SAMASOURCE: LIBERATING FORCE OR TROJAN HORSE
In 2008 Leila Janah, an attractive, young, globetrotting Harvard graduate founded a not-for-profit called Samasource. She introduced the project to the world a year later at a TEDx conference in Silicon Valley. Presented as having an ideal business model – one that gets much-needed work done while uplifting the world’s poor with employment, skills, and income – Samasource is widely recognized as being revolutionary on a global scale. The organization portrays itself as no less than a rare beacon of light in an otherwise bleak world of business and labour. They see themselves as a saviour of struggling corporate ventures and the world’s poor alike. And articles in Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes highlight the extraordinary work of Samasource, labelling its founder a “rising star”. On its website Samasource lays out its vision of being a “groundbreaking social business that dramatically reduces poverty for a significant percentage of the world’s population”. We are told “Samasource believes that expanding access to formal work is the only way to incorporate billions of marginalized people into the global economy and alleviate poverty at scale.” And they carry out this mission by connecting “women and youth living in poverty to dignified work via the Internet … [enabling] people living in poverty to earn a living wage in the formal sector, build confidence, gain skills in the new economy and inject much-needed capital into their communities”. Leila Janah and her team talk almost exclusively about empowerment and bringing dignity into impoverished communities; but there’s a business side to their project as well. Samasource carries out its near-messianic mission couched in a twenty-first century upgrade of nineteenth century Fordist philosophy. Through the project its founders and funders are focused on reinvigorating and extending the benefits of the industrial revolution into the digital epoch. Leila Janah promises vast improvements in quality, speed, and cost of production in the knowledge economy, and extols the tremendous virtues of “hyperspecialization” and her “virtual assembly line”. She says that a new era of productivity is upon us, based on Henry Ford’s assembly line model, where digital work is broken into many smaller and much more simple tasks, or “microwork” as she calls it. Thusly, twenty-first century digital labour is taken out of the hands of the specialist or craftsperson (the graphic designer, software developer, video editor) and is transmuted into “microwork” that is put into the hands of the unskilled layperson – the 43 million who make up “the world’s greatest underutilized potential”. As the founder of Samasource says, “for the first time in human history, people who are living far from major centers of commerce can work on assembly lines.” On their website, Samasource explains further how the organization operates. They tell us they provide free resources and services (computers and internet connections) to “service partners”: their overseas recruitment, training, and operation centres. They then charge a small fee to their American and U.K. business clients, who provide the actual work for their service partners to complete. And when the work is finished Samasource then takes a small percentage of the value of the work done by their service partners to cover their operational costs. With recruitment centres in places like Haiti, Uganda, Kenya, and Pakistan Samasource purposefully targets high-poverty regions and seeks out the most vulnerable people therein, typically impoverished women and youth – and often those that find themselves there as refugees or internally displaced people. Of course all of this is done, as their website says, to uplift these populations by giving them “skills and fair ‘living wages’”. And we would expect no less. As with any self-respecting modern business model, the mission presented by Samasource is framed as selflessly favouring their workers. They constantly remind their partners and the public that Samasource is a non-profit and doing all of this entirely for the betterment of humanity. Sounds pretty neat and clean. (Too good to be true, some might suggest.) So what else is going on? What are we not being told? What is just out of view? And if it is all transparent and benevolent could there be unforeseen consequences? Well, first off, there are some very basic problems and limitations with the business of “hyperspecialization” and the “virtual assembly line” so we shouldn’t be so quick to focus narrowly on all of the promises. Harvard Business Review ran an article on this topic called "The Age of Hyperspecialization", in the summer of 2011, written by Tammy Johns, Robert Laubacher, and Thomas Malone. The authors tell us that, while there are potential upsides to this production trend, the perils are very real. For instance, they note the likelihood of “digital sweatshops” arising and of companies using cheap, remote, atomized labour to create digital garbage like spam and astroturfing campaigns (fake grassroots movements dreamed up by corporate or government interests to suit their own agendas). They also warn of the near-certain probability of the work on offer being dull and meaningless, of electronic surveillance of workers becoming