When Manish Bhatia began working on Amazon Mechanical Turk as a side gig in 2010, he was surprised to find himself completely fascinated by the work. Contrary to frequent coverage depicting the piece-work platform as a digital sweatshop offering low-skill tasks, he thought the microtasks were intellectually stimulating. Many involved training machine-learning algorithms to do things like make purchasing recommendations based on past behavior or categorize content by genre; Bhatia enjoyed thinking of himself as the “AI behind the AI” and knowing that he was doing something to shape the future. The only problem was that he wasn’t getting paid.

Miranda Katz is an associate editor at Backchannel. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

Bhatia says that whenever Amazon mailed him a check, it got lost in transit to India. And while he could choose instead to receive his pay in Amazon credits, those only went so far. So in December 2014, when hundreds of “Turkers” in similar straits banded together for the first time in collective action against Amazon, Bhatia joined in on one of their projects. Along with dozens of fellow workers, he emailed Jeff Bezos. He thanked the Amazon CEO for creating Mechanical Turk, which he truly loved. He just wished his checks would actually make it to his bank account.

He didn't expect a response. Most other workers who participated in the campaign just received form letters. But to his shock, Bhatia got a personalized email with a promise to improve things. Within six months, Amazon enabled bank transfers for workers in India, and Bhatia’s checks started coming through. His victory was a watershed moment for activists in the crowd-work community. And while that particular campaign petered out fairly quickly, it laid the groundwork for a bigger movement that’s gaining steam today: Some Turkers are beginning to leave Amazon’s service in search of a better home.

To workers on Mechanical Turk (or “MTurk,” in Turker lingo), Amazon—which did not respond to request for comment on this story—has long seemed like an impenetrable wall, offering few updates and little support. Meanwhile, the Turker workforce has proven particularly difficult to organize: MTurk magnifies the challenges of the gig economy, with its isolated workers spread across the globe and hidden behind usernames, performing minute tasks on a platform operated by a massive, wealthy corporation. MTurk is also one of the least consumer-facing corners of the gig economy—so while ethically minded customers have taken Uber, Handy, and the like to task for their treatment of workers, Amazon’s gig-work platform has largely managed to evade public scrutiny for its low pay and reported lack of transparency.

Turkers—Amazon says that there are “over 500,000” of them, but has not updated that number in years—have figured out how to make the best out of a less-than-ideal situation. They’ve created Chrome plugins to sort the good tasks from the bad; they’ve written programs to awaken themselves with a loud chime when a particularly high-paying task goes live in the middle of the night; and they’ve built forums where they can offer one another advice. Those forums have taken on a life of their own, leading to deep networks of support and friendship—and at least one Turker marriage.

Today, MTurk is more important than it’s ever been. Its crowd-work model has been adopted by Silicon Valley’s biggest companies to train AI algorithms, spot fake news, and keep violent content off of social media. In the long run, AI might take these jobs over—but right now humans are very much needed for tasks like cleaning and categorizing data. Turkers know they’re in demand, and some are losing patience with Amazon. For over a decade, activist-minded Turkers have been rallying for change, with little success. Meanwhile, other platforms in the gig economy have begun inching toward improvement—just in the past few months, Uber has added in-app tipping, and Postmates and Lyft have come out in support of legislation to help develop portable benefits programs for workers. Many Turkers feel that it’s long past time for a crowd work overhaul.