Forbes TECH
Now that everyone’s had a good moan about Apple paying higher than average Chinese wages to the Chinese workers who assemble its products it seems that it is Facebook’s turn to be attacked for paying what are, in the parts of the world where they’re paid, pretty good wages.
Some four billion pieces of content are shared every day by 845 million users. And while most are harmless, it has recently come to light that the site is brimming with paedophilia, pornography, racism and violence – all moderated by outsourced, poorly vetted workers in third world countries paid just $1 an hour.
In addition to the questionable morality of a company that is about to create 1,000 millionaires when it floats paying such paltry sums, there are significant privacy concerns for the rest of us. Although this invisible army of moderators receive basic training, they work from home, do not appear to undergo criminal checks, and have worrying access to users’ personal details.
The story started at Gawker a couple of weeks back.
Amine Derkaoui, a 21-year-old Moroccan man, is pissed at Facebook. Last year he spent a few weeks training to screen illicit Facebook content through an outsourcing firm, for which he was paid a measly $1 an hour. He’s still fuming over it. “It’s humiliating. They are just exploiting the third world,” Derkaoui complained in a thick French accent over Skype just a few weeks after Facebook filed their record $100 billion IPO.
The question is, is $1 an hour actually a bad wage in the country, Morocco, that he comes from? It’s not a great wage, that’s true, but it does seem to be about theminimum wage for that country. $160 a month: you see, one of the problems is that many people don’t quite understand how poor many parts of the world are.
I agree that you or I would not be willing to do such work for that sort of sum of money. We’re lucky you see, lucky to have been born at the time and in the place that we were. Where there are so many options open to use that working for $160 a month just isn’t one of the conceivably attractive ones.
The jobs are actually farmed out through sites like ODesk (currently down for maintenance) and similar and those sites are simply packed with jobs at those sorts of rates. Write 20 blog posts for $15, quick SEO pieces for $1.50 a time and yes, the monitoring of various websites and bulletin boards and so on to make sure that the material obeys the usual laws about violence, porn, libel and so on.
Now the thing is there really are hundreds of millions of English speakers out there who are willing to do this sort of work for this sort of money. It’s all better than what is available in their own domestic economies (which is an indictment of how those domestic economies are run, not of the multi-national companies who offer better jobs). We know this to be true because there are vast rivers of such work that flow through such sites. That people sign up to work for these pay rates is proof perfect that people desire to do this work at these pay rates.
As it happens these hundreds of millions are willing to do work that is directly competing with me and other English language speaking freelancers. Seven or eight years ago you could make quite a nice living, at western country sort of pay rates, doing this sort of low level writing work. You’d not get rich doing it but you could pay the rent off it, feed yourself and this just isn’t possible at all today. Not at the rates that they’re willing to do it all for.
Perhaps I ought to feel annoyed at the way in which this work is now being done more cheaply by foreigners? Yet I can’t quite manage to do that. For if I’m happy at the way that Chinese manufacturing makes shiny tech cheaper for us all while also enriching those who do the work then I should also, logically, applaud the same when it is my own working life that is being competed with. As, indeed, I do celebrate this way in which the poor of the world are getting richer. These outsourcing sites, these places that allow anyone with an internet connection, wherever they are in the world, to sell their labour into the US or European labour markets are quite possibly doing more to reduce poverty overseas than international aid is.
And that’s a good thing isn’t it, what we actually desire, that the poor should become rich?
Tim Worstall, Contributor
I write about business and technology.
