<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">peter waterman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 10:00 PM<br>Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen.<br>To: Networked Labour <<a href="mailto:wordpress@networkedlabour.net">wordpress@networkedlabour.net</a>>, <a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a><br>
<br><br><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:large"><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Sid Shniad</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:shniad@gmail.com" target="_blank">shniad@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 6:41 PM<br>Subject: Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen.<br>To: <br><br><br><div dir="ltr"><b><a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/178241/how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-digital-machine#" target="_blank">http://www.thenation.com/article/178241/how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-digital-machine#</a><br>
<br></b>
<div><b>The Nation <span>February 4, 2014</span><i><br></i></b><h1><font size="4">How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine</font></h1>
<div><b>Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen.<br><br>Moshe Z. Marvit</b><br>
<br>In 2007, Stephanie Costello had a boring office job with a lot of
downtime that she spent online. She recalls the day she read one of
those articles on MSN.com that have become a staple of the Internet: how
to make extra money online. These types of articles often appear in the
soft-news sections of MSN, Yahoo and other sites, usually with the
message that there is money being left on the table. Costello was
intrigued at the prospect of cutting through the boredom of her day with
the opportunity to pick up a little extra cash. She went to the
website, Mechanical Turk, where companies can post tiny tasks and
workers can find and perform them online. It was free to register—no
call for an “investment” up front, which indicated that it was not on
its face a scam. And she began making money immediately. Very small
amounts of money.</div>
<div><div><div>
<p>Costello is a trailblazer of sorts. She was one of the early workers
to join Mechanical Turk, the first online, crowd-based, micro-labor
platform. In her telling, she sounds like an alcoholic describing her
first drink. It was fun at first—and when it became less than fun, it
was still useful, if only to get through the week. But six years later,
it has become a serious problem, and not just for Costello.</p>
<p>Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage
virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital
age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central
platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold. As
many as 500,000 “crowdworkers” power the Mechanical Turk machine, while
millions more (no one knows how many exactly) fuel competitor sites
like CrowdFlower, Clickworker, CloudCrowd and dozens of smaller ones. On
any given day, at any given minute, these workers perform millions of
tiny tasks for companies both vast (think Twitter) and humble. Though
few of these people have any sense of their finished work product, what
they’re doing is helping to power the parts of the Internet that most of
us take for granted.</p>
<p>Currently, computers are very good at certain sorts of tasks, such as
identifying spelling errors, processing raw data and calculating
financial figures. However, they are less able to perform others, such
as detecting a positive or negative bias in an article, recognizing
irony, accurately reading the text off a photograph of a building,
determining if something is NSFW (not safe for work) or discerning among
ambiguous search results. This is where the “crowd” comes in. In the
current iteration of crowdworking, individuals are tasked with those
parts of a job that a computer cannot perform. This work is used both to
fill in the blanks and to train the computer algorithm to do a better
job in the future.</p>
<p>Crowdworking is often hailed by its boosters as ushering in a new age
of work. With the zeal of high-tech preachers, they cast it as a space
in which individualism, choice and self-determination flourish.
“CrowdFlower, and others in the crowdsourcing industry, are bringing
opportunities to people who never would have had them before, and we
operate in a truly egalitarian fashion, where anyone who wants to can do
microtasks, no matter their gender, nationality, or socio-economic
status, and can do so in a way that is entirely of their choosing and
unique to them,” asserts Lukas Biewald, the CEO of CrowdFlower, in an
e-mail exchange. (CrowdFlower claims to have “among the largest, if not
the largest, crowd” available, with roughly 100,000 workers completing
tasks on any given day.)</p>
<p>But if you happen to be a low-end worker doing the Internet’s grunt
work, a different vision arises. According to critics, Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk may have created the most unregulated labor marketplace
that has ever existed. Inside the machine, there is an overabundance of
labor, extreme competition among workers, monotonous and repetitive
work, exceedingly low pay and a great deal of scamming. In this virtual
world, the disparities of power in employment relationships are
magnified many times over, and the New Deal may as well have never
happened.</p>
<p>As Miriam Cherry, one of the few legal scholars focusing on labor and
employment law in the virtual world, has explained: “These technologies
are not enabling people to meet their potential; they’re instead
exploiting people.” Or, as CrowdFlower’s Biewald told an audience of
young tech types in 2010, in a moment of unchecked bluntness: “Before
the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them
down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them
after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find
them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when
you don’t need them anymore.”</p>
<p align="center">* * *</p>
<p>Amazon created Mechanical Turk in 2005, a decade into its rise from
online bookstore to massive virtual mall. Even in its early stages,
Mechanical Turk was a “Jeff project,” meaning that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
took a special interest in it and worked closely with the project
managers. By that time, Bezos and his team had already perfected the
model that has made Amazon a tech-age giant: catering to customers,
undercutting competitors and treating workers poorly. With Mechanical
Turk, they further refined this approach, but with a twist: instead of
exploiting labor to sell goods to an avid public, they created a system
to sell labor itself, cheaply, to perform many millions of microtasks.</p>
<p>The name Mechanical Turk was not simply a whimsical choice by Bezos.
