Sign of the desperation - Americans willing to work for 25 cents an hour

Some Americans are willing to work for much less than people from other countries, according to the results of an online experiment conducted by Newsweek.

The magazine used Mechanical Turk, a website run by Amazon.com that acts as a marketplace for freelance work. As Newsweek described their method:

We posted simple, hourlong jobs (listening to audio recordings and counting instances of a specific keyword) and continually lowered our offer until we found the absolute bottom price that multiple people would accept, and then complete the task.

The results? No one in Italy, the Netherlands, or Egypt would accept less than $5 for an hour of work. In Germany it was $3, in Australia and Britain $2, and in Canada $1.25. Americans accepted by far the lowest figure: just 25 cents.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110620/us_yblog_thelookout/some-americans-will-work-for-25-cents-an-hour-experiment-shows

Republicans can pat themselves on the back now. Mission Accomplished.

Volunteering = free work.

I had no idea Americans were so much more selfless than the rest of the world, I learn something new on DU nearly every day.

the description in the article)--not a volunteer opportunity. Not sure what your point is.

with a tax exemption. People do that because they believe in the cause of the charity or nonprofit.

A for-profit corporation has no cause other than to make money for its investors. Why would anyone volunteer their services to enrich others and for no social cause? In fact "volunteering" for a for-profit corporation is a violation of the minimum wage laws.

Is that true?

My BIL works for a big 3 carmaker. He "made" $28/hour in skilled trades 10 years ago. With benefits it was about $48/hour. He now makes $22/hour.

That's 2080 hours at full time. Multiply that by $70 an hour and you get $145,600 per year. Do you honestly think any auto worker is making that much money before benefits?

the person who stated this was someone who clearly SHOULD have known better, and probably did, but heard it on Rush or something, making it a "fact", thus, fair point to raise during discussion about the economy (which is the context). How can I refute that, politely, when I'm neither an auto worker nor in a union? So I just let it go, but you gotta know that I just wanted to snipe back.

$14.00 an hour. During their hayday, my husband made about $20. or so an hour for Chrysler.

:hi:

Many of the people haunting those freelance sites aren't actually working to make a living. There are a lot of high school and college kids who just do this kind of work for beer and gas money. The article itself points out that the results are biased against the U.S. because of selection bias among the sites users. On top of that, you need to remember that many of the Turk-type jobs are braindead simple, and most people can do multiple tasks at once. The takers may not have been looking this as a 25 cent an hour job, but as an easy way to make an EXTRA 25 cents on top of the work they were already doing that hour.

I doubt you'd find a single person anywhere in the United States trying to pay their bills with a 25 cent per hour job. You can make more money than that picking up aluminum cans on the roadside.

It's interesting that they convinced people to do the job for 25 cents, but that doesn't actually say anything about America. I convinced the kid up the street to mow my yard last week in exchange for a couple of old computer parts I had in my garage. From that, should I write an article decrying the fact that American's are now reduced to bartering their labor for hand-me-downs?

Wrong spot

There was an article here in GD recently about the latest "employment" boom being in unpaid internships, they pay exactly zero and you usually can't do them while doing something else as well.

This reminds me of that old scam from the '70s where you could work from home "stuffing envelopes" or something similar.....it was basically piecework and had the reputation for "rejecting" more than half the stuff sent back to the company, therefore, no pay for those "rejected" pieces. I never tried it myself, but always wondered about the "rejected" pieces and how often they were actually used by a company, just not paid for.

They're called "interns".

Shielding the corporations & their criminal CEO's while stickin' it to the little guy.

It's true, most of it is completely worthless, they pay next to nothing. These people were way overpaying for that site at $5 for an hour of work.

The only work I do there is transcription work through CastingWords. It's not great, but there's usually some transcription work available to supplement my meager freelancer income when I can't find other work. As a freelancer, I spend about as much time looking for work as I do working... and often earn less than minimum while I am working. CastingWords actually pays more than other transcription services for expedited work. You have to go through a less than 100% fair peer grading system to reach the point where they allow you to do them, but it works.

A lot of Mechanical Turk workers are in India. You can have your pay automatically converted to rupees.