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I agree that this could be a part of a bigger position instead of being the bread and butter, but we are talking about sub $30k/year jobs that nobody wants to d

I agree that this could be a part of a bigger position instead of being the bread and butter, but we are talking about sub $30k/year jobs that nobody wants to do. We could just as easily make the argument that it's not safe for garbage men to hang off the back of the garbage truck, but at the end of the day a) nobody cares and b) I've got my own job that nobody wants to do that I'd love for someone to come along and make less shitty.

jrochkind1 8y ago
> but we are talking about sub $30k/year jobs that nobody wants to do. Yes, that's the problem. There is no law of nature that says we need to pay people with the jobs that are worst for their health the worst and give them no respect or acknowledgement. If there are other jobs that is true for, yes, those too. I wouldn't tell you what to care about, but I would say that we all would benefit by taking care of those of us whose jobs harm them. Your job should be less shitty too, it doesn't take away from that to point out other people who's jobs are harming them and aren't getting what they need. It is reasonable to begin focus on the jobs that are the _worst_, mentally or physically. Maybe yours is one of those too. It's also reasonable in the HN venue to focus on the jobs that are the worst that make possible the economy that many of us reading this benefit from by being paid a lot more than $15/hour to contribute to, and probably aren't as harmful to our health as those for many of us. If your situation is especially dire, then, yes, you too.
- derefr 8y ago
  > There is no law of nature that says we need to pay people with the jobs that are worst for their health the worst and give them no respect or acknowledgement. It's not a law of nature, no; but it is a law of human psychology/economics. The jobs that nobody wants to do aren't competed for—there are always plenty of such jobs to go around. Therefore, there's nobody kept out of the field. Therefore, the field doesn't ever build any social cachet of exclusivity. And that's a problem, because exclusivity is a prerequisite for the general halo-effect of respect that a field's members can earn. Example: doctors must know a lot to do their jobs—but we wouldn't default to thinking of doctors as "knowing a lot" if anyone could be one without proving that they know a lot. We'd distinguish "well-trained doctors" from "badly-trained doctors" and we'd certainly give some props to the well-trained ones, but "being a doctor" would no longer command respect on its own. It'd be like... being a programmer, for instance. That general halo-effect of respect is essentially what drives the ability of a class of workers to collectively bargain—it's what makes the other side of the negotiation treat them seriously. They know that people that are respected by society have a voice in that society, that they can use to denounce bad employers. So they actually sit down and bargain, rather than just firing all their old employees and getting a new batch. Microecon says that jobs with more employer-demand than employee-supply should pay more, because employers must compete for employees. But because of this failure-of-negotiating-power, this doesn't happen; all the employers effectively are in implicit collusion to keep the wages of such employees down, by just not even taking seriously the idea that they should be competing for such employees. (It's kind of the same effect as employers "implicitly colluding" to fail to compete for talented female employees—but instead of being driven by employers' biases about demographics, it's driven by employers' biases about the assumed social-power that an employee must have if they are willing to take a particular job.) But to get the members of the field to be respected—rather than just sympathized with (see e.g. sanitation workers—they have "hard jobs", everyone knows this, and people try to not make their lives harder than it is—but being one still doesn't make you any more likely to be listened to at a town council meeting), the field must first become more exclusive. That can work for fields where most of the work occurs in one place—see Hollywood and their actors' and writers' guilds. But if the work is distributed (like with community moderators)—how is the exclusivity going to happen?
  - zanny 8y ago
