Portside

Urban Life 1: Where White People Live; Urban Life 2: Where White People Walk; Writers vs Amazon Fight Heats Up; Nixon's Media Consolidation Legacy; Payday for LinkedIn Workers

Net Corp Buyoffs; Tennessee sticks it to Comcast; Canvas fingerprinting; How Israel does spin; Amazon eats the world; Margot Adler

Al Jazeera journos jailed; NYT beats war drums; Giants behaving badly; Facebook messes with your mind; News biz renaissance; Newspaper requiem.

Reader Comments - Cecily McMillan Update - Occupy Activist Faces Seven Years in Jail - Trial Postponed to March 3rd; Africa; Latin America; Learning from History; Slavery; UAW Campaign at Volkswagen; Amiri Baraka; Pete Seeger memories; Announcements - CISPES Delegation to El Salvador; Workers Get a Cut on Powell Books purchases; New Video - The USA's new underclass; Labor Notes conference - April 4 - 6 - Early bird discount

Since 2005, Amazon has helped create one of the most exploited workforces no one has ever seen. Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold.

"There are always going to be menial jobs, but we can make them better or worse. And it seems to me the demands of efficiency at the cost of individual's health and wellbeing - it's got to be balanced." - Prof Michael Marmot