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How Many People Microwork in France? Estimating the Size of a New Labor Force Clément Le Ludec, Paola Tubaro, Antonio Casilli

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How Many People Microwork in France? Estimating the Size of a New Labor Force Clément Le Ludec, Paola Tubaro, Antonio Casilli How many people microwork in France? Estimating the size of a new labor force Clément Le Ludec, Paola Tubaro, Antonio Casilli To cite this version: Clément Le Ludec, Paola Tubaro, Antonio Casilli. How many people microwork in France? Estimating the size of a new labor force. 2019. hal-02012731 HAL Id: hal-02012731 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02012731 Preprint submitted on 16 Feb 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. How many people microwork in France? Estimating the size of a new labor force CLÉMENT LE LUDEC, MSH Paris Saclay, France PAOLA TUBARO, National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), France ANTONIO A. CASILLI, Telecom ParisTech, France Microwork platforms allocate fragmented tasks to crowds of providers with This novel organization of AI-driven automation in contemporary remunerations as low as few cents. Instrumental to the development of industries does not "replace" human jobs but makes human contri- today’s artificial intelligence, these micro-tasks push to the extreme the bution to productive processes largely inconspicuous. It supports logic of casualization already observed in "uberized" workers. The present technologies where they fail, and yet it is not a selling point that article uses the results of the DiPLab study to estimate the number of people companies leverage to attract and retain large userbases. Microwork who microwork in France. We distinguish three categories of microworkers, has received very little media coverage and is unfamiliar to the gen- corresponding to different modes of engagement: a group of 14,903 "very active" individuals, most of whom are present on these platforms at least eral public. Its invisibility is striking especially if compared to other once a week; a second featuring 52,337 "routine" users, more selective and new forms of work associated with the rise of digital platforms, such present at least once a month; a third circle of 266,126 "casual" users, more as on-demand work for urban transport applications like Uber, or heterogeneous and who alternate inactivity and various levels of work for real-time delivery like Deliveroo. practice. Our results show that microwork is comparable to, and even larger Microwork platforms do not generally recruit or hire workers than, the workforce of ride-sharing and delivery platforms in France. It is directly, but operate as intermediaries between client companies therefore not an anecdotal phenomenon and deserves great attention from (usually called "requesters") who publish small tasks, and individual researchers, unions and policy-makers. users (usually called "workers", "contributors", or "providers") who Additional Key Words and Phrases: Microwork, digital transformation, em- accept and perform the tasks. This form of digital labor pushes to the ployment, digital platforms, digital labor, algorithms. extreme the logic of workforce casualization and insecurity already noted in the context of the vast public debate and legal disputes 1 INTRODUCTION on the status of "uberized" workers. It is therefore imperative to address this emerging phenomenon. The digital economy currently experiences a proliferation of "mi- Strikingly, however, the size of this phenomenon is unknown: crowork" platforms, specialist services where providers perform how large is the micro-workforce? Official statistics are still ill- fragmented and standardized micro-tasks to be paid on a piece-rate equipped to capture the economics of digital platforms, and the basis. These activities take only minutes and their reward can be as (few) surveys conducted so far have conflated microwork with other low as few cents. Often repetitive and unqualified, they consist for platform-mediated activities such as transport and delivery (Uber, example in identifying or naming objects on images, transcribing Deliveroo). Some insight comes from platforms themselves, whose invoices, translating snippets of text, moderating content (such as claim is that their userbase is large: if Amazon Mechanical Turk, the videos), sorting or classifying search results, responding to online most widely-known microwork service, boasted 500,000 providers surveys. ("Turkers") as early as 20141, the Chinese giant Witmart alone is These tasks are often part of data-intensive processes and lengthy said to exceed 12 millions2. A widely cited 2015 World Bank report supply chains, feeding activities as varied as digitization of archives, proposed a much more conservative estimate of 4.8 million people market research, management of back-office operations and most registered on microwork websites globally, just over 10% of whom importantly, development of artificial intelligence [Gray and Suri are actually active [Kuek et al. 2015]. 2017]. Recent applications of machine learning - on which smart Not only are these figures very divergent, but they are also static, technologies, autonomous vehicles and virtual assistants are all no serious attempt to update them having been undertaken since based - rely on the creation and maintenance of large databases 2014-15. They are also somewhat misleading insofar as they take that need to be annotated, refined, labeled and more generally, aug- little account of the European context. This is a serious limitation arXiv:1901.03889v1 [econ.GN] 12 Jan 2019 mented [Porter et al. 2017]. Microwork is used, first, to prepare, from the viewpoint of national and regional policy-making: lack categorize and qualify information for automatic learning algo- of even approximate estimates makes it difficult to take action and rithms; and second, to assess their performance and if necessary, to hinders initiatives in support of local microworkers. make corrections. Growing investments by technology companies To fill this gap, we propose an estimate of the total numberof confirm the importance of microwork in the current development people microworking in the specific case of France. A highly indus- of artificial intelligence. Giants such as Google and Microsoft either trialized country and a pioneer in information technologies, France rely on existing platforms or create their own internal microwork is less documented in the (still scant) literature on microwork, and is markets. 1"500,000 Workers from 190 countries", cited in M. Harris, "Amazon’s Mechanical Authors’ addresses: Clément Le Ludec, MSH Paris Saclay, Paris, France, leludec. Turk workers protest: ’I am a human being, not an algorithm’", The Guardian, December [email protected]; Paola Tubaro, National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), 3, 2014. Laboratory of Research in Informatics, Paris-Saclay, France, [email protected]; Anto- 2Les Echos, "L’actu tech en Asie : Female founders veut percer le plafond de verre", nio A. Casilli, Telecom ParisTech, Paris, France, [email protected]. June 19, 2015. , Vol. 1, No. 1, Article . Publication date: January 2019. 2 • Le Ludec, C. et al less present in international platforms such as Amazon Mechanical The second purports to assuring the quality of the results of scien- Turk, partly for language reasons. France has its own microwork tific surveys, questionnaires and experiments for which "Turkers" platforms, the most popular of which is Wirk (formerly known as are recruited by research teams in disciplines such as psychology, Foule Factory). Its webpage displays 50,000 contributors and it has marketing, and cognitive sciences. This involves ensuring access to had to close its registrations [Amar and Viossat 2016]. a sufficiently large "pool" of respondents [Keith et al. 2017]. To estimate the size of the microworking population in France, Attempts to estimate the number of people working on Mechani- we draw on publicly available sources combined with the results of cal Turk have arisen from these dissimilar research questions, insofar DiPLab ("Digital Platform Labour"), a comprehensive study of mi- as the figure of 500,000 popularized by Amazon was to be probed. crowork in the French-speaking world3. We identify three modes of A first study showed the existence of a pool of 7,300 "rather ac- engagement in microwork that correspond to three pools of users of tive" unique workers at any given time [Stewart et al. 2015]. In the these platforms. They comprise approximately 15,000 "very active" same year, activist Kristy Milland conducted a six-week survey and microworkers, 50,000 "routine" microworkers and 250,000 "casual" counted about 30,000 workers4. [Difallah et al. 2018] use Stewart’s microworkers respectively. These estimates should be interpreted model and improve it, allowing for a longer observation time and as orders of magnitude rather than precise values. taking into account the heterogeneous propensity of individuals These relatively high figures matter to policy-making. To the to accept tasks. They show that about 100,000 people work on Jeff extent that they exceed the number of contributors to more high- Bezos’ platform, or one fifth of the advertised population. profile platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo, they call for theat- Despite
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