What do you mean without full knowledge? This article is about adults being informed of the risks of PTSD up front.

Obviously everyone who seeks a job is under some form of "economic duress" for if they had no need for income they'd either not work, or work pro bono.

What's the alternative here? A YT moderators union isn't going to negotiate away the intrinsic shittiness of YT moderation.

There's informed and then there's informed. A few words in a disclaimer presented to you at the last moment is not anything like having full knowledge of the consequences. Long ago I did sysadmin work for an early anything-goes community site, bianca.com, which at the time involved a bunch of anti-abuse work. 20+ years later, there's still shit I can't unsee. Right now I can close my eyes and see my CRT, the room behind it, and the horrible things abusers were posting to make other people feel awful.

And what I had to deal with was a small fraction of the horror now flowing through the ugly parts of social media sites. I don't think written words alone can convey what people doing that work have to deal with, or the possible long-term impacts. At a minimum, for "fully informed" I'd suggest a one-hour documentary that mixes the kind of things they see with interviews from people who ended up with long-term trauma from the work.

And the alternative is what we've done with all sorts of other dangerous work: making it reasonably safe. Off the top of my head, I'd want to see: 1) tools that minimize exposure to harmful imagery (e.g., ML-driven auto-summarization and by-default pixelization), 2) weekly paid sessions with a therapist, 3) a limited amount of time per week dealing with the especially bad stuff, 4) significant, mandatory paid vacation, and 5) mandatory paid sabbaticals for anybody verging on burnout.

Occupationally, mental health isn't fundamentally different than physical health. Nobody reasonable today would deal with radiation or chemical exposure by just having people check the "I might get cancer and that's cool" box when they apply for a job, because we took the problem seriously. We need to do the same with toxic digital media.

Upfront, you mean other than those employees already working.

The more nefarious part of it is that at no point does Accenture suggest that they have any responsibility or will assist with said PTSD. Hell, they even imply that they'll most likely fire you if they find you do have it (one, because the document requires you to tell them, and two, because their supervisors repeatedly pressure therapists at the in house WeCare to disclose that information).

All the more reason to find work elsewhere which will cause those available to do the work be more scarce which will cause the compensation for the work to go up. For those under economic duress as it were, there's time. This isn't an imminent danger.

Nope. We should not sacrifice poor people on the altar of quarterly profit goals. Doubly so for companies like Google and Facebook, which are hugely profitable.

There is a sufficient supply of desperate and/or naive people that the market equilibrium is significant and lasting harm to humans. If companies won't solve that problem on their own, then the alternative is regulation. Given the history of physically dangerous jobs over the last century or so, I expect regulation is the likely outcome.

But these are not poor people. At $37k annually they are in the middle third of US income and substantially above the poverty level.

The article linked below profiles a man that "worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does". This indicates to me that all else being equal, they are already offering a premium.

Nor does it sound like he is either desperate or naive. He is well aware of market compensation and he is struggling to decide on the tradeoffs.

Oh? What's that relative to your income? Because my point isn't about absolute dollars. It's about America's long-running tendency toward exploitation of people with less money.

And two years later, they develop PTSD, and look for help with that, at which point Accenture waves this document saying they have absolutely zero responsibility to assist with it.

As someone with personal experience with PTSD, there's no such thing as being informed of the risks up front. No matter how bad it's described to be, it will be worse.

Addressed in linked comment, also by me, also in this thread.

This is one reason I'm pro-UBI; while it might be reasonable to tightly couple subsistence to full-time labor while below a certain threshold of GDP, if our societal project is to maximize human dignity and autonomy (and why the hell not), truly consensual social relationships cannot exist at extremes of negotiation asymmetry, such as when survival / Maslow needs are reliant on employers and private capital.

Across some invisible line of total societal / planetary wealth, it becomes feasible to provide every human a baseline of economic and biological well-being; moreover, I would argue that such an economic ecosystem would be on net more generative than the "work to keep the wolves from the door" model:

- Economic anxiety decreases executive functioning and ability to plan for the future.

- Authoritarian labor models carry an "enforcement tax"; we can get more done if there's no need for a middle manager caste to enforce compliance and productivity (or the corresponding incentive for workers to "look busy").

