Organize the Content Moderators
Here’s how it could happen — and what Facebook says in response
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.
“Facebook as a whole respects the right of our partner employees to organize.”
Content moderators “need something much more fundamental than a campaign to join a traditional…
