Are you entering the job market now? Good luck kid. In an era where bank interns die after 'working until 6am for three days' and The Guardian writes articles titled The minimum wage scam: Corporations get away with crappy wages, so government has to make up the rest, we also have crowd sourcing to ensure our wallets are so thin we have to move back to our parents house after college (if we ever left). But wait, the latter may soon have a legal precedence set that could change crowd labour forever. If the crowdflower suit ever gets off the ground as it's currently pending motion to dismiss for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. That's legalease for "probably not this jurisdiction". But wait, if the entire world is the labor market, what is the jurisdiction of the company that employs/crowd sources this labor - if not the city and state where the company is founded? There you go again, magical internet, avoiding all possible legal jurisdictions simply by being on the internet. Awesome super power. The OTEY v. CROWDFLOWER class action lawsuit is very interesting. Should crowd laborers be paid as contractors or employees? If you do on-line work for CrowdFlower, you are being paid far below the lawful minimum wage for your work, even according to the company's CEO who has gone record to say that sometimes pay is as low as $2 an hour. Under US federal law, the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. In California, CrowdFlowerâs home state it's $8.00. In San Francisco, CrowdFlowerâs home city it's $10.55 an hour. You're not being paid this, despite Crowdflower operating from San Francisco. Otey argues that anyone doing tasks for Crowdflower should be, like an employee, at least paid minimum wage:
We are one of the three law firms who recently filed a class action lawsuit against CrowdFlower seeking payment of minimum wages for CrowdFlower work. The lawsuit aims not only to require CrowdFlower to pay minimum wages in the future, but also to get back pay and penalties for people who did CrowdFlower work during the last several years, but were not paid the minimum wage.