rampant, and of the inherent difficulty in guaranteeing payment to distant offshore workers – Janah’s target communities of marginalized, materially impoverished, technically unskilled, female refugees. These factors alone should have everyone thinking critically about the rules and measures that can be put in place to prevent any one of these worst-case-scenarios. We have reason to be concerned about the nature of the work being done and the kinds of skills these people are being given becoming obsolete any moment now. Even highly trained and skilled professionals, in highly paid positions, are rapidly being replaced by ever more sophisticated robots, computers, machines, and software. We have all seen bank tellers, cashiers, retail staff, and even librarians replaced by automated self-serve machines. But it’s not just these basic service sector jobs that are disappearing. In the last few years we have seen soldiers and air force pilots replaced by unmanned drones; writers, reporters, lawyers, and paralegal teams traded in for sophisticated software packages; even medical professionals like pharmacists and surgeons are not immune from the sweeping electronic hand of twenty-first century digitization and automation. Looking more critically at Samasource itself it’s not hard to take all the same facts they offer us and frame it all from a different vantage point. Doing so paints the organization in much dimmer light than their communications team would have them portrayed. Without effort we can see Samasource as little more than a well-branded labour broker, in the business of outsourcing work to developing countries. So, what’s wrong with that? Well, depending who you are, either nothing at all or absolutely everything. Samasource builds what is essentially a factory for its “virtual assembly line” workers. It then partners with Western companies to provide the digital work, the raw material, for these factories. Among these corporate clients Samasource lists global superpowers such as Google, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart. The Samasource organization forges an unprecedented link between these corporate entities (the most wealthy, powerful, and dominant organizations on the planet) with the most marginalized and vulnerable people they can find. Leila Janah would like us to believe that all is well and that nothing could possibly go wrong here. But, I ask you, is there any doubt that it matters whether or not that is the case? Let’s look further. To assure us of their benevolent mission, the Samasource website and promotional videos prominently highlight the number of people they’ve employed, and the amount of money they’ve disbursed. Everywhere you turn looking for information about their workers you are told that they offer their foreign labourers a fair “living wage.” So, what about that? What do they actually pay these virtual “factory” workers? Well, one company source informs us that they’ve “created employment worth $550,000 for 900 individuals over the last three years”. With no other details this is clearly tremendous work they are doing, for a small newly-founded non-profit. But what if we delve deeper than what we are directly told? If we do the math (550,000 / 900), this amounts to $611 per person. And then divided over the three years in question, that comes to $200 per person, per year. Wait! There’s a problem here. Suddenly things look quite different than we are lead to believe. If workers are getting $1 an hour, “instead of $1 a day,” as the slogan goes, they aren’t getting close to full-time or even long-term part-time work. At eight hours a day ($8), five days a week ($40), workers would be at their yearly average ($200) after just five weeks. And, of course, that means they will have made their portion ($600) of the half a million dollars Samasource has distributed in only three months. So are their assembly line workers putting in an hour a day? If they’re working full-time what are they doing with the other 33 months out of this 36 month period Samasource is reporting on? And, just as importantly, why is none of this clear? The fishiness doesn’t stop there however. Interestingly, on a more recently updated part of their website, Samasource says they’ve paid out “$2,073,188 in living wages” to “3,037 trusted workers”. This amount works out to $682 per person – which, on the surface, looks like even more than the workers were getting before. And yet, as Samasource was founded in 2008, four years before this data was presented, we are forced to assume that employees are working even less hours (or for less pay) as the number of workers grows. Look at the math: $682 per person over four years amounts to only $170 per year, per person – compared to the $200 per year average from the previous year’s reporting. These numbers suggest something slightly less than Samasource purports to offer. At the very least, it seems that Samasource actively obscures the fact that they provide very short-term work, or extremely limited part-time work, to marginalized communities in the developing world. Sadly these are not the only funny numbers that Samasource offers. When looking further into the pay that Samasource’s virtual factory workers get, I came across a fair trade calculator on the Samasource website that they say they use to arrive