Individuals who had beforehand felt paralyzed by their NDA’s started to speak. Helena, the conflict-avoidant moderator of the Mercor subreddit, labored additional time deleting livid rants from aggrieved employees who delighted in dropping names of the “secret tasks”—one thing explicitly banned by the non-disclosure settlement each tasker should signal earlier than being employed as an Impartial Contractor.
Elsewhere, on one other challenge, Good-looking Swede was not faring nicely. Felled by Covid, he advised his crew leaders he couldn’t make the minimal weekly requirement and was swiftly fired. He entered the melee as soon as once more to search out one more challenge.
The wages had been dropping week by week. After I first began scrolling the contractor jobs in early 2025, corporations like Mercor, Handshake, Turing, Process-ify and Outlier had been providing $150 an hour for “consultants,” $35 to $75 an hour for “generalists.” Right this moment, Mercor says the common hourly price on its platform is $105. However in my searches throughout the business close to the beginning of 2026, the consultants had been typically getting $50 an hour, and the entry-level grunt employees had been getting as little as $16 —lower than California minimal wage. Contracts had been now known as “sprints.” The work needed to be accomplished, asap, as quick as doable, for employment which may final 24 hours. The urgency was paramount, self-important, and annoying as fuck.
The burnout has led many taskers to show to the courts. A number of lawsuits have alleged that Mercor is misclassifying its employees as impartial contractors, mentioning that the calls for of the job—frequent onboarding, infinite retraining, the necessity to test e mail and Slack a number of instances a day, to be on name and carry out at very brief discover, the expectation that taskers will full a sure variety of hours each week—are indications of employment. However in comparison with common staff, contractors obtain virtually no office protections towards unpredictable scheduling, prohibitive work hours, denial of breaks, or retaliation from employers. Which looks like an enormous danger if, like me, you might be bored with the bullshit and complain. Loudly. Typically.
Christmas day got here. I had not earned the extra $3-5K I believed Mission Lifeless Language would have netted, and my checking account hovered round $14. Mired in existential panic and with solely sufficient cash to stay off cereal, I accepted two totally different invitations to work on an unlimited $16-an-hour challenge that was in its ultimate phases. It employed a number of thousand annotators throughout a number of platforms to carry out extremely boring targets. Your entire enterprise had the sensation of a bustling refugee camp that had been functioning lengthy sufficient to cowl important wants, however to not be, like, comfy. I’d already accomplished a lot of the onboarding steps. Crucial factor, they emphasised within the literature, is to get on Slack.
I couldn’t find the Slack.
I known as the Zoom helpline.
“Do you simply hang around right here all day?” I requested a faceless man whereas, in one other sq., an aged girl peered suspiciously into her digicam sporting a nasal cannula connected to an oxygen tank, set towards a background of palm bushes. “Just about,” snorted the faceless man. “I hope they pay you nicely,” I stated sincerely. “They don’t,” he responded, earlier than informing me that I used to be already a member of the Slack channel I had spent two days ready to affix, and that I had missed 5 important onboarding quizzes in a doc I had did not learn.
