Hollywood’s writers union says it has reached a preliminary labour agreement with the industry’s major studios in a deal to end one of two strikes that have halted most film and television production for nearly five months.
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced the deal on Sunday with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the group that represents studios, streaming services and producers in negotiations.
The three-year contract agreement – agreed to after five marathon days of renewed talks by negotiators WGA and the AMPTP – must still be approved by the guild’s board and members before the strike can be declared officially over.
The WGA, which represents 11,500 film and television writers, described the deal as “exceptional” with “meaningful gains and protections for writers”.
“This was made possible by the enduring solidarity of WGA members and extraordinary support of our union siblings who joined us on the picket lines for over 146 days,” the negotiating committee said in a statement.
There was no immediate comment from the AMPTP.
The WGA settlement, while a milestone, will not return Hollywood to work as the SAG-AFTRA actors union remains on strike.
The writers strike immediately sent late-night talk shows and comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live into hiatus, and has left dozens of scripted shows and other productions in limbo, including the forthcoming seasons of Netflix’s Stranger Things, HBO’s The Last of Us and ABC’s Abbot Elementary, as well as films including Deadpool 3 and Superman: Legacy.
The Emmy Awards were also pushed from September to January.
Efforts to restart daytime talk shows without writers, such as The Drew Barrymore Show, collapsed this month in the face of criticism from striking writers and actors.
At picket lines, protests took on the rhetoric of class warfare.
Writers assailed media executives’ compensation and said working conditions had made it hard for them to earn a middle-class living.
Executives at times fanned tensions.
Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger, fresh from a contract extension that gave him an annual bonus of five times his base salary, criticised striking writers and actors as “just not realistic” in their demands.
Iger subsequently struck a conciliatory note, citing his “deep respect” for creative professionals.
The work stoppages took a toll on camera operators, carpenters, production assistants and other crew members, as well as the caterers, florists, costume suppliers and other small businesses that support film and television production.
The economic cost is expected to total at least $5bn in California and the other US production hubs of New Mexico, Georgia and New York, according to an estimate from Milken Institute economist Kevin Klowden.
Four top industry executives – Iger, Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and NBCUniversal Studio Group Chair Donna Langley – joined negotiations this week, helping to break the months-long impasse.
As with past writers strikes, the action is partly a response to Hollywood capitalising on a new form of distribution – and writers seeking their share of the newfound revenue.
The 100-day strike in 2007-08 focused, in part, on extending guild protections to “new media,” including movies and TV downloads as well as content delivered via advertisement-supported internet services.
This time around, a central issue is residual payments for streaming services, which writers said represented a fraction of the compensation they would receive for a broadcast television show.
Writers also sought limits on AI’s role in the creative process. Some feared that studio executives would hand a writer an AI-generated script to revise and pay the writer at a lower rate to rewrite or polish it. Others expressed concerns about intellectual property theft if existing scripts were used to train artificial intelligence.
Even as studio executives celebrated the end of the longest-running writers strike since 1988, it is only half the labour battle. The studios must still find a way to get actors back to work.
SAG-AFTRA, representing 160,000 film and television actors, stunt performers, voiceover artists and other media professionals, walked off the job in July, the first time in 63 years that Hollywood faced a strike by two unions at the same time.
At issue are questions of minimum wages for performers, protections against the use of artificial intelligence replacing human performances and compensation that reflects the value actors bring to the streaming services.
US Department of Justice says company wrongly claimed law meant it could only hire citizens and permanent residents.
SpaceX, the rocket company owned by Elon Musk, has been sued by the United States government for allegedly discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees in its hiring practices.
SpaceX wrongly claimed that the company could only hire US citizens and permanent residents due to export control laws, dissuading asylum seekers and refugees from applying for jobs, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a statement on Thursday.
While SpaceX must comply with legal restrictions on the shipment of certain goods and technologies overseas, US law does not require companies to treat asylum seekers and refugees differently than citizens or green card holders, the DOJ said.
The justice department said it would ask the courts to impose civil penalties on SpaceX and seek backpay for asylum seekers and refugees who were deterred from applying for jobs or denied employment.
“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the justice department’s Civil Rights Division said.
“Our investigation also found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company. Asylees and refugees have overcome many obstacles in their lives, and unlawful employment discrimination based on their citizenship status should not be one of them.”
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk, one of the world’s richest people, founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of reducing the costs of space missions and facilitating future interplanetary travel.
Metro Manila, Philippines – On July 6, National Fried Chicken Day in the United States, Vincent Cruz and a crowd of supporters marched into a Jollibee’s branch in Journal Square, New Jersey.
Cruz and 50-odd employees and supporters wanted to get the attention of management and customers alike on the busiest day of the year for the Philippine fast food chain.
Cruz is among nine Filipino former employees at the Journal Square branch who claim they were terminated by Jollibee management in February after petitioning for better wages and working conditions.
Standing in front of the cashier, the 19-year-old former fry cook held up a megaphone and yelled the demands of the new “Justice 4 Jollibee Workers” campaign, including reinstatement, back pay, an apology from Jollibee and a hike in the base pay from $14 to $17 an hour.
“For all fellow workers who have experienced or are currently experiencing similar struggles, we want you to be brave and take action,” Cruz, who migrated to the US in 2021, told Al Jazeera.
For Cruz, whose family back in the Philippines consider Jollibee a beloved brand, his alleged treatment by the company was “extra heart-breaking”.
