I'm from the Philippines and 6 day week is frowned upon. I can't believe Facebook has tolerated this. As with other countries, we only work for 5 days. Corporate greed is taking advantage of the small rates here.
I know outsourcing is good here. I know a lot of small startups here who does not take advantage of the cheap talent rates here. But this is Facebook. They preach "work life balance" on their blogs but seem to tolerate modern slavery here in my country. This is wrong. I hope this gets to the front page of your blogs and newspaper here.
Things like this bother me.....why insist upon 6 day weeks, what difference does it make to Facebook really, compared to just hiring a few more people? It's almost like they're not happy unless their employees are unhappy.
If its like the outsourced firms I've worked with at my employers, unless you make specific clauses in your contract about how the employees of your contractor will be treated, the managers of these would just pocket any money given to treat the employees better and continue on as normal
The pay is decent enough. But the job description for a kid straight out of college, filtering disturbing videos is not something I would recommend. And imagine doing this for 6 days per week with a quota. And you get fired for not getting the quota.
This terror, fake news, live disturbing videos has been going on for Facebook for years now, I think they should have developed some kind of machine learning to at least detect and reduce a sort of percentage than get this fresh college kids to filter them. Instead they prioritize releasing new emotions stickers and transforming their messenger to a Snapchat clone.
I think if they do have automations, they wouldn't outsource it here to us. Plus employing an additional 3,000 is not giving me any belief that they do have some filtering mechanisms.
They definitely do and are working on it. But it's not perfect and eventually you need human judgement. Even if it's just for the initial data training set.
Compare wages, living conditions, and working conditions.
Intentional hyperbole: being forced into wage slavery in order to afford basic food and clean drinking water is a little different than taking a driverless car to the Googleplex on a Saturday morning for free breakfast and a game of ping pong.
But why compare to America ? To MANY, It's not the best country to live in. Plus, what good is having modern job in a modern world that sucks up so much time for work ? Can't we get a bit of the good parts of the Star Trek utopia :) ?
We're not America. Some may work the same as 6 day work week, but still our rate is like 1/12 of how much you guys own in an hour. Shit, some gringos even asked me $400 to have them develop an app for them. That is like one day for an engineer from Silicon Valley.
I was about to throw away this napkin. Glad I hung on to it for a little longer. When I see things like this, I often ask myself "Why would people take this job?" and some times I find it's because it pays very well from the perspective of the local economy.
1. £1.36 = 86.68 Philippine Peso (according to Google)
2. average annual family income ... 267 thousand pesos [0]
3. 267000 / 2 = ~133500 yearly person income
4. There are about 2,087 work hours in a year [1]
5. yearly/hours 133500/2087 = ~64 Philippine Peso
* Average Guesstimated Salary: 64 Philippine Peso/hour
* Facebook Censurer Take Home: 87 Philippine Peso/hour
That's about 30% more then the average take home.
Let me crunch the numbers again for the top 10% earners [0] bracket.
1. (786000/2)/2087 = 188 Philippine Peso/hour
That means a person in a top 10% earners household is only making about (188/87) 2.16 times what you make.
According to Investopedia the "average household income for the top 10% of earners is higher, at $295,845". which means that running the same numbers...
1. (295845/2)/2087 = 70
2. 70 / 2.16 = $32 USD/HR
Since they are earning 2.16 times less then the top 10% bracket I'd guess that taking (top 10% hourly wage / 2.16) would give you a localized approximation for your economy. Doing this job is the local equivalent of ~$32 USD/HR in USA money for reading Facebook posts and deciding if it is terrorism or not.
I know I've definitely gotten some stuff wrong here. Please correct me if you know better.
If you get 10% over the "average annual family income" of a USA family, but you live in San Francisco Area, you are screwed.
I understand your point, but "Doing this job is the local equivalent of ~$32 USD/HR in USA money for reading Facebook posts and deciding if it is terrorism or not." it's a big jump into conclusions without having more information. With 300,000 km2 and 100 million citizens probably requires more analysis. So maybe is a good job, it doesn't look like a bad one. Bud the "equivalence" is not as easy to get to.
'average' and 'what factor off 10% of US earners' contain some assumptions about distributions that make this a less informative comparison than it might seem. You probably also want 'censor'.
Economists have various ways of comparing purchasing power, where a particular income fits in a given distribution, etc, etc. It's probably more sensible to dig up one of their metrics - the chances you're going to come up with a good one on a napkin seem low.
I don't think anyone is disputing the "benefit" to the worker, from their perspective. The outrage is that corporations take advantage. They refuse to employ US employees because they would have to pay reasonable wages, provide healthcare, offer stock options, etc. So they outsource to skirt millions on all of the above.
I'm really sick and tired of "but they're happy to have the abysmally low-paying job, because in their currency it's above-average!". Companies like Facebook aren't outsourcing to "give jobs to the needy"; they only do it because it's disgustingly cheap for them. The destitute, desperately grasping at the crumbs dropped on the floor by the rich, is not a positive thing. It's depressing.
What's next? Do we defend companies who hold immigrants' passports hostage, enslaving people indefinitely with no way out? After all, they pay X% above average! Those workers should be thankful just to have a job! Who cares that they'll never see their family again, and likely die while living in squalor?
I agree with you. I don't think it's right but we're in a shitty situation now. You have the following choices:
1. Choose to fire the now reasonably well off employees forcing them to go back to a previous lines of employment that were less lucrative
2. Force companies to stop outsourcing labor which will in turn make it more likely for other countries to create similar sanctions like this against you.
