WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Umanita Nova: Artificial intelligence. The illegal work of the "mechanical Turks". (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The objective of the site is therefore to guarantee maximum mutual

transparency between workers and employers (hence the decidedly
disturbing reference to Bentham's Panoptikon). Over time the site has
undergone various evolutions and today offers, among other things, an
analytical "report card" for each client (https://turkerview.com) which
indicates, together with a global evaluation, the average hourly wage
offered, the average number of rejected jobs, time to job approval,
quality of communications to workers. As for pay, it is grouped into
three bands: red if it is lower than the US federal minimum wage
($7.25), orange if it is intermediate, green if it is higher than $10
per hour (that is, higher than the various US minimum wage standards). .

To date, Turkopticon has reviewed over 30,000 employers for a total of
over 750,000 reviews. However, 15 years after the birth of Turkopticon,
the organizers must admit that the problem of "mass waste" of the work
carried out is far from resolved and a petition addressed to AMT in
August 2022 to limit the effects of mass waste on the evaluation of
workers does not seem to have produced great results.

However, it would be wrong to smugly dismiss this organizational
experience. With all its obvious limitations, it has allowed hundreds of
thousands of previously isolated digital workers to be permanently
connected, who now have the opportunity to exchange ideas on a daily
basis on various forums and platforms.

The powerful German trade union IgMetall noticed this and (with the help
of Lilly Irani) created the platform http://faircrowd.work/ with the aim
of intercepting "platform workers" operating in Germany, Austria and
Sweden . Even our local UIL has thrown itself into the business by
creating a site for networkers, in this case the more modest objective
is to sell legal and tax advice to digital workers.

A more accentuated class profile highlights the Tech Workers Coalition,
born in 2014 in San Francisco following a joint strike by programmers
and service staff to hire Google canteen staff on a permanent basis. The
association (also in contact with Turkopticon) boasts offices in various
countries around the world including Italy. TWC does not present itself
as a new union but rather as a "facilitator" of relations between the
various unions, spontaneous committees, researchers, etc. who operate in
the field.

To conclude this brief (and certainly incomplete) overview, it should be
highlighted that, apart from Turkopticon, all the other platforms
mentioned are aimed in an undifferentiated way both at "web-based"
workers (that is, they work exclusively online without ever meeting, as
precisely the "turkers") and to "location-based" workers (that is, those
who operate in a specific territory, like riders, and therefore also
have the possibility of meeting each other physically). Recent years
have shown us notable examples of organization and struggle of
"location-based" workers, but the class organization of "turkers" and in
general of those who work "web-based" is the great challenge of the
future (previous UN articles no. 15 and 19/2023).

Mauro De Agostini

https://umanitanova.org/intelligenza-artificiale-il-lavoro-nero-dei-turchi-meccanici/
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