New Opportunties in "Digital Sweatshops"

Back when I was in library school, I remember hearing rumors about battalions of typists in unnamed third world countries who worked night and day to key in citations into (then new) InfoTrac. Reportedly, these shadowy third-world keyboardists are still hard at work, but now they're keying in documents with inconsistent typefaces such as restaurant menus and correcting scanned historical documents.

The online edition of Business Week has a fascinating article, "Life on the Web's Factory Floor" that lists job opportunities in the new world of "digital sweatshops". The story features a former librarian/indexer who left a job as a creator of Google's AdSense ads (the work is much less creative than it sounds) because the pressure-cooker atmosphere (reportedly, the manager stood over the workers and "barked" at them to type faster, faster, faster). In the U.S., needless to say, the turnover rate for such jobs is high.

In third world countries, scanning, typing and correcting jobs provide low-paying, mind-numbing, but nonetheless valuable work for many people, especially people with disabilities who might otherwise be unemployable. One overseas firm teaches its impoverished employees English and computer skills, then has them practice by typing and proofing historic documents, such as over 130 years' worth of the Harvard Crimson student newspaper (that project would be a real eye-opener for someone in a wheelchair living on subsistence wages).