No, not the Mustafa Kemal Atatürk nation. They have their own communities. But Mechanical "Turkers"?... better than Mechanical Turkeys, I suppose, have a community: Turker Nation. Everything for requesting and providing services using the Turk.

We look forward to the day that Mechanical Turk has their own eBay Live-like convention. Even more, we look forward to the day when they stop holding the convention because it has grown too large and unfocused. Then the Turk will have truly arrived.

The author topped out at $0.50 for users to hold up picture of them with a sign. But that only got him 20 submissions in two days. One can imagine all sorts of interesting experiments along these lines. File this one away for future use.

Our position is that the only problem with virtual sweatshops is that there aren't enough of them. Still, Katharine Mieszkowski's article for Salon on Mechanical Turk is a light, but interesting read; rightly pointing out how tight the economics are for anyone hoping to make a living from it in a Western country. But, this being Salon after all, it adds the "contractually required" shout-out to their anti-sweatshop readership.

To a labor activist like Marcus Courtney of WashTech, a tech workers union, the whole arrangement represents a dystopian vision of a virtual sweatshop. "What Amazon is trying to do is create the virtual day laborer hiring hall on the global scale to bid down wage rates to the advantage of the employer," he says. "Here you have a major global corporation, based in the United States, that's showing the dark side of globalization. If this is Jeff Bezos' vision of the future of work, I think that's a pretty scary vision, and we should be paying attention to that."

And

Rebecca Smith, a lawyer for the National Employment Law Project, seconds that. "The creativity of business in avoiding its responsibility to workers never ceases to astound," she says dryly. "It's day labor in the virtual world." Smith sees Mechanical Turk as just another scheme by companies to classify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying them minimum wage and overtime, complying with non-discrimination laws, and being forced to carry unemployment insurance and workers compensation. "It's an example of cyberspace overtaking a country's labor laws," she says.

Take as given a recitation of the endless, economics debates here. If you aren't convinced already, you will have to wait until you come back to life as a developing-world peasant farmer to achieve enlightenment.

Not specifically on-topic, but it is always good to see someone taking a stand against legal blackmail Too often businesses settle to avoid the hassle of a court case, much less the possibility of losing even when the accusation is baseless. The whole system, from top "practioneers" who go after large companies (read deep pockets) and who may be considered presidential material on down to ambulance chasers, is corrupt and in need of massive reform.

It's a cost of business we could all do without.

According to a study discussed in Slate, if you are under water on your home, you are less likely to relocate for a new job until you are foreclosed.

[this] recent study by economists Fernando Ferreira, Joseph Gyourko, and Joseph Tracy finds that homeowners who have "negative equity" in their homes—that is, a mortgage that exceeds its resale value—are 50 percent less likely to move than those who can afford to pay off their mortgages with a home sale.

The result being that not only will capital makets be effected -- harder for businesses to get financing, but so too will labor markets. Workers will be stuck in areas where capital may be even scarcer and unable or unwilling to relocate to areas that are still functioning.

The authors calculate that every two years, about 12 percent of home-owning Americans moved. But for those with negative equity—about 2.6 percent of respondents during the 1985-2005 period of study—the probability of moving is cut nearly in half.

Which, I suppose, unfortunately, just reinforces the fact that the home work trend should be better off than ever. If it doesn't matter where you live, you can "happily" stay put in undersea home while continuing to work remotely and waiting for flood waters to receed.

I've never been totally clear as to why this kind of thing --an umbrella organization for independent contractors that would allow them to get health insurance, etc. -- would not work in the US. Apparently quite successful in the UK but non-existent? here.

I recall hearing that eBay looked into offering something along these lines for their top eBay sellers but abandoned the effort perhaps due to excessive state and local tax issues.

Still seems like something worth pursuing... maybe it could be rolled out on a state-by-state basis.

According to this Yahoo survey 66% of Americans have considered starting their own business (though this is down from 72% who reported considering it as of last year). Interestingly over half think it is something to do later in life and that, for all, the most poplular reason was to do it is to do work you love; the second most popular response being to be your own boss.

We like both around here. Though perhaps being my own boss overstates my title in my particular venture!

eBay is adjusting fees again, emphasizing fixed-priced auctions. No one seems to have a clue how to fix eBay, either inside the company or outside. They seem to have bled out as much talent as Yahoo and, other than their profit margin, it was never a sexy business to begin with; it is unclear if or how they will go about getting some of that talent and momentum back.

Furthermore, eBay sellers, always a cranky bunch, and despite eBay's best efforts, are not satisfied. Perhaps because eBay's best efforts are insufficient or perhaps because eBay sellers cannot be satisfied. eBay remains a great platform with millions of users, transactions, lots of $$$ and extremely open (if overly complex) APIs that allow for a lot of 3rd party interaction. But what do I know. I mostly shop on Amazon.

Shockingly, a San Francisco government plan to coddle a group that makes the officials running the city go all warm and fuzzy has not quite lived up to expectations. 

  "The law was set up with good intentions, to allow artists to have a place to live and work, so that they didn't have to rent a separate studio," said Paul Lord, a city planner who helped write the ordinance. "But it was very hard to enforce."

You say good intentions, I say... uh, something else. But, don't worry. What San Francisco has given, San Francisco will re-extract. With pliers if necessary.

In 1999, the San Francisco Examiner reported that as a result of the live-work rules, the city was not eligible to collect an estimated $8 million in fees.

  Personally I am quite fond of artists. And I like live-work lofts. We specialize in that around here. I just don't understand why they get special treatment. There are plenty of doctor's who can't afford to live in the city either. Maybe we can give them a hand (but let's not). 

There are now a record number of no-employee businesses in the US. 20.7 million according to the US Census) bringing in revenue of $970 billion in 2006. A nice graph of growth from 1997 at Small Business Trends.

Of course, some of these are on life-support, some are just tax dodges, but most are likely to be mom & pop, solo-businesses, consultancies, and many many are work from home.