Tagged: Jobs

A recent study from Northeastern University reveals a crippling catch- 22 for the long-term unemployed. Matthew O’Brien is an associate editor at The Atlantic who recently took a look at the date and wrote about the gloomy prospects for people who’ve been too long without work.

The International Labor Organization – or ILO -- announced last week that global unemployment has dipped to its lowest level since December 2008. However, the numbers don’t look nearly as promising for young people. An estimated 75 million people in the 15-to-24 range will be unemployed this year.  The ILO warns that if these trends continue, a generation will be scarred by economic disadvantage.  Mona Mourshed is Education Director  for the McKinsey Center for Government , which is studying youth unemployment. Mona is co-author of the McKinsey  report: “Education to Employment: Designing a System That Works.”

I was so inspired by today's segment on Micro-tasking and the practice of doing mind numbing work over the internet for pennies, I thought I would interview the Word of Mouth team to see which of their worst jobs could go head to head with being an Amazon Mechanical Turk. It's a little game I like to call: Which One's Worse?

So without further ado, here's what I found out my colleagues used to do before they found their groove in public radio:

Every day, the internet is inundated with more information, and more data to be to be categorized, organized, scrubbed, and filed away in a timely manner. Millions of miniscule tasks need to be performed each day to keep things running smoothly. Computers can do some of this mind-numbing work; other tasks are done piecemeal by hundreds of thousands of people for almost no money; Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for this kind of work. Ellen Cushing is staff writer for The East Bay Express, she wrote about the work called “micro-tasking,” which pays a pittance, drawing comparisons to working in a sweatshop.