3. Make companies pay foreign employees a "reasonable" rate based on local offering thereby making these jobs infinitely more lucrative then even well-educated professions and ultimately tilting their economy in an unwanted direction.
We live in times where economic action is also foreign policy. How would you like it if a country richer then yours started offering jobs for 100x the average wage that you are used to? Would you try and get one of those jobs? Would people start expecting that wage in other places? Would this change the way the market behaves?
> The destitute, desperately grasping at the crumbs dropped on the floor by the rich, is not a positive thing
I wouldn't call the Philippines destitute. I know a few people who'd be offended by that characterization. I'd also ask: why are these people doing these jobs if it's not better then what they were doing before? Better either being higher pay, easier labor, or more enjoyable work environment.
The only question is "why are rich American companies outsourcing to the poor?". There's no reason why they have to. They can entirely afford paying full market wage in the US. If it's acceptable to outsource, then it should be legal to hire within the US for the same salary. Let Americans make $2/hour if that is the acceptable rate.
One "reason" would be that FB derives the most income from the US, especially compared to the US. They certainly benefit from the US education system, which at least in part benefits from the infrastructure and social environment in the US that was created and paid for over a long period of time by essentially all Americans.
In the past, you wouldn't even have to ask this question, you would employ Americans as a matter of principle, as a matter of pride, to give back and reinforce this shared infrastructure and society for the benefit of future generations.
But then, none of this really matters in the new and improved globalist every man for himself world. (While the executives preach the virtues of socialist values.)
>If it's acceptable to outsource, then it should be legal to hire within the US for the same salary.
That's not how economies work.
> Let Americans make $2/hour if that is the acceptable rate.
I see no reason what that should be disallowed in my moral structure. If you don't think that's a reasonable wage don't take that job. You won't see any takers.
(a) They do receive reasonable wages. Better than the average in fact as the parent articulated. If you paid them US wages you would be completely distorting the local economy as suddenly you've created a community of millionaires. Do you really want medical/law students etc dropping out to become Facebook moderators because the money is so much better ?
(b) There is universal health care in Phillipines. Companies paying for health care is a US concept that doesn't apply in many other countries.
(c) They are employees of Accenture not Facebook. And not sure where you get the idea that all employees get stock options. That's something that again is a foreign concept in most places in the world.
The low wage isn’t surprising given the typical take-home pay in the Philippines. But it’s a force multiplier in depressing work when they have to filter through a lot of material that’s potentially traumatizing to a moderate Filipino that’s probably not mentally fit to handle this.
Frankly the amount of traumatizing material they are exposed to is probably pretty low. They aren't watching this materiel start to finish by the articles own admission they only have a few seconds to make a judgement. 99% of terrorist propaganda videos can be spotted by only watching the first few frames of video. They all have the same music / tone / symbolism.
Not sure if you've been to Phillipines but it's a pretty unusual country. According to Wikipedia there are over 2000 inhabited islands so the regional differences are quite stark.
Blanket statements like this don't make much sense.
I've been here for 31 years. Yet to see violence and dead bodies in person. I don't know where you got this. You need to stop reading news, get the fuck out of your chair and come here.
Based on that logic we should outsource this work to Syrian refugees. C'mon, think a bit harder before posting. :(
This sort of content is troubling for anyone to be exposed to - that's the whole reason why Facebook has to filter it. How can you possibly justify it by saying someone should already be desensitized? To child porn? Beheadings?
Imagine this is your only impression of the west- you go to work and get to see 4chan as a constant stream on a daily basis, without the larger context.
My argument is that this outsourcing has a hidden cost, of radicalizing a anti-western, anti-captialistic youth wherever it happens. This is not just some shit-job exported- this is a problem creator at its finest.
This is hurting progress in this countrys. This is supporting religions who where constantly in decline. Sorry facebook, this might be a solution for you, but for the rest of humanity, this is a problem.
> Facebook employs hundreds of young Filipinos - some with limited English skills - to remove offensive and terror related material from the site
1984 was wrong on this one. The censorship doesn't come from an all knowledgable goberment, but it comes from low-cost teenagers.
What impact is going to have into the global communications to introduce such a specific bias?
What impact is going to have in the psychology of these young employees, that already live in a violent country?
> These people don't make any individual decision.
Yes, they have. If it were possible to fully automate the task, Facebook will not hire humans. From the article: "The moderators have to check posts that have been flagged up and make a snap judgement on whether they should be taken down.". Some videos are probably easy to identify, but the world is a scale of grays.
> Will young Philippinos empathize with terrorist causes after reading too much?
I didn't say anything about terrorism. I was talking about "One ex-manager who helped recruit Facebook moderators said staff were often traumatised by material.". Sorry for not being more clear.
Stressful traumatizing jobs can have a worse impact in a poor country that in one where there is more help available.
I'm pretty much done with Facebook for good. They simply don't give a shit about the rampant racism, sexism, and homophobia going on all over their site. Reporting comments gets you nowhere. Calling out these idiots gets you banned. And now, come to find out, they're paying their moderators subsistence wages to do all the work of policing the place. I'm moving on.
I know outsourcing is good here. I know a lot of small startups here who does not take advantage of the cheap talent rates here. But this is Facebook. They preach "work life balance" on their blogs but seem to tolerate modern slavery here in my country. This is wrong. I hope this gets to the front page of your blogs and newspaper here.