People who previously felt paralyzed by their nondisclosure agreements are starting to speak up. Helena, the administrator of the conflict-avoiding Mercor subsite, worked overtime to delete angry comments from aggrieved workers who were happy to name-drop “secret projects” – something expressly prohibited by a nondisclosure agreement that every administrator must sign before being hired as an independent contractor.
Elsewhere, in another project, Handsome Swade didn’t fare so well. After Covid struck, he told his team leaders he couldn’t meet the minimum weekly requirements and was quickly fired. He entered the fray again to find another project.
Wages were falling week after week. When I first started browsing contractor jobs in early 2025, companies like Mercor, Handshake, Turing, Task-ify, and Outlier were offering $150 per hour for “experts,” and $35 to $75 per hour for “generalists.” Today, Mercor says the average hourly rate on its platform is $105. But in my cross-industry searches near the beginning of 2026, experts were often making $50 an hour, and entry-level workers were making as much as $16, less than California’s minimum wage. The contracts are now referred to as “sprints.” The work had to be done as quickly as possible, as quickly as possible, for a staffing that could last 24 hours. The urgency was critical, self-important, and deeply annoying.
Exhaustion has prompted many of those charged to resort to the courts. Several lawsuits have alleged that Mercur misclassifies its workers as independent contractors, stating that job requirements – such as frequent onboarding, unlimited retraining, the need to check email and Slack multiple times a day, remain on call and perform on very short notice, and an expectation that task handlers complete a certain number of hours each week – are indicators of employment. But compared to regular employees, contractors have almost no workplace protection against unpredictable scheduling, exorbitant hours, denial of rest breaks, or retaliation from employers. Seems like a big risk if, like me, you’re tired of bullshit and complaining. aloud. mostly.
Christmas day came. I hadn’t made the extra $3-5K that I thought Dead Language would, and my bank account was sitting around $14. I was deep in existential panic, and with only enough money to live on pills, I accepted two different invitations to work on a massive $16-an-hour project that was in its final stages. I’ve employed several thousand interpreters across multiple platforms to perform incredibly boring objectives. The whole project had the feel of a bustling refugee camp that had been operating long enough to cover basic needs, but not to be comfortable. You have already completed most of the setup steps. The most important thing, They emphasized in the literature, It’s getting to Slack.
I couldn’t locate Slack.
I called the Zoom helpline.
“Do you spend your time here all day?” I asked an unidentified man, while in another square, an elderly woman stared suspiciously into her camera while wearing a nasal cannula connected to an oxygen tank, against a backdrop of palm trees. “Pretty much,” sniffed the faceless man. “I hope they pay you well,” I said honestly. “They don’t,” he replied, before telling me that I was already a member of a Slack channel, had spent two days waiting to join it, and that I had missed five key tests in a document I couldn’t read.