Vincent Cruz and eight former employers say they were let go from Jollibee after demanding better pay and conditions [File: Patrick Nevada/Al Jazeera]
Jollibee, which specialises in fried chicken and other fast food, is one of the most iconic Philippine brands.
The chain operates more than 6,500 branches worldwide, about half of which are located outside the Philippines.
In the first quarter of 2023, Jollibee Food Corporation (JFC) posted revenue of about $1bn – which was up 28.5 percent from the previous quarter – 20.2 percent of which came from North America.
JFC has announced plans to add 500 more stores in the US, which has by far the largest overseas population of Filipinos, in the next five to seven years.
In 2021, Esquire magazine ranked Jollibee as the 13th-biggest fast-food chain in the world and the only non-American company in the top 15.
But the Journal Square workers say that Jollibee is not just exporting its popular Filipino fast food but a record of unfair labour practices as well.
Since they launched their campaign, workers from more than a dozen other branches in the US and even the Philippines have reached out to them with negative experiences.
Jollibee’s Journal Square management has argued that the layoffs were necessary due to financial difficulties, a claim Cruz and the other workers say makes little sense when considering the branch hired 13 new employees two weeks after their firing.
Cruz and the other workers have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and are waiting on the outcome of its investigation into whether the company violated their right to organise to improve their working conditions.
“Hopefully, the NLRB will be sympathetic. To us it’s a very slam-dunk case – it’s obvious that Jollibee violated labour rights,” Jackie Mariano, a lawyer with the advocacy group Mission to End Modern Slavery, told Al Jazeera.
Jollibee is one of the biggest fast-food brands in the world, with more than 6,500 branches worldwide [File: Aaron Favila/AP]
In a statement to Al Jazeera, Jollibee North America said the layoffs had been a purely financial decision related to the conditions at that branch.
“The action was due to financial circumstances specific to this store and not related to other claims being circulated online,” a spokesperson said. “With its location near a commuter hub, the Journal Square branch has not recovered from customer behaviour changes after the pandemic, including people working from home instead of offices.”
On July 14, Facebook took down the “Justice 4 Jollibee Workers” campaign page, citing the use of the Jollibee logo as a “violation of community standards”.
Mariano said Jollibee is notorious for a practice in the fast food industry known as misclassification, where workers are retained as part-time staff indefinitely despite usually working close to full-time shifts. The practice allows an employer to avoid granting staff benefits such as paid leave and full-time wages.
Cruz said that his managers often extended his break hours to keep his working hours just below the eight-hour threshold even as he worked extra shifts, and burdened him with extra responsibilities, such as lifting heavy items in the stockroom, without additional pay.
“At 14 dollars an hour, you can barely survive living so close to such a Metropolitan area where everything is super expensive,” Cruz said.
In February, Jollibee-owned Smashburger was ordered to pay damages to 241 employees after being found to have violated New York City’s paid and sick leave laws.
“It’s Jollibee’s motive to maintain high profits by cutting labour costs,” Mariano said.
“That’s where they got all that capital, from unpaid benefits. It also relies on the labour export programme of the Philippines with 4 million Filipinos in the US comprising the company’s market base.”
Conditions at home
Allegations of poor labour practices at Jollibee stretch all the way back to the Philippines, where the company was founded in 1978.
Janine, who spent a year working at two Jollibee branches in Antipolo City in 2021, said she was denied overtime pay for shifts stretching from 3pm to 1am and would be forced to buy leftover food at the end of the day.
“I once had to take out three orders of spaghetti!” Janine, who asked to use a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera, adding that she earned 375 Philippine pesos ($6.65) a day, minus a 50 pesos fee ($0.89) for a recruiting agency.
As in the US, Jollibee in the Philippines has been accused of depriving employees of benefits and job security by keeping them as contract workers indefinitely.
In 2018, the Philippines’s Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) said JFC topped the list of companies with the most contractual employees.
When DOLE ordered the company to regularise nearly 7,000 of its workforce, JFC submitted an appeal before laying off 400 workers.
JFC did not respond to a request for comment. But it has maintained in past statements that it complies with all labour standards and only deals with “reputable” contractors, insisting that the onus for regularising workers lies with the recruitment agencies.
In the same year, JFC chairman Tony Tan Caktiong told reporters that contractualisation was a thing of the past and had been supplemented by the outsourcing of employee roles.
The ‘Justice 4 Jollibee Workers’ campaign is calling for better working conditions at Jollibee restaurants in the US and elsewhere [File: Patrick Nevada/Al Jazeera]
Jerome Adonis, the secretary general of the trade union Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), said becoming a regular employee with a contractor and with the primary company are two very different things.
“How can you bargain for your full rights, wages and benefits with an agency which merely depends on the temporary contract between them and Jollibee for example?” Adonis told Al Jazeera, adding that workers do not enjoy an employee-employer relationship with Jollibee even if they are stationed at the company’s branches.
“That’s how it circumvents the law,” Adonis said.
KMU estimates that about 29,000 of JFC’s more than 36,000 employees are contractual, an increase since the DOLE’s 2018 directive.
Denise, who worked as a branch manager at JFC for 12 years, said that Jollibee usually handpicks a few workers who will be regularised directly with the company.
“It’s performance-based. You need to apply and then we evaluate,” Denise, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera.
Adonis, the trade union leader, said such a standard is “unfair and arbitrary”.
