mturk w.

This is a site used by marketers and Universities to collect low cost survey data and repetitive task completion for minimal fees. In many instances, workers who complete tasks as per the directions receive payment.

However, as anyone who has been burnt by these scheming requesters who mess it up for all of the others well knows there are certain unscrupulous requester types who use the Amazon.com mturk system to ends more sinister than access to an unsuspecting pool of cheap labor.

These requesters follow a self serving ethic presumably motivated by the ease with which they can reject work and save themselves the fees they have already agreed to and are required to pay. A stiffed worker has no recourse through Amazon. There is no appeals process or investigation by Amazon. A requester can only be reported before the worker has any experience with her and only for a very narrow range of complaints evading work payment is not one of them. It gets worse. The rejection and any untrue reason(s) provided by the requester through the automated Amazon system in bad faith have a deleterious impact on the profile of the workers who have already been denied payment for their work.

The Congress needs to take a deeper look at this mturk system, which conceals these types of business practices behind the shield of a contract worker arrangement provided by the shrink wrapped, boilerplate adhesion language in their TOS. Legislature and the courts need to further assess the whole system to gauge its compliance with basic levels of public policy, acceptable in the reasonable standards expected in an industrialized nation.

If such systemic false pretense routinely engaged in by those requesters who make use of the mturk system to actively pursue the above-mentioned practices does not enumerate as the key elements of material fraud, then how else is it reasonably described?

There is no rating system of the requesters provided by Amazon. Mturk workers are in the dark when accepting a work hit that could result in non payment by one of these unscrupulous requesters meeting the above definitions. In the interim, a plug-in such as the one provided by Turkopticon can provide some minimal measure, though incomplete because of its 3rd party implementation, forewarning to the mturk worker pool.