(Illustration by Hugo Herrera)
In March 2019, Daniel Motaung, a college graduate from South Africa, flew thousands of miles to Nairobi, Kenya. He believed he’d been recruited as an IT administrator for a company called Samasource. But when he arrived in Nairobi, he realized his job was entirely different. Instead, he would be a content moderator for Facebook. He would spend nine hours a day, for a wage of roughly $1.50/hour, looking at some of the worst things imaginable to decide whether they violated Facebook’s content policies.
Content moderators like Daniel, are social media’s essential workers. Without them, platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok would be flooded with hate and violence. Simply put—there is no social media without content moderation.
Daniel and his colleagues worked in dangerous conditions. Facebook and their outsourcing companies like Samasource, now Sama, refuse to provide proper, meaningful psychiatric care resulting in serious, long-term mental health illnesses for many of these workers.
The first video Daniel remembers moderating was a livestream of a man being beheaded. Not long after, he developed PTSD.
Content moderators are kept carefully hidden, behind social media’s bright and busy newsfeeds. We still don’t even know the true number of moderators working globally.
Facebook refuses to reveal the number of moderators working to keep it safe, but reports suggest there are around 15,000 worldwide. Most of them are not directly employed by Facebook, but outsourced to companies like Sama and generally receive worse pay, working conditions and mental health support than directly employed colleagues.
The problem is far from limited to Facebook.
Big tech companies would like us to believe AI and smart tools are a panacea for all their woes, but the reality is these companies are powered by a hidden army of human beings whose job it is to make Big Tech’s platforms function as advertised – and keep their gigantic profits flowing in.
In 2022, TechEquity Collaborative released its Contract Worker Disparity Project report, looking at various ways the technology sector relies on subcontractors and what that means for those workers. This “ghost work” or “microwork” can include ultra-small online piece work, ranging from tagging content to interacting with large language AI models. The pay is pennies or less per task.
It also includes so-called “independent contractors'' who compose the entire workforce of gig economy businesses like Uber or DoorDash. Alternatively, it could be the vendors and service workers, from cafeteria caterers to bus drivers, who keep tech campuses running. Or it could be the temp workers who perform the same jobs as direct hires—doing everything from data analysis to content moderation to administration—yet lack benefits, fair wages, and job security.
As the report found, despite the work of outsourced workers being essential to keeping tech companies in business, the divisions between them and direct staff are stark. Subcontractors make 75 cents on the direct employees’ dollar, while frequently lacking paid time off, health insurance, job security or the prospect of career advancement. They are also overwhelmingly the same people who are already underrepresented in the tech world, including women, people of color, and nonbinary people.
Subcontractors often also face embarrassing treatment that contrasts with direct hires. Contract workers may have to wear differently-colored employee ID badges than regular full-time staff, may be prohibited from attending work events for other staff (even, in one case we learned of, when the subcontractor had planned the entire event!) and are often, crucially, prohibited from even citing their work for tech companies on their resumes. This puts the lie to the oft-repeated myth that outsourced workers at least gain a foot in the door with entry-level jobs that will allow them to apply for better roles at other tech companies.
The demographic differences between contract and full-time tech workers are so significant it amounts to effective workplace segregation. Bluntly, you’re likely to see a lot more white faces at Facebook’s HQ than you are in their content moderation offices.
In Big Tech as a whole, there are nearly twice as many Latinx tech workers who are contractors—compared to direct Latinx tech hires—and 1.5 times more Black contract tech workers than direct Black hires. As one contract tech worker told us, since contract workers at their company (who are primarily people of color) have to sit separately from direct hires (who are overwhelmingly white), the office floor looks like a picture from the Jim Crow era, with Black contract workers on one side of the room and white direct hires on the other.
This segregation has important safety implications as well. In 2018, when an active shooter threatened the YouTube campus in San Bruno, California, regular employees received an emergency email from the company, telling them to get off the campus—contract workers charged they never got the warning. (Google has denied this claim.)
Likewise, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, full-time employees of many tech corporations in Silicon Valley were sent home to work remotely, while contractors were forced to continue working in person, without even receiving health and safety notices telling them about new policies or whether they’d been exposed to a coworker with COVID.
There’s good old-fashioned health and safety violations too. One graphic designer told us they’d accepted a subcontractor position at a prestigious tech company, assuming they’d been hired for their graphic design and communication skills, only to arrive and be put to work running a forklift in the warehouse, with no training or safety equipment.