The original Mechanical Turk (also known simply as “the Turk”) was a
seemingly groundbreaking invention: a chess-playing machine commissioned
by the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in the early days of the
Industrial Revolution. In appearance, it was similar to the other
automatons of the era—a cabinet with a mannequin inside, performing some
function usually reserved for humans—but this one was dressed in
“Oriental” garb, not unlike the fortune-telling machine in the 1980s
movie <i>Big</i>. Its mystical, mysterious air was meant to appeal to
Western Europe’s conception of the East; hence the name by which it came
to be known.</p>
<p>The Mechanical Turk seemed to promise an age when automated devices
could attain the heights of human intellectual achievement—and it did so
exceptionally well, convincing observers and challengers for nearly a
century that a machine could play chess. In reality, however, the Turk
was nothing more than an elaborate ruse involving a man or woman sitting
inside the cabinet with an internal chessboard. The machine could
approximate the movements of a man playing chess, but it was necessary
to have a person inside to do what the machine could not.</p>
<p>If it was merely a hoax, then the Mechanical Turk would have been
forgotten as yet another eighteenth-century oddity. However, the device
fit perfectly into the creeping belief—replete with excitement and
anxiety—that mechanical labor (and maybe mechanical minds) could replace
human labor and agency.</p>
<p>The United States has been going through a similar period of
excitement and anxiety since at least the 1970s. Whereas some companies,
like IBM, have sought to create a supercomputer that can think as well
as (or better than) a human, Amazon invested instead in its own
Mechanical Turk—something that feels like a machine but really has
people behind it. Instead of developing the perfect computer, Amazon
thought, it could just develop a way for imperfect computers to
“integrate a network of humans directly into their processes,” as the
company wrote in its 2005 SEC filing. In doing so, it opened the door to
the weird world of crowdworking.</p>
<p align="center">* * *</p>
<p>In <a href="tel:1911" value="+661911" target="_blank">1911</a>, the American engineer Frederick Taylor delivered a paper in
which he announced that workers’ natural laziness and propensity for
underworking was “the greatest evil which the working-people of both
England and America are now afflicted.” His solution was a system of
“scientific management,” wherein work would be divided into the smallest
repeatable tasks and assigned a time limit. The aggregate of these
tasks would then become the baseline for the workday, and “those who
fail to rise to a certain standard are discharged and a fresh supply of
carefully selected men are given work in their place.”</p>
<p>Almost a century later, Amazon hit upon a similar approach to worker
productivity. Yet, whereas Taylor’s genius was in super-charging the
assembly line by reducing all skilled work to tiny micro-tasks, the
genius of Mechanical Turk is in creating virtual assembly lines.</p>
<p>Here’s how it works: the employers (called “Requesters”) can be
actual humans or a computer program running a script that automatically
outsources any task it cannot perform to the crowd. The Requesters place
microtasks (called “Human Intelligence Tasks,” or HITs) on Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk website and offer non-negotiable contracts with a
take-it-or-leave-it rate for each HIT. The Turkers (officially called
“Providers”) perform only small microtasks over and over, rarely getting
a glimpse of the whole. Using keyword searches for HITs, New York
University professor Panagiotis Ipeirotis found that among the most
numerous HITs were data collection, transcription, searches, tagging,
content review, categorization and other similar tasks.</p>
<p>However, HITs can be any task that can be outsourced online. Many of
the features of the Internet that we take for granted come from paid
crowdworking. These include more efficient search results,
transcriptions of audio and video, reliable local business information,
marketing spam and other aspects of the Internet that just seem to be
there. Crowdworkers also engage in tasks that can make certain
individuals’ lives immeasurably better, such as providing
near-instantaneous information on their surroundings for blind people
with a smartphone and the right app.</p>
<p>A HIT typically includes a set of instructions, some quite involved,
that one must read and understand before performing the task. The
Requesters can set eligibility requirements. For example, they may
restrict access to those with “Master Qualifications”—a designation
Amazon awards at its discretion—that some have received after performing
at least 50,000 HITs at an exceptionally high approval rate. Or the
Requester may exclude certain workers, such as those from India, because
in the world of online crowdworking, they are thought of as inferior
workers.</p>
<p>Requesters can engage in such broad exclusions because the Civil
Rights Act does not touch upon these workers. In fact, most of the
hard-won worker protections of the twentieth century do not apply to
Turkers. Some critics worry that even prohibitions on child labor are
being flouted. This is because it is not clear how well some sites
enforce requirements that users must be over 18 to perform HITs.
Moreover, many crowdworkers are paid in gaming credits, which may be
used to intentionally lure children into performing cheap labor. The
payment offered for HITs ranges from nothing to a few dollars to payment
in virtual currencies, with most HITs falling on the low end of the
scale. As a result, it is estimated that the average wage of Turkers is
approximately $2 an hour. For access to this unregulated labor pool,
Amazon charges a 10 percent commission from the Requesters.</p>
<p>Crowdwork often takes place in the home, performed by people who are
not otherwise employed. A few have argued that the low pay may be the
result of longstanding gender inequities in society. The great majority
of American Turkers are women, and there is some indication that many of
them are careworkers, or caring for an elderly relative or young child.</p>
<p>Rachael Jones of Minnesota is an example of a careworker who Turks.
She was trained to assist neurosurgeons, but after a neck injury and
surgery, she could no longer work in that physically demanding field. In
addition, Jones wanted to stay home and take care of her children while
her partner worked outside the home. She is now a “very full-time”
Turker and, after several years during which she earned three Masters
Qualifications and performed 110,000 HITs, she has been able to make
approximately $8 per hour. When asked for her thoughts on Turking, she
responded, “I really love it.” She admits that “there are some times
when it’s really hard, and you’re scrounging and looking and the HITs
that pay just aren’t there.” She’d like the pay to be increased, but she
also fears that any significant increase could destroy the world of
crowdworking. If that were to happen, she is unsure what type of work
she could do that would allow her to stay home with her children.</p>
<p>Turkers are categorized as independent contractors, meaning that they
are not legally entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay, workers’
compensation, unemployment insurance or the various other statutory
protections that cover employees. The multi-page participation agreement
that all Turkers must consent to before entering the site specifies
that the Turker is neither an employee of the Requester nor of
Mechanical Turk. Amazon defines its role as being limited to “the
capacity of a payment processor in facilitating the transactions between
Requesters and Providers” and claims that it is “not responsible for
the actions of any Requester or Provider.” Its agreement warns: “As a
Requester or Provider, you use the Site at your own risk.”</p>
<p>After being reminded by Amazon of its lack of legal liability, one
aggrieved Turker was baffled at how the company could profit from
conduct that it hosts while saying it has no liability: “That’s like
saying someone is running a slave market on my property, and they’re
paying me, but I have no responsibility.”</p>
<p align="center">* * *</p>
<p>Aside from the handful of companies that run crowdworking platforms,
no one really knows who makes up the crowd. The most recent study of
Turker demographics, in 2010, found that the vast majority of Turkers—
57 percent—were American, with Indians coming in second with 32 percent
of the workforce. American Turkers tended to be highly educated, with 63
percent having college degrees, compared with the national average of
25 percent. They were young, with a median age of 30, and 69 percent
were female. The crowd labor pool has grown considerably since Amazon
created the platform, and the extreme low-wage market seems to rely on
competition among the overabundance of workers.</p>
<p>The reasons people engage in Turking are varied. Several years ago,
Ipeirotis posted the question as a HIT on the Mechanical Turk site and
received responses as varied as “It kills time when I’m bored and
restless” to the need for income to get by. One person I spoke with
explained that he Turked just enough each day at his office job to pay
for a sandwich from Subway. However, there is a sizable group of workers
who have come to rely on Mechanical Turk as their primary source of
income.</p>
<p>According to the limited Turker demographics available, Stephanie
Costello’s story is all too common. Costello lives in a trailer at the
edge of a desert town in the Southwest. She is 50 and has an associate’s
degree in nursing, but she has been unable to find suitable work as a
nurse. In 2007, Costello was working at a boring office job and, in slow
periods, earning extra money by doing online surveys on Mechanical
Turk. When she lost her job at the start of the 2008 recession, she took
to Turking full time, often more. What started as a source of extra
cash suddenly turned into her main source of income. According to the
2010 study, Costello’s situation may be representative of approximately
one in eight Turkers in America, or one in five worldwide.</p>
<p>Costello describes full-time Turking as “feast or famine,” but years
of Turking have diminished her view of the feast. In February 2013, she
worked approximately sixty hours a week searching for and performing
HITs and made approximately $150 per week—and that was the feast. The
next month, she was unable to find as many “good-paying” HITs and earned
