Amazon Mechanical Turk provides services that demand human intelligence. Generally, people can handle some tasks with efficiency than the computer. Amazon Mechanical Turk has received popularity because of its stellar service provision framework. However, little light has been shed on those key individuals working behind the scenes. A turker uses the Amazon Mechanical website to access questions, provide answers and manage his or her assigned account. In North America, youths constitute the largest population of this workforce. College students, graduates, salaried employees and unemployed women are the key players in this industry ( Bergvall ‐ Kåreborn & Howcroft, 2014) . This paper will also asses the demographical aspects of these workers.
Studies have shown that 80% of turkers live in America thus constituting the largest portion of Amazon’s workforce. In terms of income, turkers are considered to be low earners according to the survey carried out by Pew Research center. The total income levels of north American turkers is 66.7% as compared to the general US earnings from online platforms ( Hauser & Schwarz, 2016) . This indicates a low-income margin when compared to that of the entire state. However, mechanical Turk pays its workers based on the task completed and not by the federal minimum wage limit. Workers are paid based on the skills they possess among other factors. According to the survey carried out by Pew Research center, most workers complained of having received an hourly earning that is lower than the federal minimum wage limit of $7.25. In this research, it was evident that more than 52% of workers reported having received $4.99 or less on an hourly basis ( Ku & Firoozi, 2017) . The accumulative gross earning of North American turkers is $16640 in a year. This annual income margins clearly indicates how these workers are being underpaid. Most North American turkers work on a part-time basis to supplement other sources of income. This is evident from the surveys which have exhibited that less than 25% of workers depend on this firm for survival. However, a whopping 75% are believed to have other sources of income ( Ku & Firoozi, 2017) .
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Education is a very key element in meeting the HIT requirements of this organization ( Kang et Al , 2014) . In North America, most turkers are college students who depend on Amazon online platform for their income. Research has shown that 81% of those who get all their income from this site generally have educational certification that is beyond high school. However, in the public sector, only 61% of employees meet these education levels. This is a clear indication that most turkers are highly educated. Furthermore, 59% of these workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk have at least an undergraduate degree and they form the largest portion of the organization’s workforce. ( Ku & Firoozi, 2017) .
Most of the North American turkers are aged between 18 to 29 years. This constitutes a total of 62% as compared to 38% who are considered older and have other sources of income. These trends can be explained based on habits that characterize different age groups. Studies have shown that 73% of the workers who are aged over 50 years earn less than $5 per hour as compared to 52% of workers aged between 30 to 40 years ( Ku & Firoozi, 2017) . Therefore, it is clear that the largest portion of Amazon workforce comprises of young people on average.
It is also important to consider the issue of gender in this case. Women and men are considered to have similar habits when using this online platform. However, research has shown that 59% of women earn less than $5 per hour as compared to 47% of men on the same scale ( Yu, Willis, Sun & Wang, 2013) . Therefore, it is clear that Amazon Mechanical Turk also employs the gender pay gap that is very common in North America.
Even though Amazon mechanical Turk helps in providing solutions to various CHI studies, there is a group of humans behind the curtains that are being underpaid. The wages that turkers receive do not match the amount of work they are assigned to accomplish. Even though this website is open to all people, it is important for the system developers and employers to consider revising remuneration standards of turkers.
References
Bergvall ‐ Kåreborn, B., & Howcroft, D. (2014). Amazon Mechanical Turk and the commodification of labour. New Technology, Work and Employment , 29 (3), 213-223.
Hauser, D. J., & Schwarz, N. (2016). Attentive Turkers: MTurk participants perform better on online attention checks than do subject pool participants. Behavior research methods , 48 (1), 400-407.
Kang, R., Brown, S., Dabbish, L., & Kiesler, S. (2014, July). Privacy attitudes of mechanical turk workers and the us public. In Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) (Vol. 4, p. 1).
Ku, C. H., & Firoozi, M. (2017). The Use of Crowdsourcing and Social Media in Accounting Research. Journal of Information Systems .
Yu, B., Willis, M., Sun, P., & Wang, J. (2013). Crowdsourcing participatory evaluation of medical pictograms using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Journal of medical Internet research , 15 (6).
