News & Commentary May 4, 2023 (part 1)

https://onlabor.org/techwork-may-4-2023/

By Maddie Chang

Maddie Chang is a student at Harvard Law School.

In today’s Tech@Work, more than 150 workers establish a Content Moderators Union in Nairobi, the White House is looking into the use of automated technology to surveil workers, and WGA proposal on AI highlights writers’ desire to limit how AI is used in the workplace.

On Monday, more than 150 content moderators gathered at a historic meeting in Nairobi to create a new union. Content moderators manually flag illegal or banned content across social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok. Those who gathered this week work for third party outsourcing firms, where the work of continually viewing harmful content can be traumatizing and can pay as little as $1.50 per hour. As reported in TIME, former Facebook content moderator Daniel Motaung started the effort to unionize back in 2019, and was then fired. He is currently suing Meta and the third party content moderation firm Sama in Nairobi court. In the suit, Motaung is part of a group of 43 Sama workers who allege that the firm engaged in “forced labor and human trafficking, unfair labor relations, union busting and failure to provide ‘adequate’ mental health and psychosocial support.” As commentators have previously noted, the organizing highlights that behind the seemingly automatic functioning of social media websites and AI chatbots is a group of unseen workers in precarious conditions.

FULL story at link above.