Mechanical Serfdom Is Just That

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I learn quickly to proceed with caution. Some jobs ask me to download suspicious-sounding software or to add apps to my Facebook profile. Amazon makes clear that it has "no control over the quality, safety or legality of the services," let alone a requester's ability to pay me. Let the worker beware.

One job asks me to rewrite an article in my own words. It must be written in the form of a news story, although it cannot resemble the original. The piece is about President Barack Obama's State of the Union address and it seems familiar. When I compare it with a Jan. 25 New York Times article, I see that the first six paragraphs are identical. The job pays 77 cents, but no amount of money could persuade me to plagiarize. I move on.

Next, I try transcription jobs because I've been transcribing my interviews for more than a decade. I try an 8-minute interview with an elderly woman in a nursing home that pays about $1.20. If I'm accurate, I can make a bonus that will bring total earnings to more than $2. I get about half-an-hour into it and press the wrong button, accidentally deleting my transcription. I try a different interview, this time an English woman being interviewed about the school her children attend. Her accent is heavy and the job takes an hour; when I try to post the Microsoft Word document I've created, the Mechanical Turk page has timed out and I can't get back to the HIT. I click frantically to find it. There's no one to ask for help. Two hours of work, zero dollars.

Longtime Professional Turns Unreliable

As I click around for the right HIT, I inadvertently make it seem as if I've abandoned some jobs. Having damaged my statistics, I'm now considered fairly unreliable. Few transcription jobs are available to me, a college-educated professional with 20 years of work experience.

As a last resort, I try surveys. Some are quite involved, such as one from a business school that asks me to look at an income statement of a fictitious tech company and decide if my client should continue a partnership with it. I take seven surveys for $2.55. Later, I attempt some 1¢ tasks because I've heard that these can add up for workers who do them quickly.

After seven hours of diligent work, I've earned a grand total of $4.38—or 63¢ per hour. That's about what I'd make toiling in a California prison. Even if I were to become so productive that my earnings tripled, I'd be looking at $13.14 per hour. In a developing country, where 95 percent of the population earns less than $10 per day, that might not be so bad. In San Francisco, that wouldn't cover a day's parking near my office. In the cheap lot, no less.

King is a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco.