Organize the Content Moderators
Tech industry executives like to talk about innovation, and nowhere do they follow through on that hype more than in the realm of labor exploitation.
Some companies are worse than others — Uber’s business model boils down to flouting regulations and a race to the bottom for worker pay, for example — but direct employees of all big tech firms are slotted into a hierarchy of pay, privileges, and status, and ever larger parts of these companies’ duties are outsourced to third-party contractors. Security officers, cafeteria workers, custodial staff, shuttle drivers — they’re toiling for Facebook or Google or Apple, but they’re technically employees of a subcontractor. Risk, minimized; responsibility, externalized.
One of the fastest growing classes of subcontracted workers are the content moderators tasked with tending to what has too often become an unwieldy spigot of porn, child abuse, and, as tragically was the case last week, a live-streamed mass shooting.
Content moderators “need something much more fundamental than a campaign to join a traditional American labor union,” says Eric Murphy, a security officer on Facebook’s main campus. Murphy, like thousands of his fellow subcontracted tech workers in the United States, recently unionized (the security guards joined the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU), but the growing army of moderators — around 15,000 for Facebook alone — has yet to join that wave. They’re the janitors of the internet, low-paid workers who scrub these platforms to make them look a bit more like the immaculate visions conjured by their executives.
“Maybe if Mark Zuckerberg had to do the job for a week, he would have some ideas about how to fix it,” Murphy notes.
Many subcontracted workers who labor on or near tech campuses see the industry’s immense wealth up close every day, and they view the widespread practice of subcontracting as a way to keep them from accessing it. As Murphy told me last year, “My coworkers and I dream about going direct with Facebook: That’s where the money is, that’s where the power is, and this artifice of subcontracting is just a scheme to hold down our wages and prevent us from getting a whack at the Facebook piñata.”
Content moderators, by contrast, operate in relative isolation, hidden away from gleaming Silicon Valley campuses, their existence downplayed by executives who tout A.I.’s role in moderation, even as human beings do much of the heavy lifting.
As recently detailed by Casey Newton for the Verge and by a number of other articles before that, mods are being ground into dust. The workers at the Arizona call-center-like office that Newton focused on are employees of third-party contractor Cognizant, one of several companies where Facebook offloads its services. They are paid $15 an hour — significantly higher, it should be noted, than some of their counterparts outside of the U.S. For these wages, they are subjected to a torrent of disturbing content. They screen hate speech, violent attacks — even including beheadings — and graphic pornography so it can be removed before reaching Facebook users.
Psychological trauma is rampant among the workers. Cognizant reportedly offers health care and “wellness time” to the workers, but this is limited to nine minutes per shift and is policed viciously. (Workers are ordered not to use wellness time to go to the restroom, according to Newton’s story). Cognizant stresses the availability of counselors for workers in need of help — a point Facebook has talked up in the recent past — but at least some of the counselors appear to be less than helpful. One of them told Newton of the concept of “‘post-traumatic growth,’ an effect whereby some trauma victims emerge from the experience feeling stronger than before.”
Moderators need to get organized and quickly. The work is by its nature unpleasant, but the first step toward decent working conditions requires moderators, collectively and without fear of retaliation, to be able to state the problems most pressing to them and how they think those issues can be resolved. Should their employers or Facebook itself decline to implement these fixes, the moderators could then decide how to force them to do so. Unions representing other subcontractors at Facebook — Unite Here, SEIU, and the Teamsters in the case of Facebook’s shuttle drivers — might be best positioned to assist them.
Asked if Facebook would take a position on organization among content moderators, a spokesperson said, “Facebook as a whole respects the right of our partner employees to organize.” But there’s been no public effort yet by moderators within the U.S. to organize.
Direct employees of platforms like Facebook or YouTube have a role to play by advocating for subcontracted moderators. Doing so would help build alliances across the vast blue- and white-collar divide in tech, a priority of recent tech worker organizing. “Techies should absolutely be using their privileged positions to advocate for the people that their company is exploiting — and, in this case, arguably torturing — because they benefit from that exploitation,” Murphy says.
