Voices of Workers: Why a Worker-Centered Approach to Crowd Work Is Challenging

Abstract

How can we better understand the broad, diverse, shifting, and invisible crowd workforce, so that we can better support it? We present findings from online observations and analysis of publicly available postings from a community forum of crowd workers. In particular, we observed recurring tensions between crowd workers and journalists regarding media depictions of crowd work. We found that crowd diversity makes any one-dimensional representation inadequate in addressing the wide-ranging experiences of crowd work. We argue that the scale, diversity, invisibility, and the crowds' resistance to publicity make a worker-centered approach to crowd work particularly challenging, necessitating better understanding the diversity of workers and their lived experiences.