Meta cut ties to a subcontractor supplying moderators for their African markets, just weeks before the tech giant appeared in a Kenyan court to face accusations of human trafficking and union breaking.
The company ended the contract with outsourcing company Sama, whose former employee Daniel Motaung accused last year for imposing “unreasonable working conditions,” including irregular pay, inadequate mental health support and violations of workers’ privacy.
But conditions at the company preparing the Meta contract appear to be just as bad, if not worse. Meta hasn’t confirmed which company will receive the new contract, but Financial Times report on January 10th, it could be Majorel, a Luxembourg-based outsourcing company that already has a content moderation contract with Meta in Morocco and offices around the world.
“The work was hard and we were fed peanuts,” a Majorel employee in Nairobi, who works as a content moderator for TikTok, told WIRED. They describe long periods of viewing graphic content about beheading, mutilation and suicide for a monthly salary of less than 35,000 Kenyan shillings, or about $281. “We can’t even maintain our normal lives.”
Employee descriptions of conditions at Majorel were confirmed by other moderators working at the company and by messages in private social media groups, viewed by WIRED.
Both TikTok and Meta moderators who have worked with Majorel describe viewing hundreds of potentially traumatic images every day without much support from advisors. The TikTok moderator in Nairobi says that while there may be performance-based bonuses, they are hard to come by and those who complain about working conditions feel they have been denied promotions and received poor reviews. Executives at the Nairobi office also complained of not receiving their monthly payslips to confirm their payments, instead being directed to an online portal last updated in October.
Neither Meta nor Majorel responded to requests for comment.
Majorel employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, told WIRED that Meta executives visited Majorel’s Nairobi office in mid-January and said the employees had was informed that the company would sign a contract with Meta.
Job ads on Fuzu.com, an Africa job posting platform, show that Majorel is currently hiring content moderators who speak Kirundi, Tigrinya, Oromo, Luganda, Kinyarwanda, Tswana, Afrikaans, Zulu, Amharic and Somali. Sama provides Meta moderation in most of these languages.
While working conditions at Sama, which is certified as a social enterprise, have been heavily criticized, the company has paid operators more than Majorel is offering new employees, according to one person. person working on the Meta contract and spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity. Sama moderators are paid around 60,000 Kenyan shillings ($483) a month, which still makes them one of the lowest paid workers in Meta’s moderator network.
a year 2019 report from the Verge found that content moderators in the US earn $15 per hour. In contrast, Sama employees were pay from $1.46 to $2.20 per hour. Previous reports found out that moderators in India make almost $2 per hour.
