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This comment is now one of the top hits on Google for "Qatar slave helmet". And it's the only hit when I put quotes around the phrase to force an exact match.
by ShredKazoo 4y ago
This comment is now one of the top hits on Google for "Qatar slave helmet". And it's the only hit when I put quotes around the phrase to force an exact match.
If this is real you should get in touch with investigative journalists, e.g. ProPublica.
("Get in touch with investigative journalists" probably applies to a bunch of the people posting in this thread.)
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoWhat would that accomplish?
- ch4s3 4y agoBringing further scrutiny to similar practices there and elsewhere.
- ethanbond 4y agoAmp up the sort of disdain that might, for example, prevent international organizations from granting legitimacy to these regimes. Things like FIFA, as a completely random example.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoI think it's clear that FIFA gives anti-fucks about slave labor.
- ethanbond 4y agoSure, but FIFA cares about money and at least some people care about not giving their money to deeply unethical entities. That’s what it’s meant to accomplish.
- scaramanga 4y agoYou need to ask what it accomplishes to leave it in the dark.
- ShredKazoo 4y agoActually, I want to think more about the theory of change here. It's conceivable that a ProPublica article could actually make the situation worse, e.g. by advertising the existence of the helmet to other abusive employers, or causing abusive employers to rework their labor practices in a way that looks better to the press but is actually worse. If the company that makes the helmet is based in a country with good government, maybe a reasonable regulation would be to score workers on productivity, but place limitations on the scoring somehow. E.g. the helmet stops showing the worker's location when they've spent too much time in the heat. Or the helmet estimates the fraction of the workday that the worker spent offsite, but all workers who spend 20% or less of their time offsite are given a score of 20%, so the employer can't force the worker to spend more than 80% of their time onsite. I don't think productivity scoring has to be dystopian in principle; generally speaking it seems reasonable to pay people according to how productive they are. You could also argue for regulating the helmet out of existence, but I assume in that case it would just be built somewhere else with lax regulations. So the trick is to put in regulation that creates a humane experience for workers, but not so much that Qatar is incentivized to contract the development of a new, more draconian helmet in a different locale. I don't think this should be too hard, because creating a humane experience for workers should also help productivity to a degree. There's also a security dimension here -- you don't want abusive employers to be able to circumvent these limitations. So you could make it so the helmet only runs code which has been signed with the company's private key, or have a lot of the functionality server-side.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoHow many people do you think worked on the project? If I were the OP, I'd be more worried about getting the Khashoggi treatment for speaking out.
- NoGravitas 4y agoPresumably these sinners: https://www.wakecap.com/ https://www.wakecap.com/
- lindygraham 4y agoOP i am investigative tech journalist. i would love to talk about this. my dms are open and my signal number is here: https://twitter.com/alibreland https://twitter.com/alibreland @hannon22