Material #20: Workers, tech and the law
20th week of the year, 20th example of the word “material” in use. This week from a story about a legal case that Kenya-based content moderator Daniel Motaung brought against Samasource Kenya, Meta Inc., and Meta Ireland, in Nairobi’s Employment and Labour Relations Court.
Motaung argued that the three companies engaged in recruitment practices that targeted workers from disadvantaged backgrounds (particularly migrant workers from outside Kenya), and subjected them to intense surveillance combined with the enforcement of stringent performance metrics that created extreme time pressure and high psychological stress. He also claimed that the real purpose of the “extreme granularity” of the content these workers had to label was “not to keep the platform clean of harmful material, but to train the algorithms”. (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre is posting updates on the case).
This is one of the many examples of workers turning to the law to protect their rights in cases that involve the role of technology in the workplace, included in the latest excellent publication by the ILAW network: “Labour Rights and Technology: Mapping Strategic Opportunities for Workers and Trade Unions”. (The author is Barbora Černušáková, who I first met back in the early days of the Resource Centre).
ILAW (the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network) got underway in 2019 as a small group of labor rights lawyers. Now the network has over 1,200 lawyers in 92 countries, who share experience and strategies across boundaries, and set agendas at the forefront of the challenges that workers confront in their workplaces: challenges that are age-old, and challenges that are emerging as the world of work changes.
Other ILAW reports cover the ways that international labour standards can be applied (for example a briefing on applying international standards to the informal economy), and the situation of workers in specific contexts (for example Central Asian truck drivers in the EU). The Summer issue of ILAW’s journal, Global Labor Rights Reporter, will focus on “A Just Transition Law for Climate Justice”. Nothing short of inspirational. A round-up of ILAW’s work over its first five years of existence is here.
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Through 2024, It’s Material is sharing one use of the word “material” each week, on Tuesdays.