An employee at Appen, whose sole customer is Google, whose job it is to rank sites for the search algorithm (rater), complained that he was earning $3 an hour less than his daughter behind the checkout at a fast food restaurant.
In general, this Appen worker, a member of the Alphabet Workers Union, complained that he and his colleagues were earning some of the lowest wages in the entire US.
For his work, which consists in studying sites and ranking them for a search engine, as well as excluding sites with potentially prohibited content by law, this person receives $ 10-12 per hour. True, some time ago, thanks to the union, the pay was raised to $14-14.50. At the same time, Google announced back in 2019 that they would not pay their employees less than $15 per hour.
Website “evaluators” help improve search results by incorporating human control into the decision chain. Sometimes you have to view pornographic content and content with violence.
The employee who complained about the salary has been working in this position for 10 years, he tries to build his work schedule in such a way that he does not work in the evening hours, because then he has problems with sleep.
The Alphabet Workers Union is now requiring management to ensure that content reviewers who the union says “earn a beggarly wage without any benefits” are treated with “the same dignity, respect and fairness” as other employees of the enterprise.
Google currently employs about 10,000 content estimators. They often work part-time.
Earlier it was reported that in Kenya, experts evaluating sites for the company OpenAI, which creates artificial intelligence solutions, earn $ 2 per hour with the prospect of completely replacing them with an AI application.
