<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/03/kenyan-court-first-to-tell-meta-it-cant-walk-away-from-a-lawsuit-just-by-claiming-its-not-from-around-here/>
"A lawsuit filed over exploitation of content moderators will be allowed to
continue, according to a recent ruling by a Kenyan court. Former employees of
Meta sued the company in the Kenya Employment and Labour Relations Court last
year, alleging being subjected to a “toxic work environment” while performing
the often unpleasant task for removing harmful content before it is seen by
Facebook users. The plaintiffs also alleged Meta and its third-party contractor
(Kenyan digital services provider, Sama) engaged in “union busting” and refused
to provide mental health services to moderators.
The allegations also detail what moderators view as pay rates much lower than
what should be expected for people hired to wade through the internet cesspool
on behalf of a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars. An expose of the
work conditions by
Time last year contains this absurd explanation for
lowballing moderator pay:
Sama’s late founder Leila Janah attempted to justify the company’s levels of
pay in the region. “One thing that’s critical in our line of work is to not
pay wages that would distort local labor markets,” she said. “If we were to
pay people substantially more than that, we would throw everything off.”
Ah, yes. We can’t have tech disruptors disrupting local labor markets. Anything
else that can be broken while moving fast is still on the table, but
outsourcing pay rates must remain in line with that of local,
non-multinational, non-multi-billion dollar companies."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
