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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

> Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.

I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher.

For job that while psychologically scarring for some, does not require any education aside from being able to read, that really doesn't seem that bad.

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To all the pissy commentators on here - Average Monthly HOUSEHOLD Income in Kenya is around $145/month [0]

The fact that Sama's STARTING SALARY is almost $300/month is staggering.

That's the equivalent of being a SWE in the US (around $140k median salary) when the median salary in this country is around $65-70k/yr.

Also, at $300/month I could hire plenty of English speaking moderators and labelers in Central/Southern Phillipines or Madhya Pradesh/Bihar and not have to deal with level of instability Kenya has. They're honestly lucky Sama even chose Kenya as a base to operate instead of going with Infosys or the Pinoy equivalent (if anyone has experience with the PH BPO industry, I'd love to learn more)

[0] - https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/bd/economy/kenyans-avera...

Average and median are different.

Median is an average, just like the mode, arithmetic mean, geometric mean, harmonic mean, etc., are, even though most of the time when “average” is used without specifying which one, its actually the arithmetic mean.

It most definetly is.

And given that Kenya's Gini coefficient is 51.3, that means the median Kenyan household is earning less than $145/month, which only shows that Sama is paying competitively at the national level.

Income distributions have fat tails, so the median is less than the average, which only amplifies grandparent poster's point.

It doesn't look like he couldn't have left the job he found unsuitable. Especially in Kenya, where the rule of law and contract enforcement are not that stringent... If I don't like blood, I better not work at a hospital or a butcher shop. Content moderation is hard and it's not for everyone.

What instability does Kenya have? There are sporadic minimal localized protests about the cost of living that happen now and then, but nothing on the scale of the animosity that exists between different religious groups in India (that flares up now and then, according to what I see in the news, which I recognize could be leading to me doing what I'm accusing you of). And $300 per month is too low, even in Kenya. That's what I earned in my first underpaid practically-an-unpaid-internship straight-out-of-university job 15 years ago.

Source: I live in Nairobi.

You are correct. There isn't any significant instability.

I brainfarted and typed that instead of intertia and can't edit it now that the timer has passed.

Kenya is definetly on a solid path developmentally.

Though I'd be curious if someone who did a BA or BSc in a non-STEM major from a non-target university could get a $300/mon starting salary in Kenya.

Those tend to be the kinds of people who end up working as labelers in PH and IN, and I'd assume it's similar in Kenya.

I do agree, there is significant unemployment, and it's possible that outside Nairobi, without rent and growing some food for yourself, $300 could go a long way.

I was speaking more in terms of "should", not "is". I think most semi-skilled jobs are probably paid around that, but it honestly doesn't compute to my privileged self how someone could live on that, with the rampant inflation.

Ok! That's fair!

And yea, inflation seems to be hellish outside the US+Canada.

Companies like SamaSource or Infosys can take advantage of that arbitrage by paying below a living wage because there are enough "desperate" or un/underemployed people who have higher education but aren't getting jobs that are paying a realistic/living wage.

I've seen this issue play out all over the developing world (India, Philippines, Vietnam, China, Thailand, Brazil, etc).

Millions of people in those countries are now living lives their grandparents could only dream of, education is much more democratized, and economies at a macro level are better than they were a generation ago - yet white collar/college educated salaries are still stuck at the 2000s or 2010s level because income rate conversions dropped or commodities have inflated. People are earning the same amount of money in Rupees, Yuan, Reales, Dong, etc as they would have 10-15 years ago for the same white collar job, but all of society has become much more expensive.

(I have edited to flesh these out a bit more, but have stopped since there is a reply)

I've kinda waffled in my opinion of outsourcing through the years, but one issue I keep coming back to is that you can trivially view it as massive, intentional wage suppression.

"It's cheaper to live there" yeah, I wonder why that might be. The numerous unbelievably wealthy global companies all doing this in the same very specific areas surely have the area's best interests at heart, and want to raise its standard of living, so it must be something else.

"No education required" because they don't have enough to fund education or provide alternatives that could let them fight back on this exploitation.

And it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere, because companies can always just offshore work that their peons are demanding fair wages for.

---

And, yes, it also brings a lot of outside wealth into those areas. At high human cost, but still.

idk. I do find myself leaning more and more towards it being almost universally a bad thing though. Particularly when they keep saying it's a highly exploitative thing, when they manage to bust through to international news.