“They’re making workers compete for their own rights. They should be direct hires while their fundamental rights to unionise should be respected,” he said.
With wildfire season under way in the United States, the federal government is facing a potential exodus of wildland firefighters over a major pay cut that could go into effect in a few months.
Funding in President Joe Biden’s 2021 infrastructure law gave a temporary pay boost to thousands of firefighters on the climate front lines – but the money is set to run out in the coming months, which could push many to quit, experts warned.
“I honestly think at least a third could go within a matter of months,” said Steve Lenkart, executive director of the National Federation of Federal Employees union.
“It would be really devastating for the country.”
The US Forest Service (USFS) has about 10,775 wildland firefighters – 95 percent of its goal of 11,300 for 2023 – and the Department of the Interior, which manages federal and tribal lands, has more than 5,400 such personnel, the latest official data showed.
While total figures are difficult to pin down, the federal government is estimated to be the largest employer of career wildland firefighters in the US.
Any reduction, though, would compound a growing labour and climate crisis as tenured firefighters depart federal agencies for other jobs and climate change fuels hotter, drier conditions that increase the risk of out-of-control blazes.
Firefighters ‘still fed up’
Rachel Granberg, a wildland firefighter based in Washington state with eight years of experience, has already seen multiple colleagues leave their jobs in the past year or so.
“Even with the infrastructure money, they were still fed up – and one of the guys had been fighting fires for 19 years,” said the 37-year-old, whose statements reflected her own opinions and not those of her agency.
Although wildland firefighters welcomed the temporary pay rise, many have been labouring for years for salaries that they say do not adequately reflect the rigors of their work.
Biden took steps in 2021 to raise the minimum wage for federal wildland firefighters to $15 per hour after criticising the $13 per hour rate some had been making as “ridiculously low”.
The infrastructure law also included $600m for benefits for federal wildland firefighters, including temporary pay rises of up to $20,000 per year, or 50 percent of their base salary – whichever was lower.
However, federal officials estimated that those funds could run out by the end of September – when this federal budget year closes – or mid-October.
Jaelith Hall-Rivera, a deputy chief at the USFS, said the so-called “pay cliff”, coupled with budget cuts like those proposed in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, would be “pretty catastrophic” for the fire workforce.
“If we’re not able to get a change in pay status for our firefighters, … we’re [going to] see many of them go to higher-paying jobs where they can make a living wage,” she told senators at a recent hearing.
“We are hearing from our firefighting union that we could lose 30 to 50 percent of our firefighting workforce in the Forest Service. That would be devastating.”
Hall-Rivera testified at the same time Washington, DC, was dealing with poor air quality – a byproduct of record wildfires that have ravaged Canada this year.
A USFS spokesperson said the agriculture department, which the forest agency is part of, is committed to working with Congress to pass a permanent pay solution.
“Federal wildland firefighters must be offered competitive salaries and the pay and improved working conditions they so deserve,” the spokesperson said.
Lenkart said federal wildland firefighters are leaving not only for state and local fire service jobs, which can offer better pay and working conditions, but for other sectors, including construction and even fast food.
“Some are going to work, literally, at In-N-Out Burger because they can make 20 bucks an hour,” he said.
Cause for optimism?
Even with the pay cuts looming, some groups who recently met with congressional staff on Capitol Hill said they had the impression that lawmakers would be able to find a solution – but warned that the consequences of inaction would be dire.
In a bid to avert the cuts, a handful of senators introduced a federal bill this week that would increase firefighters’ base pay and provide additional pay and leave for firefighters responding to large wildfires.
“These brave men and women are our first line of defense against disaster, and they’ve earned the right to be fairly compensated for the dangerous work they do – including for adequate recovery time after a tough fire,” Senator Jon Tester of Montana, one of those supporting the bill, said in a statement.
Still, members of Congress typically spend much of the summer away from Washington, DC, leaving them scant time to strike a deal and get legislation enacted before the new budget year starts in October.
Absent action from Capitol Hill, “we’re going to continue … to see the best and brightest walk out the door,” said Luke Mayfield, president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.
Brian Gold, a wildland firefighter in Colorado, said the pinch is really being felt at mid-level field leadership and lamented a significant brain and talent drain.
Some issues can be solved by increasing base pay, he said.
“But what’s really required is a holistic approach to the workforce problem, which is really burning out your labour force by requiring them to work massive amounts of overtime and be away from home for massive periods of time,” Gold added.
Working more, earning less
A recent study from the University of Washington and the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station highlighted stark disparities in pay and benefits between federal wildland firefighters and state-level firefighters in four western states.
Federal compensation was on average 40.5 percent lower than that of state agencies – even though federal wildland firefighters spend an average of 12 more days per season on more complex fires, according to the research, which analysed Washington state, Oregon, California and Colorado.
“Federal firefighters are generally working more, earning less and [are] continuously exposed to hazard[s] and levels of responsibility that are just not commensurate with what they’re getting paid relative to some of these other agencies,” said Evan Pierce, co-author of the report.
— Grassroots Wildland Firefighters (@GrassrootsWFF) June 19, 2023
Similar to the new legislation, Biden’s 2024 budget proposal calls for extra firefighter benefits such as a permanent base-pay increase and “premium pay” to better compensate responders for the time they spend on fires. But these would have to win approval from Congress.
And even the 2024 proposed compensation package represents a gap of up to $8,184 in average salary between federal wildland firefighters and the leading state agency, the recent report found.