    I don't think its so much credential based gatekeeping that gives professions bargaining power. You don't have to look any further than game development vs financial services development. The former get exploited to the point of lunacy, the latter are extraordinarily highly paid and respected despite doing basically the same job with a different coat of paint. And its exclusively because there are more people qualified for both jobs trying to go into the former than the later. Its the same effect as to how SpaceX can underpay its employees. Fundamentally all an employer cares about, and all that will determine if you are paid more, is if there aren't many other people applying for the same job. Even high skilled jobs requiring extensive qualifications - an opening for a CS PHD will always pay way more than a History PHD because there is so much less competition for the later pool of candidates, even if there is a greater performance disparity between a "bad" and "good" CS PHD than a history one in a similar capacity. Appraising candidates definitely factors in, but even in highly skilled disciplines like game development, as long as the employer can assume a strong likelihood of getting good qualified candidates to replace you they will exploit you. Its when the prospect for replacing you is in any way questionable that suddenly your wages and respect will rise.
  - danmaz74 8y ago
    Unfortunately, being a very good moderator vs just good enough doesn't make a big difference for the employer. That's a very big difference with doctors, programmers or actors. IMHO, construing that this happens because of a conspiracy between the employers isn't going to help.
    - derefr 8y ago
      Conspiracy isn't the right word. It's a societal bias. "Implicit collusion" as in nobody ever has to talk to one-another for the "collusion" to happen—everyone just ends up thinking the same way as one-another, as if there was collusion.
- zanny 8y ago
  > There is no law of nature There is a law of capitalism for it though, which we have, as a species, put well above nature. These jobs are only so shitty because Facebook can get people willing to put up with them. We sit in ivory towers of decades learning to program to be qualified as software engineers making... what I would really call just a reasonable wage for where we, as humanity, are in terms of wealth creation, technology, and productivity. But those are skills built over extreme lengths of time most people don't have, and they will suffer their entire life for it in subsistence wages. There are so few fields today where there is both demand for labor and a requirement of skill to gatekeep the "unwashed masses" from driving the wages to the wage floor. Probably the most damning information I know of is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that, one, the largest employment sectors are all unskilled, and two, they are the ones that will grow in the next decade [1]. US society is built on a foundation of despondent poor workers with no future and that foundation is intent to expand faster than fulfilling careers will... all of which make up only about 20-40% depending on how you interpret the data of actual employment. [1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...
XMPPwocky 8y ago
There's an argument that it's unethical not to automate away the jobs nobody wants to do. Like... sentient beings putting themselves in harm's way to pick up garbage? Or just spending huge amounts of time taking orders for hamburgers? Yikes! I assume the major motivator for most of these cases is money- essentially, you may just kind of have to work all day, possibly at significant risk to yourself, to get paid minimal amounts so you can eat and have a roof over your head. Ultimately, humanity is deeply undervalued. There are jobs which would absolutely be a net benefit to society if eliminated- the catch is you'd put those currently employed out of work.
schnevets 8y ago
The garbage man metaphor is a good one since those are actually pretty cushy gigs (at least around the northeast). They're a unionized workforce that has opportunity for overtime and is a pretty mindless, albeit skilled workforce. Of course, that only happened after years of organizing and strikes. These are actions that I'm sure Cognizant could quell in a pinch - if Phoenix makes demands, they temporarily outsource to India and set up a new center in Albuquerque or Tuscon. This may sound out of touch, but if Facebook wants to maintain this workforce and avoid more bad PR, they may need to restructure this as a flexible or incentive-driven environment. I'm trying really hard not to suggest "uberifying" or "gigging" the work, but allowing moderators to choose their hours or content type for the day could turn this into a desirable role. And paying them more and improving their care, without a doubt. Subjecting people to that kind of trauma for next to minimum wage sounds like a class action suit in the making.
thegayngler 8y ago
Aren't garbage men paid like $80k/year US with great benefits? I could be wrong but it seems like they have a much better situation overall than these people and the mental health issues seems like a much bigger problem than potentially getting dirty or hurt on the job but maybe I have it wrong.

