Clickwork in Brazil: A mom balancing endless gigs with childcare

Sônia Coêlho hears the sounds of browser notifications even in her sleep. Sometimes it’s only her imagination; other times, it is an alert about available gigs. No matter what time it is, she quickly jumps out of bed and gets to work.

Coêlho is a 45-year-old microworker from Foz do Iguaçu, a Brazilian town on the border between Paraguay and Argentina. Through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Appen, UHRS, and Telus, she takes on projects consisting of hundreds of quick, repetitive tasks. One ongoing project involves checking social media advertisements to verify whether they are selling what they say they are; another consists of calling businesses’ phone numbers listed on Google to see whether they are active. The microwork platforms pay in U.S. dollars, and the tasks are worth only 2–10 cents each. Coêlho does an average of 90 tasks per day to make a reasonable wage.

10 to 12 hours The average amount of time Coêlho spends on microwork platforms per day.

“I feel hostage to the screen,” she told Rest of World. “At the same time, I can’t leave this because the job market doesn’t seem to have a place for me where I can make similar earnings.”

Coêlho accidentally stumbled across microwork on Facebook. In 2013, she joined several groups on the social media platform, completing online surveys in exchange for a few cents. She soon learned about the existence of microwork platforms, where similar tasks paid more. At first, microwork was a bit of extra cash. But when she was fired from her day job as a technical assistant at a computer repair shop in 2016, it became her only source of income.

An estimated 9.1 million Brazilians are currently unemployed, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. In July 2022, 1.5 million were working for or on digital platforms, according to a study by the Federal University of Paraná.

Coêlho works 10 to 12 hours per day, every day of the week. She spends the rest of her time on housework and caring for her 13-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter, who has ADHD and attends therapy twice a week. Weekends are when she can put in the most hours, since her husband is home and can look after the kids and the house.

When she first began microtasking, Coêlho would work up to 18 hours per day. She realized it was too much one day when her son approached her with a handful of coins. “He asked me how much one hour of my time was worth because he’d pay to spend some time with me. This broke my heart and I started taking it slower,” she said. 

Microwork has become tougher in recent years. Projects that used to pay $8 an hour now pay $3.50, said Coêlho. She estimated that in the past, her average monthly income was around $800. “Today, if I’m able to make $300 in a month, it’s a big victory,” she said. 

Coêlho wants to finish the law degree she had started years ago. “For me, it’ll be a personal achievement; I don’t see myself being a lawyer,” she said. But she doesn’t dismiss the possibility of using her knowledge of Brazil’s legal system to advocate for online platform workers. “Perhaps, in the future, we might find a way to regulate microwork in Brazil,” she said.