More than 200 Facebook workers have signed a letter demanding better treatment for content moderators after some said they were required to return to the office even as the coronavirus crisis deepens.
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The contractors who wrote the letter condemned the company for deciding “to risk our lives to maintain Facebook’s profits during the pandemic”. It was sent to chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and top executives at Accenture and CPL, two companies that contract the moderators.
“Facebook needs us,” the workers wrote in the letter. “It is time that you acknowledged this and valued our work. To sacrifice our health and safety for profit is immoral.”
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Moderators for Facebook are contracted through third-party companies including Accenture, headquartered in Ireland with more than 40,000 contractors in the US. Employees were sent home during the early days of the pandemic, but workers say Accenture has recently started requiring workers to come back to the office.
The workers are calling on Facebook to improve worker safety, issuing demands such as hazard pay for moderators returning to the office, maximizing at-home working, and offering better healthcare and mental health support. The letter renewed calls on Facebook to stop contracting with outside companies and to fold moderation into its main business.
A spokeswoman from Accenture told the Guardian workplaces that are reopening have measures in place including “vastly reduced building occupancy, extensive social distancing and masks, daily office cleaning, individual transportation and other measures”.
“We are gradually inviting our people to return to offices, but only where there is a critical need to do so and only when we are comfortable that we have put the right safety measures in place, following local ordinances,” she said.
Workers who are at high risk for coronavirus or live with vulnerable populations are not required to return and are being offered other accommodations, including working from home.
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For years, Facebook moderators have called for improved treatment and better health benefits. Those calls have only intensified during the pandemic, which has exacerbated the divide between white collar employees at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto and the contractors who keep the website running from smaller offices around the world.
Facebook had announced in August an extension of its coronavirus policies allowing workers to work from home until July 2021, though that policy did not extend to contractors. The company promised to rely more heavily on automated systems to allow moderators to work from home. But the letter sent Wednesday cast doubt on the success of those efforts, noting that the technology is not yet advanced enough to address many of the platform’s biggest issues.
“Without our work, Facebook is unusable,” the workers wrote. “Your algorithms cannot spot satire. They cannot sift journalism from disinformation. They cannot respond quickly enough to self-harm or child abuse. We can.”
Drew Pusateri, a Facebook spokesman, said in a statement moderators have access to healthcare and confidential wellbeing resources.
He said the majority of the company’s 15,000 content reviewers globally have been working from home since the beginning of the pandemic and continue to do so. Still, advocates are calling on Facebook to provide moderators with the same rights, benefits, and protections as Facebook staff.
“We appreciate the valuable work content reviewers do, and we prioritize their health and safety,” he said. “While we believe in having an open internal dialogue, these discussions need to be honest.”
Wednesday’s letter was coordinated by UK non-profit Foxglove, which is helping content moderators organize and bring legal cases, and was signed by both contractors and full-time Facebook employees. They are asking Facebook users to sign a statement in solidarity with the workers.
It is just the latest action against the social network: in October former moderators risked violating non-disclosure agreements to come forward with claims of mistreatment ahead of the 2020 elections. Earlier in 2020 Facebook agreed to pay a $52m settlement to former moderators for not doing enough to protect them from the mental health impacts of the job.
“Content moderators are the heart of Facebook’s business, so Zuckerberg should treat them like it,” said Cori Crider, a director at Foxglove. “If Facebook won’t up its game and start looking after its essential workers, people will bail for companies like TikTok that offer better pay, employment rights and more dignity.”
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