The USFS is aware that federal wages have not kept pace with state, local and private firefighting groups in some parts of the country, the agency’s spokesperson said.
Mayfield left the federal government several years ago after 18 years with the USFS “for an opportunity to have a livable and plannable income”, he said.
By the end of his USFS service, Mayfield said he had been dealing with issues linked to depression and suicidal thoughts and recalled that in conversations with more than half a dozen peers and mentors, almost everybody told him to go.
“One of my former superintendents, his quote to me was: ‘Leave, Luke. Do you want to be me?’” Mayfield said. “And my other buddy was like: ‘We spend all our time worrying about retirement. Nobody’s worried about living. Get out.’”
Editor’s note: In collaboration with Danwatch, IRPI Media and The Wire, this investigation took place in Italy, India and Denmark – and was made possible with the support of the EU Journalism Fund.
The 12 armed men appeared just before sunrise, as darkness hung thick over the remote farm outside Borgo Sabotino, south of Rome.
It was March 17, 2017, a date Balbir Singh will never forget.
“I was really scared. The farm owners shouted for me to run away. But I did not,” said Singh, a decision he is happy to have made.
The 12 men were Italian police in plain clothes, and kindly asked him to come along.
“My clothes were filthy. My state was dreadful. I had deep wounds on my hands and feet, and my nails were bleeding. But it was a big day. In the minutes before we left, I saw that the police had arrested the farm owner and his wife.”
Singh, a former English teacher and longtime farm worker who hails from the Punjab region known as India’s breadbasket, said he suffered six years of exploitation in Italy, citing violence, death threats, theft, lack of pay, hunger and deprivation.
Like other Indian workers in Italy, Singh arrived and could not understand the Italian language, had little money and no knowledge of his rights.
For long periods, Singh had no food. He lived on the stale bread he found in the farming family’s rubbish bin or leftovers they had thrown out to feed pigs and chickens.
He lived in an old caravan without gas, electricity or heating.
No one heard his cry for help, until one day, the Italian sociologist and researcher Marco Omizzolo was notified by a fellow Indian worker – and asked local police to intervene.
Balbir Singh reflects on his treatment on an Italian kiwi farm [Stefania Prandi/Al Jazeera]
Singh is one of the few migrant workers who has taken his former employer to court.
He sought justice for the humiliations to which he was subjected and wanted raise awareness of the conditions of migrants.
In 2018, he became the first immigrant in Italy to be granted a residence permit “for reasons of justice”.
The trial is continuing.
Farming’green gold’ plantations
During the past 30 years, Indian workers – mostly from Punjab – have come to Agro Pontino, an area south of Rome, but few dare to speak out, especially to foreigners and journalists, about the abuse they have endured.
According to Omizzolo, of the 30,000 Indian residents in Italy, most are employed as labourers in the Italian fruit-and-vegetable sector.
Agro Pontino is one of the country’s most productive growing regions and its flagship products include kiwis, locally known as “green gold”.
Between July and December, many Indian labourers work in kiwi plantations.
Italy produces 320,000 tonnes of kiwis annually, mostly in Lazio, and exports to 50 countries, making it the main European producer and the third-largest in the world after China and New Zealand.
It is a market worth more than 400 million euros ($431m), led by Zespri, a multinational company.
Zespri is best known for the yellow-fleshed variety – one of their patents – the SunGold.
From the fields of small and medium-sized farms, the kiwis are taken to the cooperatives’ large warehouses, where they are packed and branded with the Zespri logo, before being marketed throughout Europe.
The rules for harvesting Zespri kiwis are strict; cotton gloves are mandatory and delicate, precise manoeuvres are required to preserve the fruit.
Workers described being forced to work in the fields seven days a week, 10-11 hours a day, and are paid no more than six euros ($6.50) an hour. Adequate toilets and taking breaks are out of reach for many, while several workers told Al Jazeera that they were not regularly given compulsory protective equipment such as gloves and masks.
In addition, the impermanence of the jobs make them seem perilous – without a regular work contract, it is not possible to renew a residence permit and live legally in Italy.
To get to Italy, workers pay up to 15,000 euros ($16,200) to Indian intermediaries and incur in debts in India.
Many take on loans from acquaintances and relatives, or sell land, cows, and family jewellery.
But staying at home is not an option – the monthly salary of those who do manual labour in Punjab is usually between 80 and 120 euros ($87 to $120). In Italy, an Indian labourer receives an average 863 euros ($934) per month.
Italy is the main European kiwi producer and the third-largest in the world after China and New Zealand [Stefania Prandi/Al Jazeera]
Gurjinder, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, worked for three years for a company that sells kiwis to Zespri.
With a low voice, hunched shoulders, and tearful eyes, he remembered when a supervisor who scolded him, shouting as soon as he stopped working for a few moments.
“She insulted me and threatened to beat me up.”
In the fields, the supervisor filmed him three times with her mobile phone as he stopped to drink and something got into his eyes.
The videos served as “proof” of his lack of efficiency and were handed over to the head of the company in an episode seen as a “warning” to other workers.
When asked why he did not leave the company immediately, Gurjinder held his head in his gnarled hands and burst into tears.
“I had no choice, I had to earn for my four children and my wife. They stayed in India, I haven’t seen them for 13 years.”
Zespri told Al Jazeera that while most employers in the kiwifruit industry “care for their people, a small minority may be failing to do so”.
