  Crowdsourcing markets provide workers with a centralized place to find paid
work. What may not be obvious at first glance is that, in addition to the work
they do for pay, crowd workers also have to shoulder a variety of unpaid
invisible labor in these markets, which ultimately reduces workers' hourly
wages. Invisible labor includes finding good tasks, messaging requesters, or
managing payments. However, we currently know little about how much time crowd
workers actually spend on invisible labor or how much it costs them
economically. To ensure a fair and equitable future for crowd work, we need to
be certain that workers are being paid fairly for all of the work they do. In
this paper, we conduct a field study to quantify the invisible labor in crowd
work. We build a plugin to record the amount of time that 100 workers on Amazon
Mechanical Turk dedicate to invisible labor while completing 40,903 tasks. If
we ignore the time workers spent on invisible labor, workers' median hourly
wage was $3.76. But, we estimated that crowd workers in our study spent 33% of
their time daily on invisible labor, dropping their median hourly wage to
$2.83. We found that the invisible labor differentially impacts workers
depending on their skill level and workers' demographics. The invisible labor
category that took the most time and that was also the most common revolved
around workers having to manage their payments. The second most time-consuming
invisible labor category involved hyper-vigilance, where workers vigilantly
watched over requesters' profiles for newly posted work or vigilantly searched
for labor. We hope that through our paper, the invisible labor in crowdsourcing
becomes more visible, and our results help to reveal the larger implications of
the continuing invisibility of labor in crowdsourcing.
