Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry

By Alek Felstiner. 2011

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Accounting, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science, Social Sciences & Humanities

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

In Marketing

In Sociology and Political Science

In Social Sciences & Humanities

Citations in the corpus

Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society (2023, background): “Because of the nature of crowdsourced work–usually small tasks requiring only several minutes to complete–it is not uncommon for crowdworkers to work for hundreds of different companies in a week [79].”
Ethical norms and issues in crowdsourcing practices: A Habermasian analysis (2018, background): “On the one hand, crowdsourcing has been criticized, for example, for providing cheap labour and global arbitrage that circumvents workplace regulations (eg, Bergvall‐Kåreborn & Howcroft, 2014; Felstiner, 2011; Scholz, 2017).”
Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (2011, unknown): “Felstiner (2010) reviews many of the legal grounds and ethical issues related to crowdsourcing, and is an excellent starting point for the discussion.”
New Forms of Employment (2015, background): “Because crowd workers are considered to be self-employed or freelancers, they do not get any benefits (including access to HR measures such as training, mentoring or coaching) or have any job security (Felstiner, 2011) or social protection.”
The Future of Work in the ‘Sharing Economy’. Market Efficiency and Equitable Opportunities or Unfair Precarisation? (2016, unknown): “(Felstiner, 2011) Legal analysis of digital crowds employment Law Legal analytical essay Secondary sources Crowdsourcing in general with focus on MTurk 67 21.”
The rise of the "just-in-time workforce": on-demand work, crowdwork and labour protection in the "gig-economy" (2015, background): “…so, businesses in the gig-economy actually dictate terms and conditions of employment between workers and clients, something that could indeed go in favour of the recognition of the platform as a “joint employer” of the worker in a particular transaction, in the United States (Felstiner, 2011).”
Being a turker (2014, background): “Felstiner [4] goes so far as to suggest that such opacity and lack of information ultimately can lead to”
Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control (2020, background): “In this view, information asymmetries are not random: instead, they are deliberately created by employers to constrain workers ’ choices and control workers ’ ability to contest the distribution of surplus value (e.g., Felstiner, 2011; Howcroft & Bergvall-K ˚ areborn, 2019).”
The ‘gig economy’: employee, self-employed or the need for a special employment regulation? (2017, background): “Bargaining entities are hard to establish on an online platform where it is unlikely that the number of workers is known and they can work for different platforms at the same time (Felstiner 2011: 183–185).”
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly: Why Crowdsourcing Needs Ethics (2013, background): “…overarching term of the phenomenon, because it is the one most widely used by the industry itself and I also stick to Jeff Howe’s original definition: ‘Crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined…”