Contrary to a commonly held view of crowdsourcing as a transfer of low-skill work to low cost locations, our analysis shows that more than half of all the crowdsourcing workers live in North America and Europe and workers are generally very well educated. Almost half have bachelor degree and only 5% are truly low skill workers with only an elementary education.
Crowdsourced
Andrew made a Tumblr for his forthcoming thesis. Sometimes he will get off topic though.
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Work Without Jobs: A Trend For The Educated Elite →
The rapid shift to non-employment should concern us for a number of reasons. Routine employment data, which underpins economic optimism or pessimism, is unlikely to reflect the full range of opportunity that the economy is creating as we move away from jobs as a primary form of engagement with work. Add to that the fact that emerging types of work tend towards the extremes. They can be entrepreneurial, creative and full of opportunity but they can also be very low paid.
A troubling development is the drift to highly educated, low paid labor. That combination seems to be characteristic of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has the potential to enable a new elasticity in the use of labor but it also has the capacity to drive income through the floor.
…spec work devalues the communication design profession. It reduces communication design to a commodity, rather than to a specialized service.
We will sing of the great crowds who can finally free themselves from the slavery of wage labour and through solidarity revolt against exploitation. We will sing of the infinite web of knowledge and invention, the immaterial technology that frees us from physical hardship. We will sing of the rebellious cognitariat who is in touch with her own body. We will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future.
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
AIGA was advised by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) not to publish a spec work position in any statement that might be referred to, even indirectly, as an ethical standard that might elicit censure within the profession… or it might risk being cited for a restraint of trade through price fixing (i.e., making it unethical to work for nothing) for which we would have lost our 501.3.c status and possibly been subject to a regulatory action.
1 year ago | 1 note | Reblog |
aiga, crowdsourcing, spec, no spec, spec work, ftc, trade, federal trade commission, regulation,
aiga, crowdsourcing, spec, no spec, spec work, ftc, trade, federal trade commission, regulation,
Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing foreign wealth, broken in body and brutalised in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation.
We have till now supposed that the working day has given limits. The working day, however, has, by itself, no constant limits. It is the constant tendency of capital to stretch it to its utmost physically possible length, because in the same degree surplus labour, and consequently the profit resulting therefrom, will be increased. The more capital succeeds in prolonging the working day, the greater the amount of other people’s labour it will appropriate.
Unfortunately there is a disturbing growing trend affecting the creative communications community where companies using contests as a major part of their business model pit designers against each other, like roosters in a ring, to win bids to have their work (notably, logos and other identity) awarded to clients.
