August 29, 2023
Remote gig work lets companies find workers anywhere in the
world, and they’re using that to depress wages as much as possible. I was fired
for speaking out about it.
Under the cover of Internet invisibility, companies around the
globe are using online gig platforms to break labor laws and violate human
rights. The so-called gig economy (more akin to digital piecework) is
exacerbating poverty and inequality, particularly in the Global South, by
circumventing existing labor standards and imposing harsh working conditions
and low wages on millions of workers. I was one of those workers, and I was
recently fired, after seven years, for speaking up.
I had been working as a researcher at the New York-based company
Ask Wonder in order to supplement my income as a freelance journalist in
Mexico. The company provides personalized research reports to mostly corporate
clients, who pay $150-200 (USD) per hour, or a custom rate, depending on the
plan they’re on. While most full-time staff and executives are based in the US,
almost all researchers live in Global South countries and earn $12.75 to $21.25
per hour, depending on tiers determined by internal auditing (those with an
auditing score of 19/20 or more are paid the highest rates). The people doing
the auditing are fellow freelance researchers, who score research based on set
criteria.
Workers like myself were being paid just 10-15% of what clients
paid for the research reports we wrote. The pay includes casual loading—a
payment that is made in addition to one’s base wage in lieu of job security and
basic benefits like sick days, retirement, health, and maternity leave. It
includes rush fees, a standard practice in freelancing to compensate for work
that has to be completed within 24-48 hours. After taking out casual loading
and rush fees, the real base hourly pay rate amounted to $8.40 to $14. The
research is high-level and specialized, requiring years of experience using
health databases and marketing reports, and most workers have one or multiple
degrees.
To get paid work, we would first have to join an online
dashboard queue and wait for an assignment. I’d often enter the queue at around
the 34th position, and I would routinely have to wait 16-20 hours before making
it to the front of the queue, at which point I would be assigned, typically,
just three hours of work. Often, I would reach the end of the queue late at
night and would have to log off to sleep and start over in the morning, so it
was common to wait up to four days before being assigned work. Other times, I
would accept work at 11PM on a Sunday night, or get up at 5AM to finish a
report. Not knowing how fast the queue would move, I would be watching it all
day, afraid to leave the house to pay a bill or run an errand; I would
regularly put my open laptop on a chair in the bathroom when I showered just in
case work arrived.
The dash queue functions as an algorithmic mechanism by which
gig and digital companies can shift enterprise risk onto workers themselves,
with no corresponding compensation. Instead of the company bearing the
responsibility for fluctuating client requests or sales numbers, workers bear
the burdens of adjusting to those fluctuations, which translate to erratic work
schedules, variable workloads and take-home pay week to week, etc. Digital
platforms promote these burdens as benefits under the banner of worker
“flexibility.” Workers like myself are meant to accept the lack of social
security, holidays, sick days, certainty of work, etc. in exchange for choosing
when we work. But at Ask Wonder, we could not choose when we would be assigned
work; and when we were given an assignment, we typically had no more than seven
hours to complete it. That’s what “flexibility” meant for us.
Gig workers are parents (usually women), migrants without access
to formal work (in Argentina and Chile, over 70% of gig workers are migrant
workers), underpaid professionals who need more income, people working from
home due to mental or physical disabilities, and unemployed people covering
costs while searching for work. It is these already-vulnerable people who bear
the brunt of fluctuating or decreased sales for companies like Ask Wonder.
There’s also a lot of unpaid labor involved in gig work. For
instance, we were often made (or else we would lose our jobs) to complete
unpaid training and testing exercises, even though labor laws in the US and in
most countries require that workers be paid for such obligatory training. Some
freelancers, moreover, were doing customer service work on a 40-hour-per-week
schedule, without receiving any full-time benefits, which is also illegal. Then
the company would hold voluntary Friday trivia sessions to try to create
“community” and loyalty.
