People & Organisation : HRM and the Design of Work (Lecture 05)

"CROWD WORKING " : NEW FORM OF EMPLOYMENT

It is worth to think about what will happen to the growing surplus of labour if the technology displaces the human in the workplace with the emerge of advance technology. According to Berg et al. (2018) one of the major transformations in the world of work over the past decade has been the emergence of an online digital labour platform. This includes:

• Web-based platform (Crowd work): work is outsourced through an open call to a geographically dispersed crowd
• Location-based application: Individuals are allocated to work in a specific geographical area.

Crowd working

Crowd work emerged in the early 2000s with the growth of the Internet and the need for human input in tasks needed for the smooth functioning of the web-based industries.

“Employment that uses an online platform to that enable organisation or individual to access an indefinite and unknown group of other organisation and individual to solve a specific problem or to provide specific services or products in exchange for payment” (EurWORK, 2018).This is also known as crowdsourcing and crowd employment.

Crowd workers or micro task workers are a group of people who work on micro tasks. These usually pay per task kind of work which will vary according to the company. They do not need any expertise for this kind of work as it based on the guidelines provided by the employer and which are not hard to follow.

The companies which offer this kind of work are Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Lionbridge Crowd Worker, Appen Butler Hill, Clickworker.

View more on : Crowd working 

Crowd working has both advantages & disadvantages to the workforce and Risk and rewards to the market.

According to Berg et al. (2018) advantages & disadvantages of crowd working to the workforce are as follows.

Advantages	Disadvantages
Provide the opportunity for workers to perform the best suited job from any place at any time.	Able to perform work under Reliable internet connection only
flexible working hours	Lack of social protection
Work is flexible, interesting, and enables to work from home	Lack of clear employment relationship
offers new opportunities for workers to earn income	Insufficient availability of work

Chandler et al. (2013) describe Reward of Crowdsourcing market place and it can be summarised as follows.

Rewards

• Transaction Cost Effectiveness - Marketplaces make crowdsourcing accessible to requesters with limited financial and technical resources.

• Efficient Matching and Task Completion- Each worker proceeds at their own pace and receiving new work only when old work is completed.

• Low Market price - Apart from a minimal payment to the web service, the only cost faced by requesters to crowdsource their tasks is worker.

• Flexible recruitment - Crowdsourcing marketplaces allow requesters to specify that workers possess certain attributes in order to complete a task.

Conclusion

Online marketplaces have developed rapidly in the past few years and it is too difficult to predict what will happen in the future. Another thing that needs to think is what tasks online labour markets will be used in the future. As machine perception and language processing improve, it is likely that the demand for human and human-machine hybrid computational solutions will no longer be needed for these tasks. However, will software replace crowds, for some tasks?

Finally, a larger sociological question that remains to be answered is how these changes within crowdsourcing marketplaces may impact other labour markets and society at large.

References

Berg, J. et al., 2018. Digital labour platforms and the future of work Towards decent work in the online world. Geneva : International Labour Office International Labour Organization.

Chandler, , Paolacci, G. & Mueller, , 2013. Risks and Rewards of Crowdsourcing Marketplaces. Handbook of Human Computation, pp.377-92.

EurWORK, 2018. Euofound. [Online] Available at: https://www.eurofound.europa.eu [Accessed 28 September 2019].