Ryerson University who has spent the last 10 years as a worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk. She is community manager ofTurkerNation.com and also operates other tools and sites for Turkers. Recently, she led the Dear Jeff Bezos campaign on WeAreDynamo.org, which brought about a great deal of media interest. In an attempt to give Turkers a voice through her work, she was interviewed by many journalistic outlets across the globe. The paper on the project, “We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers” by lead author Niloufar Salehi, won “Best of” at CHI 2015. Her interests also lie in how to make the work environment for digital laborers more ethical, and the creation of platforms run by workers is one of her passions.
From Digital Worker Subsistence to Organized Resistance
If Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) were a boss, one would guess that it hated its employees. This has driven mTurk workers (Turkers) to fight back in a variety of ways, some of which may be useful to those fighting their own battles in other sectors. From rating customers to writing letters to awakening class consciousness to writing rules about what is ethical customer and platform behaviour, a variety of techniques are being tried in the attempt to make online work more bearable. A good work environment does not have to remain a dream, it can be something we realize together. I will take you from today’s mTurk to what online crowd platforms could be, so we can work together to fix the future of work.