An Oasis of Equality? Race and Stress on the MTurk Platform

People of color face many disadvantages in the conventional labor market, and the gig economy reproduces many of them. In this article, we examine racial differences in work stress among U.S. gig microtask workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. We suspected that because workers’ racial identities are concealed on MTurk, racial differences in work stress might be negligible, especially after accounting for personal, household, and employment situations and differences in MTurk experience. Popular explanations of racial inequality suggest that such factors can generate inequality even when organizations are ostensibly race neutral. We find, however, that Black and Hispanic MTurk workers report more work stress than White workers even after controlling for those factors and others. Mediation tests echo previous research on MTurk by highlighting a connection between work stress and schedule control. Black and Hispanic MTurk workers report more work stress, in part, because they are less satisfied with the timing of their hours. Work stress among Hispanic workers also reflects their comparatively low influence on the timing of their hours. We encourage more research on inequality among microtask workers to explore why anonymity is not more effective at reducing inequality.