Employees of outsourcing company Majorel have accused Meta of not paying moderators enough and not supporting them.
Meta severed ties with a contractor that had been providing moderators for its African markets just weeks before the tech giant appeared in a Kenyan court to face charges of human trafficking and union-busting, Wired wrote on the subject.
The company has terminated its contract with outsourcing company Sama, which former employee Daniel Mothaung accused last year of imposing “unreasonable working conditions,” including irregular pay, inadequate psychiatric care and violating workers’ privacy.
But conditions at the company poised to take over the Meta contract look just as bad, if not more so. Meta has not confirmed which company will take over the new contract, but the Financial Times reported on 10 January that it is likely to be Majorel, a Luxembourg-based outsourcing company that already has content moderation contracts with Meta in Morocco and offices around the world.
TikTok and Meta moderators who have worked with Majorel described looking at hundreds of potentially traumatizing images a day without getting support from advisers. TikTok moderators in Nairobi say that while performance-based bonuses are possible, they are difficult to obtain, and those who complained about working conditions felt they were denied promotions and received poor evaluations. Moderators in the Nairobi offices also complained that they were not receiving monthly payslips to confirm their remuneration, but were instead being redirected to an online portal that was last updated in October.
Neither Meta nor Majorel responded to requests for comment.
Majorel officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, told WIRED that Meta executives visited Majorel’s Nairobi office in mid-January and told staff that the company would take on a contract with Meta.
Job listings on Fuzu.com, a platform for job postings in Africa, show that Majorel is currently hiring content moderators who speak Kirundi, Tigrinya, Oromo, Luganda, Kinyarwanda, Tswana, Afrikaans, Zulu, Amharic and Somali. Sama provides Meta moderation in most of these languages.