The company added, “Any exploitation of workers is unacceptable and we are committed to holding those people involved to account, and to continuing to improve our compliance frameworks to help us do so. We take the allegations made extremely seriously and have commenced an investigation into this, including how we can best support affected workers.”
It works with more than 1,200 growers in Italy who are required to have the Global Gap GRASP (Global Risk Assessment On Social Practice) certificate, an independent and international certification system that outlines criteria for the safety, health, and welfare of workers, Zespri said.
Its suppliers who package the product are registered with Sedex, a third-party certification body that monitors workers’ conditions for Italian suppliers of SunGold Kiwifruit.
Zespri said it has contacted both third-party certification bodies and its suppliers “to make them aware of the alleged unfair practices” alleged in this investigation and “to try to obtain more information” about them.
At present, there are no formal complaints against the consortia that sell kiwis to Zespri, or against the multinational company itself.
Back in India for a visit to attend his son’s wedding, Singh said he now feels like a “free soul”.
“I am waiting for my compensation and the closure of the case. Then I want to take my wife to Italy, where I have decided to build a house. I can’t wait for good days to come,” he said.
“Life is a struggle and one must fight, but I would never want even the worst of my enemies to face the problems I faced. Even today, when I remember that time, I get goosebumps.”
Workers who farm Italy’s fruit plantations live in makeshift homes with little comfort [Stefania Prandi/Al Jazeera]
On January 18, Time magazine published revelations that alarmed if not necessarily surprised many who work in Artificial Intelligence. The news concerned ChatGPT, an advanced AI chatbot that is both hailed as one of the most intelligent AI systems built to date and feared as a new frontier in potential plagiarism and the erosion of craft in writing.
Many had wondered how ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, had improved upon earlier versions of this technology that would quickly descend into hate speech. The answer came in the Time magazine piece: dozens of Kenyan workers were paid less than $2 per hour to process an endless amount of violent and hateful content in order to make a system primarily marketed to Western users safer.
It should be clear to anyone paying attention that our current paradigm of digitalisation has a labour problem. We have and are pivoting away from the ideal of an open internet built around communities of shared interests to one that is dominated by the commercial prerogatives of a handful of companies located in specific geographies.
In this model, large companies maximise extraction and accumulation for their owners at the expense not just of their workers but also of the users. Users are sold the lie that they are participating in a community, but the more dominant these corporations become, the more egregious the unequal power between the owners and the users is.
“Community” increasingly means that ordinary people absorb the moral and the social costs of the unchecked growth of these companies, while their owners absorb the profit and the acclaim. And a critical mass of underpaid labour is contracted under the most tenuous conditions that are legally possible to sustain the illusion of a better internet.
ChatGPT is only the latest innovation to embody this.
Much has been written about Facebook, YouTube and the model of content moderation that actually provided the blueprint for the ChatGPT outsourcing. Content moderators are tasked with consuming a constant stream of the worst things that people put on these platforms and flagging it for takedown or further actions. Very often these are posts about sexual and other kinds of violence.
Nationals of the countries where the companies are located have sued for the psychological toll that the work has taken on them. In 2020, Facebook, for example, was forced to pay $52m to US employees for the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) they experienced after working as content moderators.
While there is increasing general awareness of secondary trauma and the toll that witnessing violence causes people, we still don’t fully understand what being exposed to this kind of content for a full workweek does to the human body.
We know that journalists and aid workers, for example, often return from conflict zones with serious symptoms of PTSD, and that even reading reports emerging from these conflict zones can have a psychological effect. Similar studies on the impact of content moderation work on people are harder to complete because of the non-disclosure agreements that these moderators are often asked to sign before they take the job.
We also know, through the testimony provided by Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen, that its decision to underinvest in proper content moderation was an economic one. Twitter, under Elon Musk, has also moved to slash costs by firing a large number of content moderators.
The failure to provide proper content moderation has resulted in social networking platforms carrying a growing amount of toxicity. The harms that arise from that have had major implications in the analogue world.
In Myanmar, Facebook has been accused of enabling genocide; in Ethiopia and the United States, of allowing incitement to violence.
Indeed, the field of content moderation and the problems it is fraught with are a good illustration of what is wrong with the current digitalisation model.
The decision to use a Kenyan company to teach a US chatbot not to be hateful must be understood in the context of a deliberate decision to accelerate the accumulation of profit at the expense of meaningful guardrails for users.
These companies promise that the human element is only a stopgap response before the AI system is advanced enough to do the work alone. But this claim does nothing for the employees who are being exploited today. Nor does it address the fact that people – the languages they speak and the meaning they ascribe to contexts or situations – are highly malleable and dynamic, which means content moderation will not die out.
So what will be done for the moderators who are being harmed today, and how will the business practice change fundamentally to protect the moderators who will definitely be needed tomorrow?
If this is all starting to sound like sweatshops are making the digital age work, it should – because they are. A model of digitalisation led by an instinct to protect the interests of those who profit the most from the system instead of those who actually make it work leaves billions of people vulnerable to myriad forms of social and economic exploitation, the impact of which we still do not fully understand.
It’s time to lay to rest the myth that digitalisation led by corporate interests is somehow going to eschew all the past excesses of mercantilism and greed simply because the people who own these companies wear T-shirts and promise to do no evil.
