The secret lives of Google raters

https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of-google-raters/

by james_pm • 9 years ago

80 27 9 years ago

zhte415• 9 years ago

Google outsource work to shoddy companies then? And bask in glory of $item

Mechanical Turks exist across industry. From a governance perspective, that manual processes exist is a huge problem for control of operational risk, but when outsourced to a service provider, who knows? This is where strong policies need to exist.

Example (a system I was to come to hear of): Outsourced signature recognition system. Three years paying a team of 5 developers that created nothing (that worked even coherently). Manager announced system successful, with XUZ maintenance costs for database, etc. These maintenance costs were 6 people on 24 hour staggered shifts looking at scanned copies/images of signatures in (near) real-time. Ideal solution didn't exist, so use management skill and create a budget that covers this up. Indeed, this is fraud, but 'back in the day' apparently; probably less than 8 years ago.

Only after 'working' effectively for 4+ years was this discovered via internal audit.

croon• 9 years ago

Cliff notes:

* Google raters are subcontractors for contracting companies, among which one is Leapforce.

* Google flaunts new contract requiring takers to use employees instead of subcontractors.

* Leapforce decides to employ raters, but at much reduced salaries and no benefits.

* Raters who work mostly from home are the losers in the equation, and have a hard time finding other work.

This seems like the future of the gig economy. Same work load, less pay, less security, less employee power.

JBReefer• 9 years ago

I agree with your notes but not your conclusion - wouldn't these people be way more screwed if they couldn't work from home at all? These aren't devs we're talking about, they likely don't have many options besides this or something way shittier not at home.

kartan• 9 years ago

This seems like the future of the gig economy. Same work load, less pay, less security, less employee power.

The gig economy is just a big scam on taxpayers shoulders. Companies get the benefit of low paid workers and low or not-at-all taxes. And the rest of the society has to pay the burden of increasing poverty. It is a kind of Tragedy of the Commons, one rips the benefit while the whole pays the cost.

It is fueled by the mentality of "at least they have a job". Having a job is not a goal in itself, the goal is that people are able to support themselves in a reasonable way. Having a job is a means to that end. People will be better with a Basic Income, waiting for a better opportunity that brings more value to them and to society. Once you land on a low paid, a-lot-of-hours job it is hard to get out of it. And companies that depend on this kind of jobs are inefficient and have no incentive to do things better.

ksk3• 9 years ago

Its the MBA mentality of offloading risk. Todays consumer protections, employee benefits, health insurance, etc are all business "risks" that "hurt" the competitiveness of businesses. Companies like uber have managed to offload that risk onto society by turning their employees into daily wagers.

Analemma_• 9 years ago

It's a consistent theme across the crony capitalist economy that "Privatize the profits; socialize the losses" is the way to get rich. i.e., any costs that can be pushed onto the taxpayer should be.

james_pm• 9 years ago

The remote work aspect makes it even easier to lose sight of the human doing the work. Once they are just another resource in the dashboard like an AWS instance, some system somewhere can spool more up when you need them, cut them loose when you don't.

dismantlethesun• 9 years ago

The gig economy is just a big scam on taxpayers shoulders. Companies get the benefit of low paid workers and low or not-at-all taxes. And the rest of the society has to pay the burden of increasing poverty.

All things being equal, companies would aim to spend the same TOE (total cost of employment), on each worker regardless of if they are a contractor or a employee.

A contractor being paid $15/hour has to pay self-employment tax to cover medicare and social security. A company who hired the same worker, would only do so at say $14/hour to make up for the taxes that they now cover.

The goal of contracting isn't to pay less, it's to handle jobs that are irregularly distributed so you aren't literally paying people to sit around.

The only cases where you'd choose to employ part-time instead is if a workers' presence is physically required (e.g. Starbucks), or near instant time is extremely important (e.g. not Uber).

pdelbarba• 9 years ago

I'm curious if a move to large numbers of people working from home under these conditions might actually be very much in the corporation's interests as it allows compartmentalization of communications between employees regarding pay/unionization. You can't unionize if you don't know who else works for the company.

eru3• 9 years ago

This might be an example of regulation backfiring.

If the regulation say that some class of employees will get some expensive benefit, the most rational response might be to make sure you don't have any employees classified that way.

ballenf• 9 years ago

Another take on the Cliff notes:

  * Google raters are subcontractors for contracting companies, among which one is Leapforce.

yep

  * Google flaunts new contract requiring takers to use employees instead of subcontractors.

