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Comment by bluetwo | Hacker News Reader

Was just talking last week that the last thing any of these large internet companies wants to do is hire a large room filled with low paid workers to do anything, especially here in the US.

If they are making this move they must see some large liability looming on the horizon.

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Politically that's a great idea. Put those large rooms in the right states and you can get favorable bills passed.

and some tax breaks I bet

Seems to me that keeping the labor cost reasonable isn't really that difficult. The only real problem is concealing the process well enough that it doesn't provoke outrage. Understand as you read what follows and the hairs on your neck stand up that this is --- after enough layers of BS are applied --- very close to what will evolve.

Just yesterday we read about how Facebook 'helps' marketers 'track when people were feeling overwhelmed, worthless or insecure' [1]. Focusing on people that exhibit this frequently, particularly if they're being bullied, would catch a bunch of these online suicide cases without squandering labor on everyone else.

Then all you need to do is invent enough euphemisms to enable a degree of profiling; the rape streams that go unreported for days are almost always gangbangers. Should be a trivial job to factor that group out, by their grammar alone.

There you go; the chronically depressed types and the gangbangers account for probably 95% of the headline making cases Facebook has to worry about. Focus a small workforce on those two groups (and possibly a few others; extremists, etc.) and Bob's your uncle.

[1] http://www.moneyandmentalhealth.org/facebook-mental-health/

I didn't understand the "especially here in the US" part of your comment. Can you explain?

its not like low paid and probably part time workers have many employment rights in the USA

The minimum wage itself is a barrier here, along with overtime regulations and a host of other things designed to prevent employer abuse.

That must be a very small host when compared to other first world countries

Compare to Bangladesh, Vietnam, or the Phillipines. Low-wage American workers are not very competitive in a global marketplace. If the cost of shipping and importing goods and services < the cost of complying with U.S. regulations and paying American workers, there's every economic reason to have the work sent out to less regulated, lower-paid regimes.

The way to fix this is to even the playing field by ensuring that it's not cheaper to pay to have this done overseas. Otherwise, the "American-made" companies just have to hope that's enough to convince customers to help them make up the gap in profits ... and it's usually not.

That would require a thoughtful examination of our housing policies in the US that are designed first and foremost to drive up property as an asset class. It's probably the single biggest driver of inflation in the US that necessitates increases in wages.

Both part time and low paid workers are protected by the same labor laws as full time workers in the U.S.

Maybe I am not understanding, can you say what rights are you speaking of specifically?

They would have more protections and rights than an "offshore" employee would have I imagine.

You have to work more than a certain number of hours for ObamaCare to cover you.

Its why Googles quality raters have been put on part time working Bad employers gaming the system its one of the drivers behind trump and brexit

Western workers tend be expensive.

$$$

Which FB has no shortage of though, no?

Capitalism operates on the basis of greed, not need. If a desired result can be accomplished at lower cost, it generally will be. Firms largely concern themselves only with first-order costs, leaving second-order costs to government, not least because the more abstract the nature of the cost, the fewer people are able to comprehend its existence.

If you're interested in this topic you may enjoy Ronald Coase's economic essay The Problem of Social Cost (which brought him a Nobel prize) and his body of work in general.

They don't want politics to get active to interfere with their business.

I think it's a fairly common recent strategy to hire a big pool of low cost workers with the intention of gradually phasing them out as ML tech improves.