In Nairobi, Kenya, the Sana company employs young women, those who have migrated to the city and mothers to do content moderation work for Meta. In a worker-made ‘zine they describe a digital age sweatshop in which physical, sexual and mental trauma are common as has been and still is the case for women cut-and-sew textile workers. In India women doing the same work as “gig-economy” “self-employed” with no rights or safety net have to watch hundreds of hours of violent pornography to determine what has been laid down as permissible. In Syria data annotators for AI have no choice but to be self-employed, pay for internet access and electricity themselves, and to do piece work. Their pay at the end of each project subject to cuts on the basis of lack of speed and/or errors made in this high-speed work in which each project has different demands. Surveillance of both like that of cut-and-sew workers early this century. In some countries Amazon has used 19th century means of control of workers, the equivalent of the notorious company store, data workers for Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) are paid into their Amazon.com accounts with gift cards. Workers are using ingenuity to convert these into usable money but at a loss and involving the time of having a second job.
Workers for Amazon at a distribution centre in Murcia, Spain won concessions at the very end of 2025 from a company that will do anything not to negotiate by self-creating a “strategy of chaos”. They would confuse management by turning up for work on announced strike days and then walk out unannounced when the workload was at its peak, returning when it was slow.
Port workers at 21 Mediterranean locations from Morocco to Turkey and joined a day of action on the 6th February to oppose the militarisation of transport infrastructure and specifically the complicity of port managements in the smashing up of Gaza and its citizens.