only about $50 per week. She describes how she often stays up all night
with the Mechanical Turk screen open, because when people post a good
batch of HITs, they go quickly.</p>
<p>“Good-paying” has become a relative term. Costello refuses to work
for 60 cents or even $1.20 an hour because those low amounts are “more
undignified than begging.” However, at $2 per hour she starts to
equivocate, and she admits that she often works for that wage. Even
those who describe making decent money usually talk about earning $6 per
hour, which is still below the federal minimum wage.</p>
<p>Costello’s story of being a full-time Turker who is barely holding on
is all too familiar in the world of crowdworkers. However, Costello
believes that Turking may one day change for the better, especially with
worker organization. Others, like Laura Henderson (a pseudonym to
protect her privacy), see no way out. Until 2004, Henderson had a career
as a technical trainer in the Pacific Northwest. When that work dried
up, she got her bachelor’s degree and joined Teach for America, which
assigned her to teach math at a school in New York’s South Bronx.
Henderson was assigned to the school midway through the year to replace a
beloved teacher and had problems right away. She lost her job and found
herself alone in a new city, in debt from the TFA experience and in
search of yet another career.</p>
<p>She received unemployment compensation for a period, but for an
over-50 worker in a recession, consistent work was hard to find. So
Henderson started Turking. “It sounded very interesting when I heard
about it—wow, crowdwork. I’ve always been into collaboration and working
together and the parts being greater than the whole,” she says. But her
enthusiasm quickly waned. “When I started doing it, I realized that the
pay is crap. I’m lucky to get $2 per hour.”</p>
<p>When I first interviewed her, Henderson was renting a small room in
the Bronx and described herself as “poor and despondent.” In addition to
her earnings as a crowdworker, she received $200 a month in food stamps
and $180 a month in welfare. She was too poor to maintain a bank
account, so she had to spend her Mechanical Turk earnings on Amazon,
which she called “the company store.” She was not unaware of the cruel
irony that her supplies were likely handled by an exploited worker in an
Amazon warehouse somewhere.</p>
<p>On the day I spoke with Henderson, she told me she was “irate” and
unhappy because she had just been rejected for a $5 HIT (unfairly, she
felt), and warned that she might not be coherent as a result. Henderson
recognized that $5 may not seem like a lot of money, but she added that
living hand to mouth in the anonymity of Mechanical Turk had made her
“feral.”</p>
<p>Henderson described being scammed as a relatively common occurrence.
Requesters get to keep the work product whether they officially “accept”
or “reject” the work. As a result, many Turkers have complained of
being denied payment through no fault of their own.</p>
<p>Henderson went further than most. She said that at first, she tried
to get other Turkers worked up about being scammed but found that her
indignation did not appear to be shared. “In our day and age, it’s bread
and circuses,” she said. “People don’t get angry anymore. I’m angry,
but I can’t get other people to get angry.”</p>
<p>Henderson then filed complaints with the Better Business Bureau, the
Federal Trade Commission, the Office of the New York Attorney General
and anyone else she thought might have jurisdiction over the matter.
However, because it is often impossible to know the identity of a given
Requester, Henderson also went after Amazon.</p>
<p>In a long response from Amazon’s attorneys, the company explained
that it has no legal responsibility for Henderson not being paid the
minimum wage, or even not being paid at all for a completed task. The
letter describes Amazon’s role as merely creating a marketplace and
allowing Requesters and Turkers to contract freely. The letter states
that Amazon does not resolve disputes between the parties and provides
no warranties; it also maintains that the company is released from all
liabilities when each party checks the box assenting to the
participation agreement. The New York Attorney General’s Office
forwarded the letter to Henderson and said there was nothing it could do
at the present time.</p>
<p align="center">* * *</p>
<p>Lilly Irani takes issue with Amazon’s description of its role in the
marketplace. She is one of the developers, along with Six Silberman, of
Turkopticon, an Internet browser plug-in and forum that allows Turkers
to rate Requesters and exchange important information about them in
order to “REPORT and AVOID shady employers.” Irani argues that one of
the fundamental problems with Mechanical Turk and other crowdworking
sites is that they are not neutral market-places, as the sites claim,
but are built on an inherently exploitative model that privileges
employers.</p>
<p>One example is the way the Turker has no leverage in the employment
relationship—an imbalance that is particularly pronounced in the set-up
that allows a Requester either to “accept” or “reject” a Turker's work.
