Didn't read the article but the answer is - yes.
The "Ugandans" part is superfluous.
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Are tech giants exploiting ~~Ugandans?~~
We all knew that when India and southeast Asia got too expensive for this kind of bottom-feeding work, it was going to move to Africa. It's the endless search for the absolute cheapest labour.
Executives at a manufacturing company I formerly worked for hashed out 10 year plan due to COVID.
Step 1 get out of China asap. By going to Malaysia or Vietnam.
Step 2 start working on a presence in West Africa to be setting up shop by 2028. That will help avoid wage growth that likely happens in Malaysia and Vietnam.
I was asked to help lead pieces of that transition to Malaysia. Was so icky. They talked about "labor" like the proposed employees weren't even people. Just tools to utilize.
That's why it's called "human resources", you get it now
Is this corporation exploiting poorer countries in order to maximize profits? The answers will always be yes.
Is this corporation exploiting
That's all you need to ask. And the answer will always be yes.
Poorer countries
This part is superfluous. Hell, they'll exploit rich countries, too.
in order to maximize profits?
Most of the time this is yes, but not always. Sometimes they exploit people just because they can or it's just the way they've always done things. Those are the really disturbing ones. Exploiting for profit we can all understand even if we find it revolting, but we have a problem understanding when it happens because no one ever said anything or "it's just always how we did it" or some other such reason.
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
Ah yes, Sama, I knew I'd heard that name before. The same Sama that paid its workers $2 an hour to be traumatised through tasks like labelling of harmful images, up to and not limited to '“C3” images (including bestiality, rape, and sexual slavery,) and “V3” images depicting graphic detail of death, violence or serious physical injury'.
This was under a contract for OpenAI, which was paying Sama $12.50 an hour for the work.
Sounds about right
Yup
Bram Moolenaar is rolling in his grave
Are \ exploiting ? The answer is always, 100% of the time yes. If you're not ultra rich or a corporation, than someone is exploiting you. Doesn't matter whether you're from the poorest nation in the world or the richest, if you're not in that exclusive club, you're being ground down for your constituent parts by it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Okello leads a large team of workers who click millions of times, around the clock and on a piecework basis: The processes have to be run until the car knows the traffic rules and the drone knows which apples are ripe.
Large corporations seeking cheap labor have turned to East African countries such as Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda English is widely spoken, the internet is stable and the time difference to Europe is minimal.
The situation is acute in the north of the country where a bloody civil war had raged for more than 20 years and numerous aid organizations withdrew.
Sama's first office was housed in containers next to the university campus in Gulu, the largest city in the northern Uganda, Bruno Kayiza recalls.
He spent four years at Sama teaching robots how to pick only ripe apples before becoming a team leader who monitored the quality of his colleagues' work.
A few months ago, DW spoke to dismissed employees of Sama who were traumatized by their work of flagging depictions of violence on Facebook.
The original article contains 769 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
just goes to show even india is too expensive for this shit, which is saying something given the dependency a large number of big tech companies have on cheap IST labor
They'll keep moving their contracts to the cheapest location possible. It's just business. They will then say stuff that is technically true, but morally reprehensible: "We pay them 50% more than other local businesses" followed by "they should be happy we are giving them jobs".
This is what you get when you always choose the cheapest service everywhere you go.