In mid-July, the Ask Wonder senior director posted the following
message in the researchers’ Slack channel: “In today’s competitive environment,
you either change or get left behind… the question is, will you? Your value
here is your brand of creativity, the ideas you have for our business, the
strategies you have for research… It’s your choice whether or not you believe
we… value you, and whether or not you get left behind.”
I responded to that post, reminding the senior director that
there are tangible, measurable ways a company demonstrates how much it values
its workers, and that it is not simply a matter of perception for workers who
chose “whether or not [to] believe” their employer values them. “Pay, dash
waits and other material conditions are core attributes of” the workplace
relationship and determine if we feel valued, I wrote. Many of my fellow
workers expressed support for the content of my response.
Three days later, I went to log into the dash queue and the
Slack channel, only to find I’d been blocked from both, after working for the
company for over seven years. An hour later, I got an email from Ask Wonder.
With no further explanation, the email curtly informed me that “Our journey
together… has come to an end. We’ve chosen to release you from our contract
effective immediately.”
Digital abuse of the Global South
The online work market is estimated to be worth $5 billion (USD)
and served by 48 million workers, most of whom are concentrated in the Global
South. India supplies 25% of web-based labor, but garners just 3% of global
revenue from digital labor platforms. The profits are instead channeled to the
Global North. A lot of US companies are outsourcing their tech and digital work
to Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
While companies in the US and Europe rake in enormous profits,
they are able to justify and exploit atrocious conditions for digital workers
under the cover provided by the normalization and acceptance of poverty in the
Global South, coupled with the myth of lower costs of living. Sadly, this
extractive hoarding is nothing new: Rich countries drained $152 trillion (USD)
in raw materials and human labor from the Global South between 1960 and 2021,
to say nothing of the untold riches and resources that were pillaged during
centuries of colonization prior to that.
Living in a Global South country is not cheaper than living in
the Global North. Many expenses, like online subscriptions, cost the same no
matter where you live. Imported goods such as non-perishable food, hygiene
products, and electronics also cost the same. Healthcare costs vary according
to each country’s public policies, and according to individual needs and
demographics (healthcare is more expensive for women).
Rent is usually cheaper in the Global South, but quality of life
is also much lower. I love where I live, but I am also accustomed to sewage
overflowing from a manhole at the main entrance to my building, I can’t sleep
at night because water trucks are pumping water at 1AM, and I shower twice a
week due to the lack of water. Add to that the daily reality of the mafia, who
control the streets here, the impunity for perpetrators of femicide,
corruption, and more, and you can see how lower rents here are offset by other
“costs of living.” Exploitative and abusive work conditions only make things
worse.Poorer countries have also been harder hit by inflation, climate change,
and food scarcity. Lower-income earners have been more affected by inflation,
too, because they spend more of their income on essential goods and services,
which have had greater price increases than non-essentials (as Barbara
Ehrenreich famously put it, it’s quite expensive to be poor).
Online companies use gig work and the Global South to dodge work
laws
Under Article 330 of Mexico’s amended Federal Work Law, remote
or “telework” companies have to provide computers and ergonomic chairs for
their workers, and pay for their internet and a proportional amount of home
electricity bills. Many other countries have similar laws and regulations
concerning paid training, overtime, higher rates for weekend work, or
obligatory social security contributions, even for casual workers.
Instead of meeting their legal and ethical obligations, gig and
digital companies use the cover and impunity of cross-border hiring to offload
workspace costs to workers, and to offload management costs to auditing,
rating, and dash tech services. Ask Wonder and other such companies dodge their
responsibilities by classifying workers as “self-employed,” yet such workers
are denied the autonomy attributed to entrepreneurs or genuinely independent
contractors when companies use evaluations and algorithmic work assignment and
monitoring systems like dash queues. Small business owners set their own
prices, while companies from Wonder to Uber decide pay rates, because they are,
in fact, employers—they’ve just found, through technology, a convenient means
of evading all the responsibilities of employers, including adhering to basic
labor laws or internationally recognized human rights. Firing someone for
speaking up about pay rates, for instance, is a violation of the right to free
speech (Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
15 articles a day
Mateo is another professional in Mexico who had to turn to gig
work to supplement his income. (Out of fear of retaliation from his former
employer, Mateo’s real name has been replaced with a pseudonym.) For TRNN, I
interviewed him in July. Mateo was hired by Alivia Media via LinkedIn in 2021,
and he worked for them for almost a year. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, the
content company hires people from around Latin America.