These terms belong in quotation marks because, as mentioned earlier, the
Requester sees and retains the work product no matter which choice it
makes. If the Requester “accepts” the work, then it gets to keep the
work product and pays the Turker. If the Requester “rejects” the work,
then it gets to keep the work product without paying the Turker. The
Requester does not have to provide a reason for the rejection, and there
is nothing a Turker can do to challenge the decision other than to
inquire and hope for a response.</p>
<p>By “rejecting” work, the Requester not only deprives the Turker of
payment, but also affects the Turker’s online reputation. Turkers are
ostensibly anonymous, identified only by a long string of numbers and
letters, so all they have is their Mechanical Turk reputation. Costello
describes how, in the beginning, she did thousands of HITs of any type
simply to build her approval rate, only to realize how easily it could
be knocked back down. “If you have a 99.8 percent approval rating and
then you work for some jack-wagon who rejects 500 of your HITs, you’re
toast,” she says. “Because for every rejection, you have to get 100 HITs
that are approved to get your rating back up. Do you know how long that
takes? It can take months; it can take years.”</p>
<p>Out of this grind, online forums and worker sites such as
Turkopticon, TurkerNation, mturkforum, CloudMeBaby and Reddit have
become the primary locations for the crowdworkforce to talk about their
working conditions. However, the anonymity of Turking combined with the
sharp edge of the Internet have often made these forums as
counterproductive to organizing as they are productive in navigating the
world of crowdwork.</p>
<p>TurkerNation is one of the oldest forums, and many Turkers have
complained about being arbitrarily banned from the site at the whim of
the moderator, Spamgirl. (Full disclosure: in researching this article, I
was banned from the site shortly after joining.) Spamgirl has described
herself as “the Hoffa of the Turkers! Trying to help the people.” She
allowed a thread about Turkopticon, then in its early stages, to be
hosted on the site before taking it down for unknown reasons. Rachael
Jones describes being banned for getting into a Twitter tangle with a
TurkerNation moderator.</p>
<p>Other sites like mturkforum and Turkopticon are more friendly, but
some have complained that there is little support from forum communities
in trying to better conditions or organize. It’s not clear that any
online forum can serve as the basis for workers to find common cause and
demand better working conditions, especially when the workforce is
anonymous and in flux—or, in the parlance of crowdwork boosters,
“flexible.”</p>
<p>Some well-intentioned reformers envision magnanimous employers as the
sole source of changes that will make crowdworkers’ lives better. This
view was on full display at a conference last year when eight prominent
researchers delivered an important paper titled “The Future of Crowd
Work,” framed around the question, “Can we foresee a future crowd
workplace in which we would want our children to participate?” Of the
many ideas that came out of this paper, none included any type of worker
self-help or organization.</p>
<p>That view is currently being challenged in what may turn out to be a
seminal class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in California.
Christopher Otey and Mary Greth, on behalf of themselves and “the
World’s Largest Workforce,” are arguing that crowdworkers are not simply
contractors, but employees of the crowdworking company. Otey and Greth
performed “simple repetitive online tasks for the benefit of
CrowdFlower.” For their efforts, they were paid less than the $2 to $3
per hour that the CEO of CrowdFlower has stated his workers make. Otey
and Greth allege that workers earn between $1 and $2 per hour, and that
some are compensated in online game credits, virtual money and enhanced
video game capabilities.</p>
<p>The class may have as many as 4 million members, making it
potentially one of the largest employment class actions in history. If
the plaintiffs prevail, they will be categorized as employees of the
crowdworking company rather than as contractors, and will therefore be
entitled to the host of benefits and protections that employees receive.
These include a minimum wage and overtime, protections from
discrimination, a legally protected right to organize a union, workers
compensation for injuries, unemployment compensation for layoffs,
certain whistleblower protections and others.</p>
<p>The case has advanced past several of the many preliminary hurdles
facing such an ambitious lawsuit; however, as this article goes to
press, a settlement motion has been submitted for the judge’s approval.