History is replete with examples of how, left to their own devices, those who have interest and opportunity to accumulate will do so and lay waste to the rights that we need to protect the most vulnerable amongst us.
We have to return to the basics of why we needed to fight for and articulate labour rights in the last century. Labour rights are human rights, and this latest scandal is a timely reminder that we stand to lose a great deal when we stop paying attention to them because we are distracted by the latest shiny new thing.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Cambodian rapper Kea Sokun was once jailed for his hard-hitting lyrics, but that did not stop him from forging ahead with his latest release, Workers Blood, set to scenes of striking garment workers beaten by military police. At least four workers died in the protests.
“They fought for their rights, for freedom, the search for justice full of obstacles,” Sokun raps in Khmer. “I would like to commemorate the heroism of the workers who sacrificed their lives.”
Within days of the song’s release on January 3 — the ninth anniversary of the government’s deadly response to a vast garment workers’ strike — the Ministry of Culture warned the music video was “inciting content that may cause insecurity and social disorder”.
The leaders of the human rights organisations that commissioned the song were soon hauled in for questioning. Police threatened legal action unless the video was removed from the websites and Facebook pages of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights (LICADHO) and the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights (CENTRAL), representatives for the rights groups say.
“Every year we post [about the anniversary of the protests] and we have no problem, so why now when we only used old images with a song about a real event, why is it incitement?” Am Sam Ath, LICADHO’s operations director, told Al Jazeera. “We regard the order to remove the video as a violation of LICADHO’s right of expression.”
National police spokesperson Chhay Kimkoeurn claimed no threats were involved and said police merely sought to “educate” the rights groups.
“We didn’t threaten them with legal action, but if they don’t obey the law we will enforce the law,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to “incitement” to commit a crime, a vague charge commonly wielded against those perceived to have criticised the government.
The song, commissioned by two Cambodian rights groups, was to raise awareness about a brutal crackdown on garment workers that took place in 2014 and left at least four people dead [Courtesy of LICADHO and CENTRAL]
The censorship of Workers Blood is part of an ongoing crackdown on freedom of expression in Cambodia that is gathering pace ahead of national elections in July. Nearing his fourth decade in power, Prime Minister Hun Sen outlawed the main opposition party ahead of the last elections five years ago, and is now preparing to hand control of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) to his son Hun Manet.
Civil society organisations, opposition politicians and rappers alike are being forcefully reminded of the limits of what can and cannot be said in an increasingly restrictive society.
“I think the government is trying to legitimise itself and this is a transition period of power, so they are looking at civil society as threats,” Khun Tharo, program manager for CENTRAL, told Al Jazeera. “The government feels this song has really discredited [them].”
A song seeking justice
While Cambodia’s music industry has exploded in recent years, few rappers besides Sokun have dared bring direct social commentary into their songs. Other rappers who have spoken out against the government’s actions faced death threats or were forced to issue public apologies.
“I always want to use songs as mirrors to reflect the reality in society,” Sokun told VOD, an online media outlet in Cambodia, last year. “I just want to speak the truth.”
Growing up in a poor household down the road from the World Heritage site of Angkor Wat and dropping out of school in his early teens, Sokun was arrested and sentenced to one year in prison in 2020 for a series of nationalist songs touching on topics like Cambodia’s borders, and filled with unsparing takedowns of the rich and powerful.
A judge offered to release Sokun if he apologised for his lyrics, but the rapper refused and served the time, boosting his popularity across Cambodia.
The 24-year-old now has more than a quarter of a million subscribers on his YouTube channel and continues to target political issues and injustice, producing a song describing his incarceration and another about the filling in of Phnom Penh’s lakes for development.
But it was Workers Blood that hit a nerve with the government because it was a reminder of the scale of garment workers’ protests that began in late 2013, says Sabina Lawreniuk, a University of Nottingham research fellow who studies Cambodia’s garment industry.
Tens of thousands of workers took to Veng Sreng Boulevard in Phnom Penh to demand higher wages and the government was eventually forced to double the minimum wage to $160 per month. It has since increased wages annually, even as aggressive new laws on trade unions have also been introduced that rights groups say are intended to stifle independent union organising.
“Labour politics in Cambodia are explicitly entangled with electoral politics in a way that some other human rights issues and struggles in Cambodia are not,” Lawreniuk told Al Jazeera. “That huge mobilization of people really unsettled the government.”
The protests came in the aftermath of the closely contested elections of 2013 when the Cambodia National Rescue Party spooked the CPP by capturing a large share of the votes on a platform calling for wage increases for garment workers and civil servants.
Kea Sokun is a hugely popular rapper in Cambodia and was previously jailed on charges of ‘incitement’ [Courtesy of Kea Sokun]
The Veng Sreng protests only ended after police and military forces began firing at the crowds, injuring dozens and killing at least four people on January 3, 2014. One protester, 15-year-old Khem Sophat, remains missing to this day.
“I don’t have hope that he will be found, his friend said he was shot and lay down on the street,” Sophat’s father, Khem Soeun, told Al Jazeera. “My child was very gentle, he was always helping the family.”
Sophat had lied about his age to get a job at a garment factory and sent money to his parents every month, his father said. He last saw his son nine months before the protests when he visited for the Khmer New Year holidays.
“After he went back to work, he never came back again,” Soeun said. “His mum, when she heard the song [Workers Blood], she cried all day, it reminded her of Veng Sreng street.”
