Subject: Payment on Amazon Mechanical Turk
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Dear X,

We saw your paper and wanted to gently bring your attention to some guidelines for fair payment on Mechanical Turk.

While Amazon does not issue official pay guidance, in the Dynamo Guidelines for Academic Requesters, workers note that "Crowdsourcing workers are a labor force" - i.e., completing tasks on Mechanical Turk is work, not a hobby undertaken on a volunteer basis. Accordingly, "posting to [Mechanical] Turk is not just like collecting [an unpaid] survey" and "workers presume that they will be paid a fair wage."

According to the Dynamo Guidelines, "Underpayment of crowd workers is anything less than the current federal minimum wage in the United States," or $7.25 per hour in 2017.

The Dynamo Guidelines have been signed by almost two hundred experienced Mechanical Turk workers and dozens of researchers.

Dynamo Guidelines:

http://guidelines.wearedynamo.org

Guidelines page on fair payment:

http://wiki.wearedynamo.org/index.php?title=Fair_payment

Some researchers and workers have also called for academic requesters to pay at least minimum wage in the requester's location. In Massachusetts this would be $11.00 per hour.

"Responsible research with crowds: pay crowdworkers at least minimum wage" (preprint, to appear in Communications of the ACM):

http://bit.ly/2rDBMkP

This email is just for your reference in future Mechanical Turk research.

Good luck in your future work!

All best,

Bureau of Economic Interpretation
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