If the judge finds that the terms of the settlement are fair to all
members of the class, then it is likely that another case will have to
address whether the millions of crowdworkers are entitled to the
protections and pay of employees.</p>
<p>Miriam Cherry, who was organizing an amicus brief by a group of labor
law professors before the settlement motion, fears that a judge may not
understand crowdwork and simply declare that the workers are
contractors. However, she also fears that a judge or legislature will
simply regulate crowdwork out of existence. “There’s a lot of ways that
things can go right or things can go wrong, and it depends on cases like
CrowdFlower to really tell us if they’re going to go right or if
they’re going to go wrong,” Cherry says.</p>
<p>For her part, Jones fears the possibility that a judge could rule
against CrowdFlower and hold that she and others like her are employees.
“It scares me,” she says. “I depend on this system. If things go the
wrong way for Crowdflower, this could really crush the crowdworking
market.”</p>
<p>Henderson could not wait for the resolution of this lawsuit. She has
recently stopped Turking because the wages are too low to sustain even
her life in a cheap room in the South Bronx. After four months chasing
HITs, she described herself as being “too tired to Turk for $2 per
hour.”</p>
<p>In mid-November, Henderson turned 53, and two weeks later, on
December 1, she moved into a homeless shelter. Presumably it does not
have Wi-Fi, so she wouldn’t be able to Turk even if she wanted.</p>
<p style="margin-top:34px">Read Next: <i>Gabriel Thompson details his life as a temp in California’s Inland Empire, the belly of the online shopping beast, in “<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/177377/holiday-crush" target="_blank"></span><span style="color:rgb(178,34,34)">The Workers Who Bring You Black Friday</a> <span>[2]</span>.</i>”</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div><b>Source URL:</b> <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/178241/how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-digital-machine" target="_blank">http://www.thenation.com/article/178241/how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-digital-machine</a></div>
<div><p><b>Links:</b><br>[1]
<a href="https://subscribe.thenation.com/servlet/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&cds_page_id=122425&cds_response_key=I12SART1" target="_blank">https://subscribe.thenation.com/servlet/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&amp;cds_page_id=122425&amp;cds_response_key=I12SART1</a><br>
[2] <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/177377/holiday-crush" target="_blank">http://www.thenation.com/article/177377/holiday-crush</a><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
</font></span></p></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<br></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<p>
</p><br></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
</font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><ol><li><b><font><span></span><font size="1"><span><span>EBook, November 2012:</span> <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/" target="_blank">Recovering
Internationalism</a>. </span><span><font color="#ff0000">[A compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download formats]</font></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span></font></font></b></li>
<li><b><font size="1"><span><span>EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></font>http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/<font color="#ff0000"> </a></span></span><span><span><br>
</span></span></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><span>Interface
Journal<span> Special (co-editor), November 2012:</span> </span><span style="font-weight:normal"><a href="http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/" target="_blank">For the Global Emancipation of Labour</a></span></font></b>
</li><li><b><font size="1"><span lang="NL">Blog:</span><span lang="NL"> <a href="http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman." target="_blank">http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.</a>
</span></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1">Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement Internationalisms. <a href="http://www.interfacejournal.net/" target="_blank">See Call for Papers</a>, <font color="#ff0000">(Deadline: May 1, 2014). </font></font></b></li>
<li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><a href="http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf" target="_blank"></font></font></span></font><font color="#000000">Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"><font color="#000000"> <font color="#ff0000">(2005-Now!)<br>
</a></font></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><font color="#000000"><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/" target="_blank"><font color="red"><b>MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "www.into-ebooks.com" claiming to be</b></font> Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a Globalised, Informatised Capitalism </a>(2011) <font color="#ff0000">Almost 1,000 pages of Working Papers, free, from the <a href="tel:1980" value="+661980" target="_blank">1980</a>'s-90's</font>.</font></font></font></b></li>
<li><b><font size="1"><font color="#ff0000"><font color="#000000">Google Scholar Citation Index:</font></font></font></b><br><span style="display:block"> <b><font size="1"><a href="http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ" target="_blank">http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ</a> </font></b><br>
</span></li></ol><ul><li><table cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr></tr></tbody></table></li></ul><font size="1">
</font><font size="1">
</font></div>
</font></span></div>
<br>_______________________________________________<br>
NetworkedLabour mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:NetworkedLabour@lists.contrast.org">NetworkedLabour@lists.contrast.org</a><br>
<a href="http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour" target="_blank">http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour</a><br>
<br></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div><b>Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..</b></div><div><br></div>
P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br>
<br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div>
</div>