The deaths were the result of “indiscriminate firing and excessive use of force by the military police,” according to a fact-finding report produced shortly after the protest by the labour rights group Asia Monitor Resource Center. No one has ever been held accountable for the workers’ deaths.
“Waiting for justice for nine years, a long time passed and nobody responsible, longing for a solution,” Sokun raps. “The eyes saw the truth, unforgettable, stuck in the minds of those who live.”
Vorn Pov, president of the Independent Democratic Informal Economy Association (IDEA), was beaten bloody by government security forces at the protest. As a prominent labour activist associated with Veng Sreng, Pov was questioned by police about Sokun’s song and later forced to remove it from his organisation’s Facebook page, even though IDEA had not sponsored the song.
“When listening to Sokun’s song, it is shocking, like it’s still new and fresh and so unjust for the victims,” Pov told Al Jazeera. “I feel this society cannot be relied upon to find the truth when injustice happens.”
Avoiding the ‘red line’
Ministry of Culture spokesperson Long Bunna Siriwadh would not elaborate on what specifically about Workers Blood triggered the allegation of incitement.
“I don’t analyse the meaning, I only speak to the principle of law and social order,” Siriwadh told Al Jazeera, claiming Sokun could keep making songs. “He can continue to do whatever he wants. But don’t cause turmoil to society, respect the law — it is easy like that.”
Hun Sen laid down a clear red line in a recent speech, warning the opposition party and other potential detractors that criticism of the ruling CPP would be met with legal action or violence. The CPP has already sued one of the opposition Candlelight Party’s vice presidents for $1m in defamation damages after he claimed there were issues with the electoral process, and this week police arrested another Candlelight leader for allegedly issuing a bad cheque.
In the run-up to Cambodian elections, freedom of expression is usually constricted, and while curbs might later be relaxed, the situation never returns to how it was before, according to Nottingham University researcher Lawreniuk.
“Although it feels like authoritarian control tightens around election time, and then it’s released, actually the government’s power has always been consolidating over time,” Lawreniuk said. “That’s what has enabled this slide toward de facto one-party rule.”
The prominent rights group LICADHO says the move to take down the video infringes on its freedom of expression [Courtesy of LICADHO and CENTRAL]
Sokun, who has stayed mostly silent since the crackdown, declined to comment for Al Jazeera, saying he was now experiencing “a lot of problems in his life”. But he has denied the song ran afoul of the law.
“Nothing is wrong with the song, there’s no incitement to cause turmoil,” he told Voice of America shortly after the video was censored. “We want the authorities to find justice for the victims, but instead they take action against the one who posts [the song], I feel regret about this.”
The original posts may have been removed, but Sokun’s song continues to be shared widely across social media on other pages and platforms. If the government’s aim was to stop the music video from being seen, it has not worked, CENTRAL’s Tharo said.
“Now it has gone viral,” he said. “I think our target has been reached, because the whole idea was to create a public sentiment of remembrance [about Veng Sreng].”
Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia – Made, an Airbnb host who manages a luxury villa on Bali’s sultry west coast, spent two months looking for a gardener after the last one quit without notice.
“I advertised on Facebook five times, gradually increasing the salary until the fifth time when I found someone,” Made, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name, told Al Jazeera. “By then I had increased the salary by 60 percent.”
Made’s experience is far from unique on the popular island resort.
As tourism in Bali roars back to life after the scrapping of most COVID-19 restrictions, workers are in short supply.
More than 1.4 million foreign tourists visited Bali between January and October of 2022, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, compared with just a few dozen arrivals in 2021.
Figures for November and December have not been released, but local authorities said last month they had planned for up to 1.5 million arrivals during the Christmas period.
Nearly half of workers in Bali, where tourism accounts for 60-80 percent of the economy, reported losing income in 2020. But now, employers cannot hire fast enough.
“What we are finding is it’s really hard to find qualified and middle-ranking staff because after losing their jobs, they went back to their villages and set up little businesses selling phone cards or that sort of thing,” Will Meyrick, a Scottish chef who co-owns several restaurants in Bali, told Al Jazeera.
“They are earning the same amount of money for only a few hours of work per day, and the government is giving free online business courses. It’s the same as in the West. People who worked from home want to continue doing so. If you want to get them back you have to give them at least 50 percent more than what they were earning in 2019.”
Opportunities outside hospitality
Ina, an executive at a luxury hotel in Yogyakarta, Java, is among the many hospitality workers demanding better pay and conditions.
After the Bali hotel she was working at cut her wages by three-quarters during the first year of the pandemic, Ina found her current job in Yogyakarta at her full salary.
But no,w head hunters are trying to lure her back to Bali.
“Tourism in Bali has bounced back for the festive season and the G20, so anyone who got rid of staff during the pandemic is trying to fill those roles again,” Ina, who asked to use a pseudonym, told Al Jazeera.
“Three different hotels in Bali have offered me jobs this month. But I’m not even considering them until they offer more pay.”
Some former hospitality workers have found they can do better working in the gig economy.
Ida Bagus Nuyama, a driver for the Indonesian ride-hailing service Gojek, has doubled his monthly earnings since losing his job as a housekeeper at a villa in 2020.
“Now I earn four million rupiahs ($257) a month after paying for expenses and it’s not hard work like at the villa,” Nuyama told Al Jazeera. “I just drive around and listen to music all day.”
Job opportunities in the cruise ship industry are a further headache for employers — and a boon to jobseekers.
