Technology has made many things possible, and is enabling unethical people to pay as little as one quarter cent per word for their writing. The Internet is the great democratizer. It is also the great enslaver of the disadvantaged and the marginalized.

Freelance writers, often students, mothers, and older people, are the victims of a global conspiracy to pit people against each other to auction their skills and time for as little as possible.

One of the culprits is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT). Amazon didn’t invent microworking, which is the practice of paying independent contractors by the task instead of by the hour. But they are the first globally recognized company to put their name on the practice, thereby endorsing it and making it an acceptable business practice.

Amazon MT is a service that allows businesses to contract with Amazon to have people perform very brief, discreet operations like manually forwarding an e-mail based on subject matter or moderating blog comments. My son, a student, worked for MT moderating pictures for a social network at the rate of a few pennies each.

ShortTask is another example of a service that brings together businesses and people who want to do microcontract work. In addition to facilitating this process, ShortTask often has questionable tasks like paying for positive product reviews and blog comments, Diggs, Twitter followers, etc.

And last night, someone tweeted a link to Article Slash, which had this posting:

“Hi, I need a group of writers or writing teams who can deliver 20-30 articles of 300 words every day. Payout will be made everyday through paypal.. 0.75$ for every 300 word article.”

Seventy-five cents per article! That’s .0025 per word, one quarter of a penny! If you could write 1200 words per hour (I’m a professional writer and I can’t), you could make $3 an hour doing this.

Our current minimum wage in California is $8, and the federal minimum is $7.25. As bad as that is, there are millions of Californians who would think they had died and gone to heaven to get $8 an hour. The rate at which people work and the quality expected by buyers varies, but the wages offered by these services, like the 75-cent, 300-word article, are equivalent to under $2 an hour. The last time the federal minimum wage was below $2 was in 1974.

Both California state and federal law require* that pieceworkers be paid a rate that is equal to or more than minimum wage, except for students and “new learners” (people who have never done the job before) who are paid at 85% of the minimum wage. Of course this is for regular employees, not contractors.

Some of the inevitable byproducts of this trend are:

• Devaluation of good writing, research and analysis
• Illiteracy
• Theft of editorial content

Microworking is an area in which the law has not caught up with technology and common practice. And the marketplace for these services is mostly underground, so the average person isn’t aware of it or upset by it. The operators of sites like Article Slash and ShortTask may argue that they are merely facilitators, and not responsible for the behavior of their users.

Ours is supposedly a free market economy, but we also have checks and balances so that everyone from the soup kitchen to the boardroom is protected from abuse. As the economic recovery slowly ticks up, one can only hope that supply and demand moderate the wages for microworkers so they are fairly paid for their effort and intellect. Unfortunately, the practices, which may have been made necessary by the downturn, will be status quo for some companies who will be unable to resist the appeal of continued lower operating costs.

* This is based on my research and interpretation of government documents. I am not an attorney and could be wrong about this.

Tags: Microworking, Article Slash, minimum wage, piecework, Amazon, Mechanical Turk, ShortTask, writing, writers