Sônia Coêlho hears the sounds of browser notifications even in her sleep. Sometimes it’s only her imagination; other times, it is an alert about available gigs. No matter what time it is, she quickly jumps out of bed and gets to work.
Coêlho is a 45-year-old microworker from Foz do Iguaçu, a Brazilian town on the border between Paraguay and Argentina. Through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Appen, UHRS, and Telus, she takes on projects consisting of hundreds of quick, repetitive tasks. One ongoing project involves checking social media advertisements to verify whether they are selling what they say they are; another consists of calling businesses’ phone numbers listed on Google to see whether they are active. The microwork platforms pay in U.S. dollars, and the tasks are worth only 2–10 cents each. Coêlho does an average of 90 tasks per day to make a reasonable wage.
10 to 12 hours The average amount of time Coêlho spends on microwork platforms per day.
“I feel hostage to the screen,” she told Rest of World. “At the same time, I can’t leave this because the job market doesn’t seem to have a place for me where I can make similar earnings.”
Coêlho accidentally stumbled across microwork on Facebook. In 2013, she joined several groups on the social media platform, completing online surveys in exchange for a few cents. She soon learned about the existence of microwork platforms, where similar tasks paid more. At first, microwork was a bit of extra cash. But when she...
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