Western Big Tech Treats African Employees as 'Testing Ground', Expert Says

Africa has emerged as a hotspot for outsourcing tech jobs of late, which was initiated by technology giants mainly from Silicon Valley. However, over time, they were accused by African employees of various human rights violations, including union busting, racial discrimination, wage theft, and unequal pay.

Western technology corporations see Africa as a "testing ground" for some of their practices, which are considered to be inappropriate or could be outlawed in a number of jurisdictions in the West, says Binoy Kampmark, a senior lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University, in an interview with Sputnik.

"Big Tech, notably from Silicon Valley, see such environs as testing grounds to test technologies and refine the efficiency of various platforms," he stresses.

Commenting on recent developments in Meta's case, with the tech corporation and its outsourcing partner Sama in Kenya being accused of malpractice, Kampmark explains that these companies and their activities can't be viewed in isolation. He highlights that Africa has long been seen as "a cornucopia of exploitation, a cheap vast reserve to use," and gain profits. So Meta is not the only large Western company that "exploits" African labor for its own purposes.

He underlines that all employment systems have abuses, saying that this phenomenon is a "nasty consequence of capital and its vicissitudes." But the main problem, according to him, is that these tech giants are "wily, sly, vicious and venal."

"They [Western corporations] have, over the years, cultivated local relationships with authorities that exempt, shield and immunize their practices," Kampmark states.

He points out that the only solution to this problem is for African workers to unionize and formulate clear grounds on violations of human rights, as "there is nothing more effective and terrifying" to these corporations as joint actions. There must be channels of accountability, he says, through which they can be held responsible.

Otherwise, nothing will change, because such companies as Meta know "the formula" of how to deal with these kinds of scandal, for example, by announcing reviews to policies in favor of users and employees. And the formula is the same regardless of where the outrage occurred - overseas or domestically.

"The worker here has become disposable labor, and in this, the African and US employees share something fundamental," he concludes.

According to Barbara Lazarotto, a PhD researcher in law and Marie Curie Actions fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, the neo-colonial approach that US big tech maintains towards its employees in Africa is not atypical.

"The African continent continues to be considered a 'third world' responsible for taking on tasks that no one wants to do in the first world'," the expert says. "This neo-colonial approach has also been adopted by Western tech companies, not only on content moderation but also spread across the whole line of production."

In order to improve the situation with the workforce conditions, the "roles of governments and trade unions must be transformed and adapted to the new realities faced by the workforce," believes Lazarotto.

"Governments must enact laws that protect workers from abusive work while trade unions have to adapt to the new workforce reality," she says. "Recent studies have shown that trade unions now have an essential role in protecting workers from unfair algorithms in the workplace, while in Africa they must focus on the protection of workers against psychological harms advocating for safer work conditions."

* Meta and Facebook are banned in Russia over extremist activities