It's almost exactly a good thing though.

>"It's cheaper to live there" yeah, I wonder why that might be.

It's incoherent reply - if a job does not require high qualifications, besides language knowledge, going for cheapest place is the obvious thing.

>The numerous unbelievably wealthy global companies all doing this in the same very specific areas surely have the area's best interests at heart, and want to raise its standard of living, so it must be something else.

They are all paying more than local alternatives, thereby increasing local wages.

> "No education required" because they don't have enough to fund education

3 dollars per hour is more than Polish minimum wage 10 years ago, and we funded education with much, much less. But I guess no foreign company should invest here? It would leave us in a way better place for sure.

>And it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere, because companies can always just offshore work that their peons are demanding fair wages for.

Once the same propaganda you're spewing was playing for Asia. It turned out globalization really made them comparatively rich. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/...

Now it's time for Africa. The same argument is now even more incoherent - where's the cheaper place?

>And, yes, it also brings a lot of outside wealth into those areas. At high human cost, but still.

At the cost of... work.

Pretty much all this summarizes as "yes, it's valuable work to the individual".

Broadly I agree - a lot of it is clearly a pretty big positive.

But that doesn't make it not exploitative. For the same reasons that wealthy places don't generally allow child labor and have worker safety and environmental protections... but outsourced stuff frequently does not. The companies outsourcing are clearly aware of this, but most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.

Not all of them! There are clear benefits to colocating labor (manufacturing in particular) and some legitimately seem to be spending the money and effort to make sure it's being done ethically. A strong majority very clearly does not though, and outsourced moderation seems to consistently fall into the uncaring category.

> Pretty much all this summarizes as "yes, it's valuable work to the individual".

Individuals are making up the societies. Few dozen of people working relatively high income, are lifting whole countries up - that's how globalization have worked.

>But that doesn't make it not exploitative. For the same reasons that wealthy places don't generally allow child labor and have worker safety and environmental protections... but outsourced stuff frequently does not. The companies outsourcing are clearly aware of this, but most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.

Now you're not actually accusing them of anything, but _comparing_ to other potential bad things.

Those jobs aren't pleasant - as is working 12 hour shift in an ironworks - but they are damn better than subsistence farming and dying when there's draught one year.

And after those bad jobs, come progressively better ones.

No, I'm rather explicitly accusing them.

>most do or allow things that are blatantly illegal where they're headquartered.

Much of this would not be possible on a fair playing field. It happens because the companies outsourcing wield immensely disproportionate power, so they can get away with it. If "maybe we shouldn't let them kill people and dump the trash in their water supply" means slowing things down, I suspect it would be a net benefit, even after losing most of the positives it brings in.

I recognize it's complex and opinions differ, of course. Not claiming I alone am right or that my opinion won't change.

> The numerous unbelievably wealthy global companies all doing this in the same very specific areas surely have the area's best interests at heart, and want to raise its standard of living, so it must be something else.

That’s the point of capitalism—-it works if you have only your own interests at heart. Wealthy Global Company A enters a market and makes huge profits. Wealth Global Company B (and maybe C, D, E, F, etc) sees they’re making those profits, and enters that market too. Workers then have choices of where they can work and can demand higher wages and better conditions.

> it also provides leverage for suppressing wages elsewhere

Country A has average wages of $40/hr, and Country B has average wages of $0.40/hr. If companies in Country A move some jobs to Country B and wages in Country A fall to $39/hr and wages in Country B rise to $1.40/hr, but prices also fall in Country A to make up for the fall in lost wages, is the world really worse off?

> At high human cost

What’s the human cost of not having available jobs? It means children don’t get schooling or vaccines. No access to social mobility. If you get sick from easily curable diseases, you’ll likely just die. No chance of retirement—you just work in the fields until you die.

If you want to see the benefits of “outsourcing” these types of low skill jobs, look at Bangladesh. The country has gone from one of the poorest places on Earth, to closing in on middle income status in about two decades.

> but prices also fall in Country A to make up for the fall in lost wages

I feel like the problem is that this part is usually skipped over.

> If companies in Country A move some jobs to Country B [...] is the world really worse off?

