A new, worker-friendly platform, dubbed Daemo, is currently under development at Stanford’s Crowd Research Collective, and describes itself as a “self-governed crowdsourcing marketplace”—a utopia, of sorts, for Turkers who have long clamored for more agency.

Meanwhile, the Turker workforce has proven particularly difficult to organize: MTurk magnifies the challenges of the gig economy, with its isolated workers spread across the globe and hidden behind usernames, performing minute tasks on a platform operated by a massive, wealthy corporation.

MTurk is also one of the least consumer-facing corners of the gig economy—so while ethically minded customers have taken Uber, Handy, and the like to task for their treatment of workers, Amazon’s gig-work platform has largely managed to evade public scrutiny for its low pay and reported lack of transparency.

Meanwhile, other platforms in the gig economy have begun inching toward improvement—just in the past few months, Uber has added in-app tipping , and Postmates and Lyft have come out in support of legislation to help develop portable benefits programs for workers.

 

Read full article here.