Amazon’s Mechanical Turkers are college-educated millennials making less than minimum wage - Recode

A "gig economy" reality check

"Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service is a low-cost method of outsourcing work that computers can’t do quite yet.

Or as a Gizmodo writer smartly put it, “It's a job board where the pay is low and the jobs are dumb.” If you need something transcribed, documents sorted or another menial task performed, Mechanical Turk is the place to go. And according to new research from the Pew Center, the people around the world doing this “dumb” work are a lot more overqualified than you might think.

Data collected by Pew from February of this year say that 51 percent of Mechanical Turkers have a college degree, compared with 36 percent of the adult U.S. workforce. Additionally, 52 percent of Turkers make less than $5 per hour on a job (the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour), and 39 percent earn between $5 per hour and $7.99 per hour."

Amazon’s Mechanical Turkers are college-educated millennials making less than minimum wage - Recode