Don't get the use of "flaunts" here. Google is rolling out new requirements that its contractors use employees instead of contract labor. Leapforce's main or only client is Google, so had to make changes to its policy of only using contract labor.

  * Leapforce decides to employ raters, but at much reduced salaries and no benefits.

There's no indication that pay per hour is going down and they've never had benefits. The change is that contractors are becoming employees and limited to working 26 hours a week.

  * Raters who work mostly from home are the losers in the equation, and have a hard time finding other work.

Yes, it seems that raters drew the short straw here. Hard to know for sure whether Google's fear of labor regulators or it's well-intentioned desire to improve working conditions were the cause.

  This seems like the future of the gig economy. Same work load, less pay, less security, less employee power.

The model Leapforce has is has been around for decades. The internet has made the model more feasible, but working from home as a contractor for a single company is not a new evil.

A few points to further counter balance your Cliff notes:

* Raters get paid from $13.50 to $17.50 per hour for work from home and are upset about the cut in hours because this is significantly more than they can make anywhere else.

* Raters are now going to become employees and thus the employer will be paying Social Security and employer taxes, saving the employees somewhere on the order of 50% in income tax liability. Unless their pay is cut to compensate, their per-hour rate is going to go up in this change. And it's worth repeating, they don't have any benefits now so aren't losing them.

* Employment status also brings unemployment coverage and disability benefits in case they get fired or become disabled.

Side note:

I hope for Leapforce's sake and that of their contractors/employees that they got Google's blessing before making their CEO so available and transparent on the relationship with Google. I just don't think I'd ever give the press much access to me on the record talking about my largest (or maybe only) client without vetting every word with the client first. Even if everything in the article was already well known by labor regulators, I'd be very concerned that articles like these paint a much bigger target on my back.

lapsock• 9 years ago

Leapforce's exam is not hard to pass at all. At least it wasn't when I worked for them back in 2010 as an 18 year old with English as a second language.

dsfyu404ed2• 9 years ago

What was the nature of the exam?

The reason that the people that one rater's referred didn't pass might simply be a cultural difference between the rater's locale and the locale of whoever designed the "right" answers.

For example, if you assume the test was written by people in SV it would not be a stretch to imagine a bunch of people failing because they (for example) failed to flag content that included the confederate battle flag as offensive.

groby_b• 9 years ago

And they should fail. Promotion of slavery is offensive.

3131s• 9 years ago

What's the pay like?

eru3• 9 years ago

They give hourly rates in the article.

hopfog• 9 years ago

I used to work as a rater through Lionbridge back in the EWOQ days and I honestly have nothing bad to say about it. The pay was quite good and it was all remote work where I set my own hours. I never had a problem with not being a "real Googler". I always saw it as working for Lionbridge, not Google.

Granted, I was in the privileged position of only having it as a side income while studying so I never expected any job security to begin with. In that context it was great though.

ksk3• 9 years ago

I'm no fan of Google, but I don't agree with the idea that Google is obligated to have them as employees. If anything, it just shows the BS of the whole AI narrative that a lot of startups (also non startups like MS/FB/Google) have been trying to push.

sunshiney• 9 years ago

If you study how Leapforce interacts with or what they require of their subcontractors and compare to the Labor & Industry definition of business owner/independent contractor, you would see that they are abusing the definition. Leapforce subcontractors are employees.

ksk3• 9 years ago

I agree that Leapforce is responsible, I just don't get how Google is as well.

dignick• 9 years ago

It seems that where companies are outsourcing jobs with a 'gig economy' model, they know these jobs will be automated in the near future and want to be able to easily replace humans with computers. Amazon has the same setup with delivery drivers here in the UK. If they expected these jobs to be long term, they would invest in them in-house.

gnicholas• 9 years ago

Sounds like the cost/benefit will change dramatically for many raters. The fixed costs for existing raters include "a few hours a week" of ongoing training. Under the old system, this time cost was amortized over up to 40 hours of paid work. Now that only 26 hours will be allowed, many existing raters may rationally decide that the unpaid training is too big a drag on their maximum wages.

The fixed costs are even greater for people who are not currently raters. The amount of time it takes to pass the entrance exams (based on the 160-page manual) will now have to be recouped with about half as many paid hours per week.

This will have the same effect on new rater signup that plummeting gas prices have on hybrid vehicle sales.

ChoGGi• 9 years ago

That's a little disappointing, I was hoping for an article about how rat catchers were dealing with the unique issues of Google data centres (or some such).

The secret lives of Google raters

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