If the only change is salaries then no. My only objection to offshoring is when the conditions the workers are expected to endure are clearly far below what we'd consider minimally reasonable in developed countries - my basic rule is that "would people still hypothetically buy your product if they had walk through your factory first and observe those conditions first hand?". And no I don't think it's really enough to say "well at least it's better than subsistence farming" - in that case the conditions aren't (by and large) being imposed on them by others. It's a good thing corporations from developed economies are able to offer new employment opportunities in poorer countries, but for the sake of our own humanity, we still need to treat employees with the same basic decency as we would if they were in our own country.

idk man psychologically scarring sounds pretty bad to me that's not normally a thing people are wanting from their job.

Emergency responders have to deal with what I'd imagine the typical person would consider traumatic but we've agreed that their jobs are necessary in order for society to be efficacious. Not everyone has the same physiological response to disturbing content and it would appear people that take up these distressful emergency jobs are less likely to ever even have any traumatic stress responses in some studies IIRC.

Maybe up to 33% of the world's population would find reading text triggers traumatic stress responses if I had to make an educated guess - not to diminish their experiences. But I'd imagine most people would just find the job boring or somewhat nauseating.

Should be trivial to significantly reduce human cost without completely removing their jobs anyway.

You don't perceive any significant difference between emergency work and AI training moderation?

One of them seems to have actually traumatic situations.

The potential harms of reviewing fucked up material even fictional are well attested. It's factored into law enforcement & child porn investigations and has been for years.

I am assuming you knew that though, and just enjoyed this little moment of belittling someone for their suffering. Hope it was nice. Hope you're having the day you wanted to have.

I really don't know it, because I truly cannot imagine how text could cause trauma to a normal person in the position of a third-party. And I'm assuming normal here, because they decided to do it as a job.

They had no advance warning of what to expect:

    The moderators say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support.

As noted above and below, it wasn't just text:

    The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts, and some images, many depicting graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality and incest, the petitioners say.

> because I truly cannot imagine

You're not alone, there's likely a higher than normal percentage of HN'rs that have difficulty imagining how other people react and feel.

I don't think anyone would dispute that these are not decent wages in Kenya.

What is embarrassing is that the corporation seeks places where wages (relative to western wages) are this low (for what also amounts to the bullshit work).

What's embarrassing about it? Don't you shop around when you need to hire a contractor or buy a car?

Buying/paying local helps my local economy.

I think there's times where this makes sense and times where it doesn't. Your local economy is probably better served by being paid to do something else. They probably have a comparative advantage at doing another activity. You'd be better off paying into your local economy where it makes strategic sense.

We're not talking about exporting critical manufacturing skills here. We're talking about doing a crappy job that's only worth doing and paying for if it's dirt cheap.

“We're not talking about exporting critical manufacturing skills here.”

True. Those critical skills have already been exported from the US.

Yes, except for some higher end defense tech (minus semiconductor).

No it doesn't

IMO You should be upset with capitalism, not the company.

Why not both? Capitalism for encouraging this behavior and the companies for engaging in it.

Yes, it’s terrible that people in low income countries have jobs.

If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced? Pay people what they are worth, not based on where they choose to live.

> If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced?

These people weren't "sent to work in Kenya." They already live in Kenya, and are getting wages that are typical of jobs in Kenya.

in general, there's an economic argument to be made that if you pay disproportionate wages for unskilled labor then there will likely be less skilled labor (doctors, engineers, etc.) in the market which can cripple the ability of the area to grow past unskilled work

If a worker effectively performs the required tasks for $1.46/hr, this demonstrates the work's intrinsic value quite explicitly. The onus to make a higher wage to improve their lifestyle is on the individual, given the freedom they have to allocate their time as they see fit. It's not incumbent upon others or businesses to pay more for tasks if a lower-cost, higher-value solution exists.

> It's not incumbent upon others or businesses to pay more for tasks if a lower-cost, higher-value solution exists.

in the US, we've collectively decided (through elections) that there should be a minimum wage, from which it follows that we've also decided that the "wages have no bottom" argument, i.e. they should be able to go as low as possible without limit, is unethical and detrimental to society.

Yes that’s true. I’m not making the argument that “wages have no bottom”. As another poster has noted, the wage paid in this case is above the local minimum. But as the US participates in global trade, solutions that are extremely uncompetitive like those that rely on relatively higher costs of US unskilled labor, are bound to not be chosen. Forcing the decision makers to use sub-optimal higher cost solutions ultimately makes them uncompetitive and increases the risk of failure. I haven’t seen any logic to justify that.

