[someluccc]

This is such a disingenuous article. It’s not about facebook at all. It’s about a company with which it and ALL other tech giants contract content moderation work.

It critiques working conditions without providing any context as to how these jobs compare to other low pay -or more likely even average pay- jobs in those countries.

Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady employment outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come by in many -if not most- countries of the world, never mind Africa alone.

[jjulius]

>It’s about a company with which it and ALL other tech giants contract content moderation work.

Can you please cite a source for this claim? While it's true that Sama has partnerships with companies such as, according to the article and to Sama's website[1], Google, Microsoft and Wal-Mart, it's not entirely clear that they're also doing content moderation for all of them. They seem to offer a wide range of services.

>Formal economy jobs paying $250-$300/mo with a steady employment outlook for entry/low-skill work can be hard to come by in many -if not most- countries of the world, never mind Africa alone

Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in a horrible environment.

[1]https://www.sama.com/

[Kalium]

> Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in a horrible environment.

Not precisely, but a person's choices should generally be considered in light of the alternatives reasonably available to them. If nothing else, it's often a great way to better understand the choices people make. Not every person has fast, easy, low-risk access to a six-figure USD SWE job with a YCombinator startup.

[giraffe_lady]

Yes but when you laser focus on this fact above all overs, as someone always does when they come up on HN, you are positioning yourself more as "sweatshop apologist" than "global labor market understander."

[Kalium]

I would go so far as to suggest that the article is framed in a way designed to divide people into "Facebook haters and/or defenders of the exploited" and "sweatshop apologist" camps. Generally this has the side effect of making it difficult to be a global labor market understander.

[BurningFrog]

> Ah, right, because if you're lucky enough to be making more than your peers, you should shut up and deal with doing so in a horrible environment.

These are the best jobs these people can get. If the "sweatshop" closes down, they're be doing somewhere worse.

Maybe you throw out this shitty provocation as a way to avoid thinking about that fact?

[jjulius]

If "the best jobs these people can get" amount to viewing untold volumes of graphic content of wildly varying extremes, then we should absolutely be having a conversation about how employers should be treating them.

Edit: We can - and should - be working to improve conditions for everyone, but just because "these people" have it better relative to everyone else in their immediate vicinity doesn't mean they need to shut up, be thankful and deal with it.

[BurningFrog]

You keep arguing that these workers shouldn't have to shut up. Which nobody here has said.

So we don't seem to be in the same conversation.

[jjulius]

I feel like you're seizing too literally on that phrase. Let's get on the same page before we continue...

>These are the best jobs these people can get. If the "sweatshop" closes down, they're be doing somewhere worse.

The implication that I read here is that you're saying "these people" should be grateful for having to work under the conditions they're working under because life could always be worse and this is the best they will have it.

Is that an accurate read of your comment?

[BurningFrog]

Not at all. Why would I have opinion about what poor africans "should" feel? Who even thinks like that?

I just meant what I wrote.

The implication, to spell it out, is that if you succeed in closing down these jobs, you'll make life worse for the workers you claim to care about.

BTW, why do you quote "these people"?

[tclancy]

Whether they are the best jobs or not, the fact the company explains not paying more than US$1-2.50/ hour because it would "distort" the local labor markets makes 0 sense. It's brutal work and underpaying for it by outsourcing the jobs to poorer places is a way of hiding true costs, much like how we ship our trash to other countries so we can feel better about "recycling" when they throw it away.

[el-salvador]

> "distort" the local labor markets makes 0 sense.

I dont want to seem to defend Facebook or the company mentioned in the article. However there are unintended consequences when the labor market is abruptly distorted by foreign companies.

When the first outsourced English speaking call centers opened in my city, they paid more than the average for English speakers. The foreign call centers paid about 50% more than the average salary for English speakers.

So many English teachers left their jobs and joined the call centers, including some of my teachers in high school. So we were left some months without much to do at school or with definitely underqualified temporary teachers who spoke English worse than we did. I think about 40% of our school-year was affected for this.

The next school year, the school had to increase tuition, and hired new teachers with higher salaries.

On one hand teachers salaries increased, but also school became more expensive for my parents to pay while my faimily's income remained the same.

[jsnell]

Unless I'm misreading the article, this office is dealing with moderating content from sub-Saharan Africa, not dealing with "our trash". It is not that jobs are being outsourced to where they are cheapest, these jobs fundamentally have to be located somewhere in the region. You just couldn't hire enough people with the right language skills for this kind of work in the US.

[FabHK]

Required language skills (in several African languages) were mentioned in the article, so that's not implausible.

[BurningFrog]

There is philosophical mismatch here.

To me, if you can get qualified workers for $2/hour, that's all you should pay. End of discussion.

If people accept the job offers, you are, by definition, not underpaying. It clearly helps the local economy, lifts people somewhat out of poverty, and is a classic win-win situation.

[toqy]

Exactly, if you aren't willing to exploit Africans what are you even doing?

[BurningFrog]

Looks like you need to read the HN commenting guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[giraffe_lady]

Something a company chooses to do is in fact about that company, even if they didn't create the pressure to do it or invent the practice, even if other people do it more or did it first, etc etc. They teach this in kindergarten so I know you know it. If Alex jumped off a bridge, that thing.

> It critiques working conditions without providing any context as to how these jobs compare to other low pay -or more likely even average pay- jobs in those countries.

What context could justify the global power imbalance that makes this economic relationship possible? The article is critiquing working conditions and power imbalances. I'm sorry it also doesn't take the time to explain and rationalize the economic injustice that created them.

You seem to using a liberal or neoliberal framework to understand this relation in terms of its individual actors and the economic incentives and consequences of them. The missing context here isn't more details about those actors and consequences, it's an exploration of why these factors are distributed the way they are and how to engage with that system.

[mbesto]

> It critiques working conditions

I guess you completely glossed over the main part of the article:

> They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal or banned content

Look, I'm a capitalist just like the next person, but subjecting ANY human being to the disgust of banned content on Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc. HAS to take an immeasurable mental toll.

But hey, I guess you just focused on the "but how much are these guys making"...

[msrenee]

Also, very importantly, these employees were not informed that they would be reviewing this content until after the on boarding process. It seems like quite a few of the workers even relocated from places such as South Africa to Kenya before being informed what the work entailed.

[neves]

That is a twisted mindset. Sure FB is responsible for the working conditions of its contractors.