Compounding all of this, contract workers are also the least protected when it comes to trying to improve their dismal working conditions. Those who spoke with TechEquity Collaborative said again and again that they feared rocking the boat and having their contract not be renewed—a particularly frightening threat for international workers whose visas are tied to their employment.
Daniel Motaung learned this firsthand. Several months into his content moderation work with Sama, Daniel decided to do something about his and his colleagues’ working conditions, and began organizing over 100 coworkers to form a union. He was promptly fired. With the support of Foxglove, a UK-based litigation and advocacy nonprofit focused on making technology fair, he is taking Sama and Facebook to court.
Even worse was to come for Kenya’s content moderators. Earlier this year, when Facebook switched from Sama to a different outsourcing company, Majorel, in Kenya. All of Motaung’s former colleagues—some 260 workers—were laid off in a sham redundancy claim, and then blacklisted for reapplying for their jobs under the new company. Foxglove is also supporting those workers in the courts to challenge their treatment.
Once again, Facebook is not an outlier. Last fall, after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, thousands of workers were laid off without warning, then reportedly pressured into giving up their rights in order to receive severance payments.
Big Tech likes to present itself as generally benevolent and progressive—aided by sunny California headquarters and idealistic mission statements, like Google’s now-infamous “Don’t Be Evil”. The cold reality is the tech companies that now dominate almost every aspect of our lives are deeply hostile to fairness at work, their workers’ rights and their human right to organize in the workplace.
Outsourcing and contract employment models have allowed it to obscure its terrible labor practices for years. But in the last year, there has been a marked upsurge in labor mobilization within the industry. Over and over, you hear a new realization from tech workers: “I’m disposable, just like every other worker.” And accompanying that radicalizing realization is a growing sense of courage across the tech world, as workers decide to stand up for their rights.
Foxglove is supporting multiple lawsuits against Facebook, TikTok and their outsourcing companies with the aim of helping tech workers around the world to fight for fairer workplaces. Early this June, Foxglove supported Kenyan Facebook workers in a major victory when a Kenyan court made an interim ruling that Facebook was indeed the “true employer” of content moderators like Daniel Motaung, and thus legally responsible for how they are treated.
In the US, TechEquity Collaborative is working on a number of efforts to improve workers’ lot in the sector. Subsequent to the Contract Worker Disparity Project, TechEquity created a responsible contracting standard, which was shared with hundreds of companies to set a higher bar for how tech companies treat their workers. To date, just one company has signed on to this voluntary standard—which is commendable, but also illustrates why public policy solutions are needed to truly improve tech working standards.
To that end, in 2022 California passed the Pay Transparency for Pay Equity Act, which requires companies with 100 or more employees to include their contract workforce when reporting on pay scales and worker demographics to the state Civil Rights Department. That means that, for the first time, pay disparities in the tech industry’s deeply segregated, parallel workforces will be visible to the state entity responsible for investigating civil rights violations.
The organization is currently working to extend the worker protections in California’s WARN Act—which requires a mandatory notice period or severance pay for workers subjected to mass layoffs, as at Twitter—to contract workers as well. The goal is to assemble a broader slate of protections for temp and contract workers in tech and beyond, recognizing that, if Silicon Valley tech companies are treating their workers this poorly, one can only imagine the conditions workers face in even more opaque industries.
Whether it’s a contract janitor working in Palo Alto or an outsourced content moderator in Nairobi, their common problems have a common solution: forcing companies to treat their workers safely, equitably, and with respect.
The challenges are great—but so is the potential for change. Around the world, tech workers are building new power for themselves. Amazon workers in the UK are fighting to form their first union, just a year after their US counterparts did the same. At Google, direct employee and contract workers have banded together to form the Alphabet Workers Union. This spring, Daniel Motaung’s former comrades in Kenya voted into existence the first African Content Moderators’ Union.
In tech spaces worldwide, workers are coming together and seeing the power collective organizing can bring.
For those of us who are Big Tech’s consumers, rather than its workforce, there’s a vital role to play as well. And it starts with recognizing that social media and other pioneering technology will never be a safe place for us—until it’s a safe place for its workers first.
Watch a conversation featuring Martha Dark and Daniel Motaung from SSIR’s 2023 Data on Purpose conference:
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Read more stories by Catherine Bracy & Martha Dark.