microemployment
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About
Microemployment is a socio-economic phenomenon which emerged primarily in the 2010s as a result of increasing automation of services. It allows large corporations to distribute labor needs at minimum cost to themselves (typically by externalizing those costs to the workers), while making it easier for workers now unable to find traditional employment (as a result of the diminishing quantity of such) to nonetheless obtain some level of income in exchange for their labor.
This exchange is typically conducted via some form of online marketplace, where workers are presented with potential microgigs (individual projects paying some set amount, either per hour or per unit of output) from which they can choose.
Directory
- Amazon (main article):
- Mechanical Turk: perform a wide variety of online tasks
- Flex: deliver packages
- Lyft: taxi service
- rev.com: transcribe/caption/translate audio and video
- Uber: taxi service