- A great deal of real-world wealth creation isn't metered and carries no bargaining leverage, so goes unpaid / underpaid: raising children, community work, charities, FOSS

- As we continue to pluck low-hanging innovation fruit, we benefit from higher degrees of risk-taking. The more people who can afford to gamble on education and entrepreneurship, the more "hits" of unrealized value we'll discover (to say nothing of cultural and creative works).

"under economic duress"

So basically if someone needs money, they cannot give consent because their judgment is clouded by their desperation?

BATNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...

Negotiation power: https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/t...

Correct. You're not allowed to Dell yourself into slavery.

In what way is working an unpleasant job that you could choose not to do slavery? Sounds to me like the person prefers the probability of PTSD to the guarantee of a life of poverty. How is that not informed consent? Because we wouldn't choose the same when living in a life of not-poverty? Are we really reducing all people without a certain level of income to children who can no longer make decisions for themselves or enter into contractual arrangements?

So college students should not be allowed to donate plasma for money because they aren't able to give consent due to being under economic duress?

That's actually one of the main arguments against paid blood/plasma donation, and the major reason that we don't pay for organ donations, because it results in a society where the poor literally sell their own health for basic survival. Plasma is sufficiently replenishable and donationations are safe enough that the net gain of lives saved is considered worth the societal risks.

Plasma, or other readily replenished fluids (there's another popular option, at least for men, though it carries other pregnant long-term implications) are propbably reasonably fair. There's little long-term harm or consequence.

A kidney, lung, or liver lobe, not so much.

Psychological research or DNA submission enters a pretty freighted grey area.

Pretty much. If your choice is either "Do X or live in poverty," what do you choose? Keep in mind that poverty is often a trap that is very difficult to get out of.

You just explained like 90% of working class jobs.

I'm aware of that.

At least now. Less so in my younger years.

it's so great you changed idea and you became both more realistic and more emphatic.

I'd like to think the empathy was present.

The first-hand and theoretic knowledge was not.

Much of the theory I'd been supplied (mainstream economics, an unbeknownst to me at the time hardline Libertarian professor in my intro course: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22133958), was false.

Undoing the damage of false priors and models, especially under ongoing objection and denial based on those, is difficult and expensive in time, effort, and willpower.

If you go with a notion of exploitation rather than lack of consent, it describes all waged labour.

Marx was right.

.. about nothing. Most people in his day knew this right away but even today some people still deny this.

And that's why we need strong unions run by smart people who have the interests of the workers in mind.

Yes, we need to put smart people in charge. Those stupid workers can't figure anything out on their own.

"Smart people" and "workers" are not mutually exclusive sets.

>is not free and fully-informed consent.

The standard of consent that we apply in other areas would make it impossible for an individual, worker or customer, to ever enter into a contract with a larger corporation (exactly how large can be debated, but Google size with their Google size legal team is definitely beyond that point). I think it would be a good thing to standardize the law in this regard.

Alternatively, use it as continuous motivation to improve the relative position of the worker and consumer so they are closer to having the ability to give free and fully-informed consent.

They can inform themselves, weigh their options, and make a decision. Like adults. Why this constant infantilization of people?

The problem is, they cannot. The only way to be “informed” is to actually be exposed to the material.

I'm pretty sure YouTube moderators know how to read and use the Internet.

What a bizarre thing to say. If reading about diets was enough then no one would ever be fat. But it turns out in the real world that reading about it and actually doing are very different. The same applies here.

I would put "economic duress" and "hate speech" in the same category of hand wavy rhetorical devices.

You don't believe people sometimes do things because they would otherwise be forced to live in poverty? Because that's literally what "economic duress" means.

Maybe, but not in this case. Youtube reportedly pays moderators an annual salary of $37k [1] and Glassdoor reports the average content moderator salary is $45k. The US Health and Human Services put those salaries between 3 and 4 times that of the poverty guideline for a single person.

This poverty guideline describes the bottom 12% of the US population. The Youtube salary describes the middle 33%.

In the referenced Youtube article, the man "worries that he will not be able to find another job that pays as well as this one does". Not that he worries he will be "forced to live in poverty".

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/

Interesting. How does it work with prostitution and/or working in the adult movie industry ?