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Old 10-03-2007, 05:25 PM   #32
nekokami
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One of the things I see wrong with the current Amazon setup (Mechanical Turk) is that the rules are all on the side of the employers. People can do work and the employers can rate the work poorly and not pay up, and the workers have no recourse. What I'd like to see added is a rating system, like eBay has, that would allow employers who do this to get flagged by workers as a warning to future potential workers. (There's already effectively a worker rating system.) Also, employers currently don't have to file tax paperwork on these micro-jobs, but employees have to pay taxes at the higher "self-employed" rate, which seems unfair. Possibly Amazon (or whoever is running the service) ought to manage that part.

I'm still concerned about how this will affect the benefits of individual workers, however. In countries with socialized medicine, it's no big deal that this kind of work doesn't provide health insurance, but in countries without (e.g. the US), if a lot of work moves in this direction, it'll be a problem.
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