You are constantly encountering an invisible workforce. Do you think that all the little work on the Internet is done by robots? Error. Whenever you submit photos to verify your identity, you need a person to verify your identity. Photo verification and authorization are activities that take place around the world. Invisible staff moderate comments, check reported videos, tag videos, and more. These works are performed by workers who receive, for example, only one cent for such a task.
A global army of micro-tasks workers is emerging
New technology companies are constantly emerging that need workers who will work for a wage that is extremely low. Ghost workers are used by Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber and many other giants. Ghost workers are found in India and many other countries, where in poor households people sit at a computer and perform tasks at minimal cost. This creates a new world subclass that is willing to work at a ridiculously low rating. It’s not just poor and developing countries, the Pew Research Center estimates that in 2015 alone, about 20 million people did hidden work in the United States. Instead of creating quality full-time jobs, there is a trend of severely devalued office work. If this trend continues at a steady pace, ghost labor could account for about 60 percent of global employment by 2055.
To raise awareness of the existence of spiritual workers, anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri wrote the book Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building and the New Global Underclass.
“It’s not a niche job,” Gray said. “This is literally the reorganization of employment.”
The market for invisible labor is poorly regulated
More and more applications could not work without this work of ghosts. It is a devastating picture of the abuse of labor around the world. Women who are expected to work from home, as well as poor people and people with disabilities who are poorly looking for work, are often used as ghost workers.
Jacobinmag: “Ghost work platforms as they exist today began with Amazon in the early 2000s. In 2005, it launched Amazon Mechanical Turk, called MTurk by users, which would allow anyone to make an account and spend some time cleaning up its listings for a small amount of pay. “
Frequent traumas of cleaners
A huge number of inappropriate videos are uploaded to Facebook, Youtube and other platforms every minute. These are videos of murder, child porn or animal and human abuse. all of these videos must be viewed and removed by staff. This is a very traumatic job.
A document called “The Cleaners” is dedicated to invisible work, which evokes many emotions.
How many people do ghost work?
There are a huge number of people, but since it is a relatively new type of work that is also decentralized, it is difficult to estimate how many people are involved. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center report, 20 million adults in the United States made some money from this work the previous year. Many companies recruit spirit workers through third-party platforms. This is, for example, Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower). Micro-tasks usually take a few seconds and workers have limited time to complete them.
Jacobinmag “Ghost work platforms deliver services under the pretense of one of big tech’s most pernicious lies: that technology can replace workers entirely.”
Spirit workers do not feel employed. The reason is that they work almost all day and do not even have a minimum wage. These workers work from inhuman conditions. 30% of such workers say that they will not receive as much money for their work as they were promised. Many platforms do not have to pay if they are dissatisfied with the work of such workers. Ghost workers are abused, robbed and can’t defend themselves. They do not have health care, they do not have paid leave and they spend more time working than most people. Millions of workers around the world are now working in their homes to allow big technology companies to grow.
Sources:
https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/exposing-the-technocrats-false-claims-millions-of-low-pay-ghost-workers-needed-to-keep-their-software-running/
https://ghostwork.info/
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/ghost-work-review-mechanical-turk-gig-workers-amazon
https://thereboot.com/silicon-valley-shadow-the-ghost-workers-behind-amazon-google-microsoft/
