Labor News & Commentary February 8, 2024 look into the tech industry's "shadow workforce."

https://onlabor.org/techwork-feb-8-2024/

By Maddie Chang

Maddie Chang is a student at Harvard Law School.

In today’s Tech@Work, contract workers who evaluate search results face layoffs, and a wider look into the tech industry’s “shadow workforce.”

Amidst a wider wave of tech layoffs, Search Engine Land reports on job cuts affecting Google’s “ghost workers” – a general term that refers to contract workers who work behind the scenes of tech platforms’ automated interfaces, often labeling and categorizing text and images to train AI systems. In this instance, Google contracted with firm Appen to provide “search quality raters.” Raters evaluate the quality of various Google search results in an effort to improve their relevance, trustworthiness, and expertise. Google’s $83 million contract with Appen will end in March, and it is unclear what or who will replace the search raters. Google search raters made headlines last February when they protested at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, asking for better wages and benefits. As MarketWatch reported at that time, raters were paid less than Google’s $15 minimum wage for its temporary, contractor and vendor (“TCV”) workers, because raters’ hours were capped such that they did not qualify for TCV pay.

In a separate but related development, Tech Equity Collective has released a new report focusing on contract workers in the tech industry, or what it calls tech’s “shadow workforce.” The report begins with a counterintuitive phenomenon: one might assume that AI would automate the lowest paid jobs and increase the need for higher-paid engineering roles, for example. But the report finds that AI is “displacing high-quality jobs at tech companies…and is creating many more lower-quality jobs in fields like content moderation and data training that are often outsourced to third-party agencies.” It notes these contracted roles have fewer labor protections and are often underpaid, as compared to workers who are directly employed by tech companies.

FULL story at link above.