Judging by Facebook’s response to the Verge investigation, the company isn’t planning to restructure its model anytime soon. Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice president of global operations, emailed Facebook employees, then published the message online. The post emphasized the speed at which the company is scaling up its moderation operation — it has “more than doubled” in each of the past two years. The majority of these workers are employed by staffing firms like Cognizant as well as Accenture and Genpact. Osofsky wrote of a summit with its vendors planned for April of “improved partner support and communications” — encouraging workers to raise concerns with human resources or anonymously via a whistleblower hotline — as well as further compliance auditing and contract standardization.
Nowhere does Osofsky mention considering making all of these workers direct employees — as some of his own employees have previously suggested. (“The company sees hiring all content reviewers directly as a bad use of resources,” anonymous sources told Bloomberg.) Nowhere does he mention higher pay. But those are solutions that would help alleviate the suffering.
A union drive takes a long time, particularly in a workplace that feels like a war zone, but the conditions moderators are laboring under need to be ameliorated immediately. If someone, somewhere, must be the sin-eater of the internet, the only defensible salves are better pay and effective mental health resources. Facebook and Google have enormous profits — they must raise wages for those who work to keep their platforms clean. “These workers are doing the social-care work that we never treat as valuable in our culture,” says Michelle Miller, cofounder of Coworker.org, a platform that helps workers organize.
If people use Google and Facebook like infrastructure — and they do, even if these companies are privately owned for the time being — then content moderators are effectively maintenance workers. They require compensation that reflects that value. And any raises shouldn’t be limited to U.S.-based contractors as was the case for Amazon’s recent raise for warehouse workers.
That Facebook and Google don’t directly sign these workers’ paychecks doesn’t matter here. They have the power to insist on those wages and change their own agreements with vendors accordingly whenever they get around to that contract standardization Osofsky is so excited about. They have done this in the past, to raise U.S.-based contractors’ wages to $15 and ensure paid time off. They should take action again; $15 is not enough.
Additionally, “wellness time” monitored down to the second is more a stressor than it is a relief. There have been stories raising the alarms on the mental health effects of content moderation for a decade (not to mention multiple lawsuits from workers). There’s no excuse for any company to pretend the current resources are adequate nor that it’s defensible to cut access to health care when a worker is fired or otherwise leaves.
Until the U.S. has universal health care, workers will rely on employer-provided insurance, so it’s time for tech companies to begin factoring months, if not years, of post-employment insurance or a severance package that offsets the cost of insurance into the cost of content moderation. These contractors require resources of the same quality than their direct-employee counterparts receive — and, I imagine, the counselors will need to be offered higher pay themselves so as to attract people more qualified than those highlighted in Newton’s story.
These demands are concrete and specific — Facebook should throw it into the agenda for that April vendor summit or expect a revolt.
When reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson echoed Osofsky. “We work with our partners to ensure they provide competitive compensation, benefits, and a high level of support for their employees. We know there are going to be incidents of employee challenges or dissatisfaction that call our commitment into question, which is why we continue to take steps to improve our overall operations and be extremely transparent about the expectations we have of our partners.”
They also reiterated the steps the company is taking: compliance auditing, contract standardization, the vendor summit, and, according to the spokesperson, “holding even more discussions and focus groups with partner employees while also building stronger communication channels.”
The last step, listening to workers, is good (though only if the company acts on what it hears), but so is raising wages. If subcontractors all the way down — the so-called fissured workplace — has become the new normal of the United States economy, the tech industry bears responsibility for helping push the trend. It has outsourced jobs to third-party contractors to segment the workforce, lower costs, and minimize liability for precisely the sorts of problems that are destroying moderators’ lives.
The tech industry model puts shiny veneers on a very old arrangement: profit through reducing labor costs and increasing exploitation. If subcontracted workers going direct with the company is a longer-term aspiration, then in the short term, there’s no substitute to organizing.
Organize the Content Moderators
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