Leapforce, Raterlabs and Appen

Leapforce splits and forms Raterlabs

The only thing you can count on in life is change, so of course, Leapforce changed.  The company split in June 2017 and the largest project went to Raterlabs so I went with it.  But Raterlabs limits workers to 26 hrs per week, in actuality they typically cut you off from working much more than 25.  Now both companies have been sold to Appen.  A look at the jobs posted on the Appen website shows that they limit their workers to 20 hours per week.  Is the weekly hours limit in Raterlabs and Leapforce going to be 20 hours now?  They haven’t told us yet.  But certainly we can only count on our work hours being lowered or staying at 25-26 at best.

How Raterlabs differs from Leapforce

The pay and work remain the same with Raterlabs and it is done on the same interface as Leapforce.  Raterlabs decided to make everyone an employee instead of being a contractor so taxes are taken out of your pay, and we’ll get a W2 instead of a 1099 at the end of the year.

Much of the work now involves evaluating the performance of “Virtual Assistants” like Alexa and the Google Assistant (I wish they would give her a name already).  There is also a lot of focus on identifying offensive or disturbing content.

How will Appen change things?

Workers for Appen are contractors and are limited to 20 hours per week.  Their job listings don’t give a pay rate it just says pay is dependent on the project.  After reading a Reddit discussion on the issue it seems that generally Appen pays less than Leapforce/Raterlabs does.  Fellow raters, it may be time to look for other work.