jrochkind1 8y ago

> but we are talking about sub $30k/year jobs that nobody wants to do. Yes, that's the problem. There is no law of nature that says we need to pay people with the jobs that are worst for their health the worst and give them no respect or acknowledgement. If there are other jobs that is true for, yes, those too. I wouldn't tell you what to care about, but I would say that we all would benefit by taking care of those of us whose jobs harm them. Your job should be less shitty too, it doesn't take away from that to point out other people who's jobs are harming them and aren't getting what they need. It is reasonable to begin focus on the jobs that are the _worst_, mentally or physically. Maybe yours is one of those too. It's also reasonable in the HN venue to focus on the jobs that are the worst that make possible the economy that many of us reading this benefit from by being paid a lot more than $15/hour to contribute to, and probably aren't as harmful to our health as those for many of us. If your situation is especially dire, then, yes, you too.

derefr 8y ago
> There is no law of nature that says we need to pay people with the jobs that are worst for their health the worst and give them no respect or acknowledgement. It's not a law of nature, no; but it is a law of human psychology/economics. The jobs that nobody wants to do aren't competed for—there are always plenty of such jobs to go around. Therefore, there's nobody kept out of the field. Therefore, the field doesn't ever build any social cachet of exclusivity. And that's a problem, because exclusivity is a prerequisite for the general halo-effect of respect that a field's members can earn. Example: doctors must know a lot to do their jobs—but we wouldn't default to thinking of doctors as "knowing a lot" if anyone could be one without proving that they know a lot. We'd distinguish "well-trained doctors" from "badly-trained doctors" and we'd certainly give some props to the well-trained ones, but "being a doctor" would no longer command respect on its own. It'd be like... being a programmer, for instance. That general halo-effect of respect is essentially what drives the ability of a class of workers to collectively bargain—it's what makes the other side of the negotiation treat them seriously. They know that people that are respected by society have a voice in that society, that they can use to denounce bad employers. So they actually sit down and bargain, rather than just firing all their old employees and getting a new batch. Microecon says that jobs with more employer-demand than employee-supply should pay more, because employers must compete for employees. But because of this failure-of-negotiating-power, this doesn't happen; all the employers effectively are in implicit collusion to keep the wages of such employees down, by just not even taking seriously the idea that they should be competing for such employees. (It's kind of the same effect as employers "implicitly colluding" to fail to compete for talented female employees—but instead of being driven by employers' biases about demographics, it's driven by employers' biases about the assumed social-power that an employee must have if they are willing to take a particular job.) But to get the members of the field to be respected—rather than just sympathized with (see e.g. sanitation workers—they have "hard jobs", everyone knows this, and people try to not make their lives harder than it is—but being one still doesn't make you any more likely to be listened to at a town council meeting), the field must first become more exclusive. That can work for fields where most of the work occurs in one place—see Hollywood and their actors' and writers' guilds. But if the work is distributed (like with community moderators)—how is the exclusivity going to happen?
- zanny 8y ago
  I don't think its so much credential based gatekeeping that gives professions bargaining power. You don't have to look any further than game development vs financial services development. The former get exploited to the point of lunacy, the latter are extraordinarily highly paid and respected despite doing basically the same job with a different coat of paint. And its exclusively because there are more people qualified for both jobs trying to go into the former than the later. Its the same effect as to how SpaceX can underpay its employees. Fundamentally all an employer cares about, and all that will determine if you are paid more, is if there aren't many other people applying for the same job. Even high skilled jobs requiring extensive qualifications - an opening for a CS PHD will always pay way more than a History PHD because there is so much less competition for the later pool of candidates, even if there is a greater performance disparity between a "bad" and "good" CS PHD than a history one in a similar capacity. Appraising candidates definitely factors in, but even in highly skilled disciplines like game development, as long as the employer can assume a strong likelihood of getting good qualified candidates to replace you they will exploit you. Its when the prospect for replacing you is in any way questionable that suddenly your wages and respect will rise.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  Unfortunately, being a very good moderator vs just good enough doesn't make a big difference for the employer. That's a very big difference with doctors, programmers or actors. IMHO, construing that this happens because of a conspiracy between the employers isn't going to help.
  - derefr 8y ago
    Conspiracy isn't the right word. It's a societal bias. "Implicit collusion" as in nobody ever has to talk to one-another for the "collusion" to happen—everyone just ends up thinking the same way as one-another, as if there was collusion.
zanny 8y ago
> There is no law of nature There is a law of capitalism for it though, which we have, as a species, put well above nature. These jobs are only so shitty because Facebook can get people willing to put up with them. We sit in ivory towers of decades learning to program to be qualified as software engineers making... what I would really call just a reasonable wage for where we, as humanity, are in terms of wealth creation, technology, and productivity. But those are skills built over extreme lengths of time most people don't have, and they will suffer their entire life for it in subsistence wages. There are so few fields today where there is both demand for labor and a requirement of skill to gatekeep the "unwashed masses" from driving the wages to the wage floor. Probably the most damning information I know of is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that, one, the largest employment sectors are all unskilled, and two, they are the ones that will grow in the next decade [1]. US society is built on a foundation of despondent poor workers with no future and that foundation is intent to expand faster than fulfilling careers will... all of which make up only about 20-40% depending on how you interpret the data of actual employment. [1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...

XMPPwocky 8y ago

There's an argument that it's unethical not to automate away the jobs nobody wants to do. Like... sentient beings putting themselves in harm's way to pick up garbage? Or just spending huge amounts of time taking orders for hamburgers? Yikes! I assume the major motivator for most of these cases is money- essentially, you may just kind of have to work all day, possibly at significant risk to yourself, to get paid minimal amounts so you can eat and have a roof over your head. Ultimately, humanity is deeply undervalued. There are jobs which would absolutely be a net benefit to society if eliminated- the catch is you'd put those currently employed out of work.

schnevets 8y ago

The garbage man metaphor is a good one since those are actually pretty cushy gigs (at least around the northeast). They're a unionized workforce that has opportunity for overtime and is a pretty mindless, albeit skilled workforce. Of course, that only happened after years of organizing and strikes. These are actions that I'm sure Cognizant could quell in a pinch - if Phoenix makes demands, they temporarily outsource to India and set up a new center in Albuquerque or Tuscon. This may sound out of touch, but if Facebook wants to maintain this workforce and avoid more bad PR, they may need to restructure this as a flexible or incentive-driven environment. I'm trying really hard not to suggest "uberifying" or "gigging" the work, but allowing moderators to choose their hours or content type for the day could turn this into a desirable role. And paying them more and improving their care, without a doubt. Subjecting people to that kind of trauma for next to minimum wage sounds like a class action suit in the making.

thegayngler 8y ago

Aren't garbage men paid like $80k/year US with great benefits? I could be wrong but it seems like they have a much better situation overall than these people and the mental health issues seems like a much bigger problem than potentially getting dirty or hurt on the job but maybe I have it wrong.