“We found that 40 percent of workers were earning less under the new algorithm, with half of those workers receiving a pay cut of 10 percent or greater.”
Shipt used to pay $5 per delivery plus 7.5 percent of the order. Then Target’s gig arm swapped in a black box that paid by “effort” and told nobody. Workers had to send 5,600 screenshots to an MIT researcher’s textbot to learn that about a third of them earned less than their state’s minimum wage. Sharing that data broke Shipt’s terms of service. The opacity is the product.