That assumes perfect knowledge. As mentioned in the article, these moderators often do not understand what they are getting into until long after they have committed to the job. Once you have quit a previous job, moved, setup your new life, only then do you realize your new "brand consultant" job means watching kittens die all day.
Jobs like this also open persons to realities that we normal keep tucked away deep in our brains. We all know that cops don't investigate most reported crimes, but that doesn't come up very often for us. A facebook moderator sees the crimes, sees the lack of response by the police or anyone else, every minute. Repeatedly, every minute. Nobody can appreciate what this does to ones' mental state until you have been there.
When recession strikes and the gravy train ends, the same folks will be wearing Che Guevara T-shirts crying about unfairness.
If you call 20$, for a person who owes nothing and is probably starving, a "short term profit", you've very likely never experienced how is it to live in poor conditions.
Being put in prison is an improvement for many individuals in so far as they are guaranteed three square meals and a warm place to lay their head. Would you seriously argue that that's an improvement that is worth the cost to the individual?
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i/?...
I personally know people who have moved for half that amount.
C. Dickens: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, 1843
If we're legitimately talking about situations where the balance of power is so unfavorable to the unemployed individual, the solution is to start talking about UBI, not micromanaging very specific roles at very specific companies.
edit: if it was not clear, facebook is in fact part of society (by definition) and their responsibility is proportional to their role in society, no more no less.
There are some kinds of nonviolent behavior we don't allow because we (I guess we is majority of society?) think it's wrong, often around issues of financial exploitation. For example, even if you are mentally sound you can't sell yourself into indentured servitude because that tends to only happen when someone with power exploits someone desperate, often (but not always) due to reasons out of their control.
UBI is basically an artificial wage. Like a lot of things in life, a wage is a negotiation between two entities of vastly different levels of power. As every public company proudly proclaims, the value of what employees do for them is far far less then the value the employees receive.
Why do you think those workers accept this fact? They like getting less value than they generated? It's clearly the result of an exploitative power dynamic - one side has to work or not eat, the other does not.
If you think someone should not have medicine and food dangled over their head in work negations, the answer is workers need to be paid in real value of the capital that they create and that needs to law.
I hope one day our wages are looked back on like no minimum wage, the 6 day 14+ hr work day, child labor, indentured servitude, slavery and etc which were often viewed as normal at their time but now disgusting.
This GIF is mocking the idea of UBI and while for sure a silly meme, has an element of truth IMO.
Capitalism works on leveraging advantage to pay workers less than the value that they create. Do you have anything to say about that, or are you going to continue to suggest magic discount coupons (UBI) which are worth less than the value a worker creates are something besides slavery with extra steps?
Feel free to scoff/mock me for questioning sacred holy capitalism - when immoral ideals are questioned and no logical answer is available, history tells us emotion and feelings are the standard responses.
If that's true, Facebook's workforce could quit tomorrow, go build a competitor, and claim the full $15B for themselves. Why don't they do that?
The traditional Communist argument has been that they can't because capital owns the means of production. Factory workers would happily go start their own factory, but they can't afford the machines to fill it. That argument doesn't work too well here: the means of production needed to build Facebook are accessible even to college students. Basically an editor, a scripting language, a web server, and some linux boxes.
Another reasonable argument is that they can't because they need to eat. The time it would take between quitting their jobs at Facebook, Inc. and seeing revenue from Facebook Co-Op would exhaust their savings. That is a problem UBI can solve. It's not that UBI pays what you are worth, but that it removes the urgency that sometimes prevents people from getting their full value in the market.
This idea - that workers create all the value in a company, not just the subset they are paid for - is testable. If you're sure it's true and you want everyone else to believe it, then I think you'd want to run the experiment. UBI could be a way of doing that. Could also do grants that pay living expenses during entrepreneurial activity, or just straight-up house and feed co-op founders without asking for an equity stake.
That is not how the labor market works... At all.
"Worth the pay" is overridden by "absolutely need this money for me or my kids to survive"
Wha...? Are you really that far removed from reality?
Tell that to the people who pick your fruits and veggies.
Now we have gov externalities trying to legislate something that shouldn’t have existed?
I’m not saying any of this is write or wrong, I’m just at a loss how people get mad at Uber when the model shouldn’t have made it. Where did the market dynamics go wrong here?
The issue with Uber is they pay $0.70/mi for a task where the cost of fulfilling the task is $1.00. The drivers do it because they can get quick cash with no friction.
You can already see the system breaking down. Uber XLs are getting older and shittier. 2012 Dodge Caravan that picked me up at the airport will be dead in a year. As the situation goes on, someone will die in a fiery wreck by an Uber with no brakes, and it will gather the national attention and kill the company.
I don't understand how this
isn't a problem perfectly
solved by the market.
Most people depend on their meagre income quite greatly, it's a bold thing to say someone could just 'quit' their job and spend 9 months looking for another one, especially if they don't have some pretty hard skills.
So in the realm of talent, yes, it would solve itself, which is why devs et. al. often get 'free lunch' among other things.
For most working people, it's much harder.
"All possibilities are fully encapsulated in very simple dynamics."
Yes, of course, but the incredible power asymmetry between FB and not hugely skilled workers is the dynamic that drives all of this.