Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
Cheap labour isn’t the same as slavery. I don’t think you’ll find a company that doesn’t have these practices somewhere in their supply chain, it’s how everyone can have marvels of technology like smartphones and computers and how it’s even possible to buy new clothes every single month.
Reading and viewing random parts of the internet can have a horrible effect on the human mind because humans, as a species, really suck, but it’s still just a job employees can leave if it’s too much for them. They’re not shackled to their monitors.
The only surprising thing I found is that these companies went with Kenia rather than the traditional India/Pakistan anglosphere. I guess the economic development of those two countries has pushed tech companies to Africa, so that’s good for those countries at least!
Starvation wages are slavery. And yes. Our techocolonial society engages at it at many levels. No. We should not be okay with it. We should do what we can do disengage from businesses that engage in it, and we should be self forgiving of ourselves when we can’t. We should always be advocating for the workers, even if sometimes that means who we’re advocating for is us
These aren’t “starvation wages”. The average income in Kenya is about $1.25 per hour (or even half that depending where in the salary ranges you fall). They’re earning an average wage, up to twice the average wage. It’s a shit job, but compared to other jobs it’s not necessarily badly paid.
There are reasons to keep moderation and content filtering jobs within the west (cultural interpretations, labour protections, etc.) but if all companies did that, the economy of some developing nations would take a serious hit.
AI bullshit isn’t going to go away and we’re going to need moderation for it to work. You can choose to leave AI tools and social media behind for ethical reasons, but most people won’t. AI is giving people a competitive edge and the AI-Amish will eventually die out by simply not being as cheap and effective as their direct, local competition.
We can debate if traumatising Kenyans for average wages is better or worse than traumatising Americans, Europeans, or Asians for minimum wages, but I don’t think that’s a particularly productive discussion we’ll ever find an answer to.
We need laws for companies to make sure they provide appropriate psychological support no matter where their workers are hired.
Average wages in Nairobi is about $4/hr. These jobs weren’t generally high quality but they weren’t starvation, either.
You’re gonna get a lot of flak for that take, even though I agree with most of the rest of your post. Let’s reframe the problem: you’re currently paid a low wage. It’s barely enough to pay for food, rent, and getting to and from your job.
You want to leave that job for one you know pays better, but it’s farther away. Even if you get the job and have the better income, you would be spending the net gains on the extra costs of commuting: it ends up being a wash.
You would move closer, but because your current wage doesn’t allow you to save money, you can’t afford the costs of moving, let alone a down payment on a house or a deposit on an apartment.
You would get better educated so you qualify for better paying jobs, but again, you have no savings from your current job to pay for schooling, and you have no/bad credit to afford a student loan.
All the problems arrayed against you require money to solve, and because you’re “cheap labor” you’re never able to gather enough money to solve them. You’re forcibly stuck with your current job. They pay you, yes, but you can’t leave. You’re “free” to leave, but that’s just saying you’re free to lose your home and starve. Now none of these problems are unique to Kenya, I could be describing any country with poor Economic Mobility, I could be describing any job or industry. Globalization was important for many reasons, but it has allowed companies to identify the parts of the world where labor is cheapest and pay them… exactly what they’re “worth.”
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Yes, important to not leave that implied.
spoiler
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Whether or not we call it slavery, it is for sure a gross exploitation of labour. The article reminds us that we in the so-called ‘western world’ can only afford their luxury life because there’s someone elsewhere who pays the price.
It definitely is exploitation, but calling it slavery softens the blow of the very real actual slavery that still exists all over the world.
The practice isn’t limited to cheap countries, though. This shit also happens in the west, with higher wages and with more labour protection, but with the same psychological scars that can last a lifetime.
People elsewhere pay the price, but it’s not in any way necessary for Western quality of life, because all it “affords” us is massive wealth inequality in our own countries, which leads to other problems like rising housing costs and severely skewed influence in politics.
Cut down on stupidly high profits for a very small group of people, by not stealing labor, and huge sections of people in other countries can have decent pay and work conditions.
They can leave the job but they will still carry the psychological scars from it. They were not receiving adequate mental health support for the severity of the content they had to deal with.
You comment inspired this thought: The older I get, the less I have faith in psychological support making us whole. I still think it should be part of work like this but the damage can be as permanent as losing a limb. What is that worth in money? (hypothetical)
That’s definitely something to consider. Psychological support helps people with coping but it doesn’t remove the trauma. Anyone willing to do this sort of work deserves to be very well compensated.
But all that said, it isn’t even unique to AI that there is a need for people to sift through the worst stuff imaginable to prevent everyone else from being exposed. All user-generated internet content has that problem.
Only rich people can afford new clothes every month, and if you think computer makers are passing on the savings of their exploitative practices to their customers, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.