microlabor

English

Alternative forms

• micro-labor, microlabour, micro-labour

Etymology

micro- +‎ labor

Noun

microlabor (uncountable)

1. A type of employment characterized by short-term or piecework jobs that are part of a larger project in which the worker is not involved.
   • 1982, The H-2 Program and Nonimmigrants:

     Similarly, the State's agriculture has a series of microlabor markets. Some crops and areas have ample supplies of mostly legal harvest workers, for example, lettuce and grapes use mostly legal harvest workers.

   • 2016, Marion Crain, Winifred Poster, Miriam Cherry, Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, →ISBN, page 77:

     Crowdsourcing and other types of distributed work or microlabor are likely to increase in frequency in the years to come.

   • 2019, Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, →ISBN:

     Content moderation as microlabor digital piecework has been perhaps an obvious site of expansion for globally networked microlabor websites.