Solidarity and collective issues in remote crowd work: A mixed methods study of the Amazon Mechanical Turk online forum

Abstract

The article deals with collective issues and emerging forms of solidarity in remote crowd work. Using the example of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, we analyse communication in one of the oldest online labour forums (OLF) with a mixed-methods-approach (web scraping, topic modelling and qualitative content analysis) over a 10-year period. We identify six broader themes of collective relevance whose importance varies over time. The results indicate that elements of solidarity emerge as crowd workers communicate about deprivations, develop collective orientations, and invoke injustice frames. However, there are no indications of more profound collective activities, which may be due to different types of crowd workers, some of whom have conflicting orientations. We develop assumptions about restrictions of OLF in facilitating collective action and tasks for organisers. The research contributes to a better understanding of mobilisation issues in remote platform labour.