The minimum wage is zero. 'Minimum wage' laws don't have anything to do with the actual minimum wage. They forbid employment at wages within a range between the minimum wage and a certain so-called 'minimum wage'. People that would otherwise be paid within that range instead get paid the actual minimum wage: nothing.

you're making a common argument in a very roundabout way that "the minimum wage leads to unemployment", which is not borne out by any data whatsoever

> Pay people what they are worth

There is no "what they are worth". There's competition for employees and what they can accept. The same force drives you being paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's not an abstract "what you're worth". They aren't being kind to you. They're just paying what you'll accept, exactly as they are paying those people what they would accept.

Not to say companies couldn't be a little kinder to some people, particularly when it would cost them so very little. I just think phrases like "what you're worth" only obscures what's actually happening, and makes it harder to understand it.

This is simplistic thinking. There is a reason there are minimum wage laws. While those rates are usually woefully low, there was a reason for them to be enacted.

Certainly we can agree that a person’s “worth” from a full-time job be able to live in an inexpensive 1 br apartment, pay utilities, afford medical care, eat healthy food and purchase basic hygienic items, transportation to work, maybe 1-2 weeks of vacation every year?

You would not take this option because you prefer living in the U.S. (or wherever) and being employed there, but that's not the relevant counterfactual for the people doing this work, and it seems like it's preferable to other options they actually have, else it would hardly attract workers.

Don't get me wrong, companies have an obligation to guarantee some level of workplace safety and healthy conditions etc.! But arguing that it's exploitation to buy labour where it is more affordable is plain silly.

That Kenyan workers don't have more favorable counterfactuals for employment doesn't place companies' behavior beyond critique, because the (collective) behavior of companies that employ workers in Kenya is partially determinative of what the counterfactuals themselves are.

If you fall off a bridge into a river and are drowning, and I'm the only person around, it's still exploitation if I try to make you promise to pay me $10k before I'll throw you the life buoy. It doesn't matter that, counterfactually, the alternative is death. It doesn't matter that you'd be far worse off if I wasn't around to offer you my help (at the maximum price I can extract).

Likewise, the fact that many Kenyans have no strong employment prospects doesn't mean that companies moving their labor to Kenya aren't wrongfully exploiting the situation. And that's leaving aside the fact that centuries of exploitation have created the economic conditions in Kenya. Benefiting from that is something akin to making money off the guy in the river, and it turns out your dad is the one who pushed him in to begin with.

My perspective on this is more like "the locals will work x amount of time to get by either way, and you are offering them to work x amount of time and get a better living, or maintain their standard of living at lower x." (replace "time" with "time x enjoyment lost from missed leisure time", i.e. opportunity cost of time, if you will). You win because you get the work done cheaper or get to get more work done than you would "back home", the worker wins because they have a better alternative they didn't have before.

This hinges on the fact that I assume that if you take a job for OpenAI over, say, working at the local market, or your local family business, or doing subsistence farming, ... (I don't know the employment history of Kenyans doing this) you do so because you consider the job at OpenAI, in your own judgment, the better alternative. This assumes some amount of agency in the decision, yes — I would not argue the same if you e.g. forced prisoners to do the work for below minimum wage or whatever and then went and said "hey at least they get two dollars a day more than zero" (I exaggerate). Also, again, this assumes you don't mislead them about the mental toll and then hold them "captive" with sketchy contracts or whatever.

It also seems to me that you have an underlying assumption that companies in the global north could collectively decide to outsource as much labor as they are currently outsourcing, at wage levels matching their "home countries", which I don't think is economically true.

As for your analogy, I think I see the equivalence you draw, but I'm not sure I agree with it. For me the most natural read would be that the "payment" here is the workers' time, the ring you throw is the pay for the job. In that case, the payment (time spent doing some kind of work) happens either way (weird world where you always have to pay for getting saved by some strange law of the universe, I guess), and you're just offering a better ring, or the same ring for less time.

This is incoherent. If Kenyans don't have strong employment prospects then offering them jobs isn't "wrongfully exploiting the situation". It's the exact opposite: it is providing them employment prospects they'd otherwise lack.

The economic conditions in Kenya were not caused by 'centuries of exploitation' but by millennia of non-development.

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