“We have a huge shortage of chefs in Bali,” Kit Cahill, manager of Bubble Hotel Bali, told Al Jazeera.
“You advertise, you offer the job, but they don’t show up because a lot of quality staff left to take jobs on cruise ships.”
Bali hotel managers such as Kit Cahill are struggling to find staff as tourism rebounds from the pandemic [Courtesy of Ian Neubauer]
Mitchell Anseiwciz, the Australian co-owner of Ohana’s, a beach club and boutique hotel on Nusa Lembongan, a satellite island of Bali, has had several employees quit for cruise ship jobs.
“I can’t blame them. It’s a great opportunity to see the world for people who otherwise wouldn’t travel and the cruise ships do a brilliant job of training,” Anseiwciz told Al Jazeera.
Anseiwciz said that while finding and retaining skilled staff has always been a challenge on Nusa Lembongan because of its remote location, his business has mitigated those challenges by being an “employer of choice”.
“We have a reputation for paying correctly, on time and honouring all employee entitlements like health and pension, fair work conditions, holiday pay and sick leave,” he said.
For casual workers, the incentives of the cruise industry include vastly higher salaries than they would otherwise be able to earn.
Cruise lines such as Carnival and Norwegian can pay unskilled staff $16,000-$20,000 per year — a sizable sum in Bali, where the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is less than $5,000. With only marginal living expenses, crew members are typically able to save a big chunk of their income.
“In cruise ships, the income is much, much better,” I Made Alit Mertyasa, a former guide with a Bali-based motorcycle touring company who now works as a housekeeping attendant for the Carnival Sunrise cruise ship, told Al Jazeera.
Nanny Ni Luh Putu Rustini has doubled her rates since the pandemic [Courtesy of Ian Neubauer]
Back in Bali, Ni Luh Putu Rustini, a freelance nanny who has doubled her rates since the pandemic, said that employers could no longer hope to retain staff by offering the minimum wage, which ranges from 2.4 million to 2.9 million rupiahs ($154-$186) per month depending on the district.
“During the pandemic, people would work for any money or just food,” Rustini told Al Jazeera.
“But now you have to offer 3.2 million rupiahs [$206] per month to even find someone to work and 5 to 6 million rupiahs [$321-$386] per month to keep them. It’s very easy to find a job now so people are no longer satisfied with low salaries like before.”
Strike comes as tech giant is facing disruption at its flagship iPhone plant in China after workers’ protests.
Apple workers in Australia have begun strike action, demanding better working conditions and wages, a move that could dent sales of the tech giant during the peak Christmas season.
Workers represented by Australia’s Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) had earlier this month announced a walkout from Apple’s retail outlets nationwide at 3pm local time (04:00 GMT) on December 23, with plans to stay away throughout Christmas Eve.
Earlier in June, Apple workers in Maryland, United States, became the first retail employees of the tech giant to unionise in the country as workers continued to criticise the company’s working conditions.
RAFFWU, which is at the forefront of the strike, claims an eight-year-old agreement denies workers “weekends, consecutive days off, set rosters, set days of work, 12-hour breaks between shifts, overtime rates,” among others.
“The 2014 agreement is one such agreement which pushed workers below the legal minimum,” the union alleged, demanding the iPhone maker immediately return to the table and negotiate a fair agreement.
But an amendment to ensure paid sick leave for railroad workers failed to pass the US Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
The United States Senate has passed a bill forcing railroad unions to accept a deal that would increase wages to avoid a nationwide strike that was anticipated to have devastating economic effects.
The legislation was approved on Thursday by a vote of 80 to 15 and it now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature. Railroad workers were expected to begin their strike on December 9 if a deal was not reached.
The deal is based on a previous, tentative agreement hashed out in September with the help of the Biden administration that includes higher pay but no paid sick leave.
Shortly before the vote, the Senate rejected a separate amendment that would have given railroad workers seven days of paid sick leave per year, a key demand.
With a vote of 52 to 43, the amendment received majority support, with six Republican legislators joining Democrats to vote yes. But that tally fell short of the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster during Thursday’s proceedings.
Pro-labour groups have criticised Congress’s intervention as an attack on the rights of workers to collectively bargain and a concession to railroad companies that have refused to budge on the issue of sick leave.
The administration has defended the move by pointing to the cost a railroad strike would have on the economy at a time of high inflation. A strike could roil the US supply chain and affect up to 30 percent of the country’s shipments by weight. In a speech on Thursday, Biden warned this could result in 750,000 jobs lost and a recession.
Several unions had already approved the tentative agreement, which the Biden administration helped broker and hailed as a “big win” in September.
The deal offered railroad workers a 24-percent pay increase and a $5,000 bonus over five years and comes at a time when railroad companies have slashed their workforce by more than 30 percent over the last six years. During the same period, railroad companies engaged in stock buybacks and seen their profits rise.
All 12 unions involved in the negotiations needed to approve the contract to avoid a strike. The majority did so, but members of the nation’s largest railroad union cited unmet quality-of-life issues, including demanding schedules, among their reasons for rejecting it.
Congress can resolve disputes between railroads and unions as part of its power to regulate commerce. Some legislators, such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, pushed to include paid sick leave in Thursday’s legislation.
“If you are a supporter of the working class, how are you going to vote against a proposal which provides paid sick leave to workers who have none right now?” Sanders said in an interview pushing for the rejected sick-leave amendment earlier this week.
