You know something is really bad when Elon Musk creates a Grok app that can generate sexualized images. For all the talk of ‘empowerment’, there is a deep vein of sexism in our society, which Musk, of course, celebrates.
But think of the ‘cleaners’ of social media – the people who regularly scrape away the hate speech, sexual abuse or even just the plain scams.
They are called either ‘content moderators’, or others are known as ‘AI Annotators’ who check images. About 2,000 people do this work in Covalen in Sandyford, Dublin. Workers have organised themselves within the Communication Workers Union and have been on strike to improve their conditions. They sit at computer workstations all day, and depending on their team, deal with 18 different types of abusive material.
Every minute on Facebook, users generate approximately 293,000 status updates, 510,000 comments, and about 140,000 photos uploaded. But the parent company, Meta, does not want to know the details. They do not take responsibility for mental health or the basic conditions of a workforce that has to monitor it. So, they outsource this content management and AI Annotation.
Covalen is known as a ‘service provider’ and is a subsidiary of the better-known CPL Recruitment, a company founded by Anne Heraty. Along with Lorna Conn and Seana Leech she is still a director of Covalen, which boasts of a ‘strong relationship’ with Facebook. This survived a documentary in 2018, which indicated that staff were being instructed not to remove extreme, abusive and graphic content from Facebook even when it violated the social media company’s guidelines.
The ‘strong relationship’ has brought a lot of money to Covalen. Its accounts for 2024 show it has a turnover of €722 million and a net profit of €26.2 million.
But what about the workers who make all this money?
They are seen as small, expendable players in the crazy world of capitalist competition. Meta is in a race with other corporate titans to dominate Artificial Intelligence, and next year will invest nearly €600 billion in data centres to power AI. That is on top of the Hyperion site—a 4-million-square-foot data centre campus in northeast Louisiana that Mark Zuckerberg famously told President Trump was roughly comparable to the size of lower Manhattan. But this means retrenchment in other areas. Like content moderation.
Meta has told Covalen to cut back, and they have gone at it with some gusto.
In November 2023 Covalen announced its employees could no longer work remotely and had to return to the office.
‘It meant that we had to come to Dublin and stay overnight in a hostel because with our wages, you just could not afford the rent,’ said one worker.
Later in February 2024, they announced that Meta would no longer pay for meals to be served on-site, starting from March.
Workers used to get free meals, which is a standard practice tech companies use to bind workers to them. They like to give the impression they are on a ‘campus’ and not a white-collar factory. But all of a sudden, the free meals stopped.
Wages for content moderators are usually less than €31,00 a year, and there are no long-term service increments. You could be there eight years and still get the same as someone who just stepped in the door.
Covalen was always a tough company – only it suddenly got worse. As another worker put it,‘it’s a digital sweatshop’, one where you are ‘encouraged to go to the toilet on your own break.’
‘They just don’t see beyond their spreadsheets – they do not show us any respect,’ said another.
However, the cutbacks brought matters to a head when redundancies were announced. Those who had worked at Covalen for over 2 years were offered the legal minimum redundancy payment of 2 weeks. The rest were offered nothing. Just discarded like throwaway handkerchiefs.
Some of them had been training AI, but ‘training’ is a nice word for some grubby deeds. Disgracefully, some workers were forced to interact with an AI training bot as if they were paedophiles, to give possible responses so that AI could supposedly recognise the danger – not that you could be fully sure with AI.
But strangely enough, Meta is protected from the mental health damage it does to workers by Irish law.
Last year, the High Court ruled that Facebook “content moderators” cannot pursue legal actions in Ireland against it over claims they suffered serious psychological injuries from being exposed to graphic and violent content. The litigants were based in Germany and Spain, but a precedent has been set.
Covalen can use Irish law in one other significant way. Many of the workforce are migrant workers, many from outside the EU.
Racists often claim that ‘the migrants are taking our jobs’. This is absurd of course, but its doubly true with the Covalen workers because the company must seek out workers from Indonesia or Turkey for their language skills. They encourage these workers to come here because they cannot find Irish workers with the relevant language skills.
But here is the catch.
Under the Critical Skills Employment Permit system, a migrant worker gains more rights – for family reunification, for example – but they have to be earning €38,000 a year minimum.
And most workers in Covalen do not get that.
So, the managers can suggest that not only would they lose their jobs if they became union activists, but that they might also be thrown out of the country.
No wonder the immigration system is especially designed to benefit employers.
The Covalen strike is pioneered by young migrant workers, and has an energy rarely seen on Irish picket lines. When this writer visited, the workers were singing the Abba song, ‘Money, Money, Money’ with its famous line ‘It’s a rich man’s world.’ Then they did a loud call and response chant.
The right to join a union for representation should be among the most basic rights for workers. But it is denied in Ireland. A company like Covalen can join the bosses’ union, IBEC, but deny its workers the right to representation. It is truly shocking.
It is time to hit back.
CPL get many contracts from the Irish state. Which begs the question: why should public money be used to give tenders to companies that deny a right to union representation? People Before Profit will be highlighting this basic injustice in the Dáil.
The Covalen strike is the start of a broader movement. The aim is to build a worker-led movement across the entire tech sector. Other tech workers should join the Digital and Tech Workers Alliance Branch of the CWU. It could be the start of something big.
Read on: Stewart Smyth reviews Tax Haven Ireland by Brian O’Boyle and Kieran Allen, from 2022, from the Irish Marxist Review.
