[linkregister]

If mturk workers had better opportunities, they'd take them. mturk is competing with local economies in low opportunity locales. It is rational to work in a cybercafe doing rote web tasks for 8 hours if you'd receive the same amount of money performing manual labor.

[mrdependable]

I have no idea what the situation was for people doing the work on mturk, but how far would your logic extend? Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk? If not, there has to be some ethical relationship between how desperate a worker is and how much you pay them. My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work. I don't get the feeling that was the situation.

[linkregister]

Amazon Mechanical Turk is available to anyone with internet access, though jobs have dried up in recent years. Some jobs are region locked while others are available to all locales. I'll discuss mturk for the time period of its heyday.

> My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work.

Average pay appeared to be far below minimum wage for mturk workers in the United States. My expectation is workers in developing countries have far higher purchasing power for doing the same work. I would also expect an inverse relationship between high local pay and number of workers on mturk, with considerations for languages and other region-specific .

> Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk?

Because mturk is made available internationally and signup is trivial, I do not agree with your analogy of coercive refugee camp labor. Though Amazon is well known for harsh and unsafe working conditions in its US warehouses, I cannot consider safety considerations for a web-based anonymized gig economy service to be comparable. Using mturk to make money is voluntary.

I personally hope for refugees and residents of developing countries to have the necessities of life and opportunities to achieve success comparable to OECD nations' residents. I think that targeted foreign aid is an important part of helping people in developing countries. Access to credit and global markets has brought the largest amount of people out of poverty in history. Our governments and importers should work to ensure people in emerging markets have safe working conditions while also giving them access to our developed countries' markets.