Mateo was initially told to write 10 short articles a day, six
days a week, for which he would be paid $500 (USD) a month, with no other
benefits. “As the months passed, the amount of work increased, but not the pay.
Eventually, they were asking for 15 articles, and they increased the
requirements for each article; wanting more links, more SEO,” Mateo said.
In addition to the articles,“They also made me watch videos all
day… The money wasn’t enough to cover my expenses,” he said, explaining that
the company made him watch the videos and Facebook content so the view numbers
would go up.
“I felt very exploited,” he continued. “I basically had to work
12 or 13 hours a day. The boss was very rude. And one day, they fired me,
because I updated some of the older articles. They tried to not pay me for the
last month—but I spoke up, and they did.”
Insider Inc. (formerly Business Insider), the New York-based,
majority German-owned media company, has also been using underhanded strategies
to deny its Mexican workers basic rights. Workers recently took to social media
to denounce Insider’s labor practices, saying that the company uses harassment
and intimidation to avoid its severance pay obligations, that it doesn’t pay
overtime, that racial and class-based discrimination is rampant, that it pays a
lower wage than it advertises for, and that it even registers workers as having
a lower salary than they really do when filing information with the social
security system, which means the company has to pay less.
There are countless other examples. US and Canadian call center
companies frequently seek remote bilingual workers in Mexico, whom they can pay
much less. TTEC, a US customer service tech company, recently advertised
openings for workers “available to work any shift, including nights and
weekends,” for a “maximum” monthly pay of 9,700 pesos, or $560 (USD). As Kevin,
a gig worker in Kenya doing transcription work, told Alex J. Wood and Mark
Graham at the New Internationalist, “It’s so insecure… unless you have ten
clients; then you can breathe.” A Nigerian man working as a virtual assistant
for a US company told Graham and Wood that working all night and keeping pace
with irregular work hours was leaving him exhausted.
The issue isn’t that companies have a global workforce; the
issue is that they discriminate by paying people in other countries much less
and making them work under worse conditions, even though those same pay rates
and working conditions wouldn’t be tolerated by full timers in the same
countries where those companies are based.
Covertly creating poverty and disposable workers
A few months ago at Wonder, one of the administrators posted a
survey in the gig workers’ Slack channel asking for feedback on their plan to
begin a monthly competition to reward good work. Because responses were
displayed anonymously, a number of people responded truthfully, after months
and years of silence: they didn’t want competitions, they wanted decent pay.
The precariousness of the work, and the devaluing of workers
(despite the company claiming the contrary) reflected in both pay and the way
it would so quickly fire people, cultivates a constant state of fear and
self-censorship. That, combined with the largely invisible nature of digital
Global South workers, makes it hard for digital workers to organize and defend
themselves, and US-based digital companies are taking advantage of that
situation.
By abusing Global South workers and paying them much less, these
digital companies are reinforcing poverty and magnifying inequality. Borders,
supposedly irrelevant to the Internet, are cemented by such pay gaps. Increased
labor precariousness has been demonstrated to increase poverty, while informal
employment—persistently high in the Global South, and severely exacerbated by
the digital economy—clearly contributes to inequality.
There is no law of nature that low prices and low wages in
Mexico go hand in hand, or that one necessarily causes (and justifies) the
other. These conditions are the result of global power imbalances. Dignified
living for everyone involves ending poverty, rather than entitled discourse
that the Global South deserves less.
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