at reasonable wages for their workers. However, using their own recommended tool only turns out numbers further out of whack than I imagined. FairWageGuide.org suggests that in India, say, (where much of Samasource’s work is done) the minimum wage is around $4 to $5 US per day, or roughly $0.50 per hour. Of course, the number is higher in urban areas and higher still for anyone with tradable skills. This $5 per day I found is substantially more than the $1 per day they claim in their promotional materials as an average worker’s wage in the developing world. And that's important because they use their $1 per day number to contrast with their generous offer of $1 per hour for work on their “virtual assembly line”. Yet, not only is this number misleading but there are still further problems even with this simple baseline number of $1 per hour. After all, if you dig around you’ll find that Samasource does not in fact offer its virtual factory workers an hourly wage. That's not in the business plan. No. Instead, each segmented morsel of microwork comes with its own micropayment of a few cents or fractions of a cent upon completion. Therefore, only if its workers are productive enough will they have the potential of earning a “living wage” of $1 per hour. (Critically, the dreamy $1 per hour figure is made still less meaningful when we recall the apparent maximum employment period of three months I noted earlier.) This kind of pay practise is uncommon and generally frowned upon in the developed world. And for good reason. Unions and labour justice organizations have fought long and hard for minimum wage laws and the principle of predictable, consistent wages. The situation Samasource places its labourers in is not one that we should be applauding, and should do more than raise a few eyebrows. I’ve personally experienced the kind of pay structure Samasource uses, but as a tree planter in Northern British Columbia. There the reforestation industry is exempt (both virtually and in real terms) from a range of labour and wage laws – similar to the outsourced labour situation Samasource provides for American corporations. And, like Leila Janah’s microwork and micropay scales, planting companies offer their workers a per-tree wage scale, typically between six and twenty-five cents, depending on the difficulty of the work. Contracts for planting blocks are bid upon by reforestation companies and, of course, the lowest bidder gets the lot. This means companies with the “hardest working” employees – a those most desperate, most willing to sacrifice their bodies and work under the poorest conditions, and/or use the most prescription, over-the-counter, or illegal drugs – get the work. While it’s true that an unskilled worker can earn a much higher pay cheque planting in the bush than they are likely to get in other jobs there are additional costs as well. Here, conditions and basic safety and security are chronically lacking. Yes, people can finish a season of tree-planting with $10,000 or $20,000 in their pocket, but for every one of them there are a dozen or more that go home with nothing, or even owing the company “camping fees”, “transportation costs”, or any number of other things. (Similarly, Samasource only directly pays its “service partners” and trusts that the people actually doing the work are able to survive on what filters down to them.) Worse still, some planters don’t just go home owing the company money: every year people are poisoned (by the herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides commonly used on saplings), endure serious injuries, and even die. Even in British Columbia this is a reality seldom reported because of the people who do the work, the remote locations where the incidents take place, the circumstances under which people are hurt or lose their lives, and the fact that all of this is government and industry approved. (This might lead us to ask if Samasource offers its labourers a safe and healthy work environment...) At best this type of work exploits young and marginalized poor people. In the forests or, rather, clear-cuts of B.C. the labour force is typically made up of young males, many of whom are students, and almost all of whom are from other provinces. (In a company of two hundred planters I knew of only five from B.C.) These are essentially internally displaced economic refugees who have left their homes – places like Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and rural Quebec where there is no work for them – seeking jobs in the West where they’ve heard they can make real “living wages.” Ultimately the company earns piles of money while workers get the smallest sum possible for doing all of the work. And, just like with Samasource, there is always someone poorer, more desperate, and willing to work for less, ready to fill the shoes of any worker who leaves (out of disgust, from lack of wages, or through injury or even death). It may seem be a legitimate criticism to suggest that I'm being silly to talk about pay structures, the type of work, and conditions given that Samasource is offering training and income to people who’ve had neither of these. And, of course, that’s the very message Samasource sends. However, there are good reasons to be weary. CAREX Canada, for just one example, our nation’s only cancer surveillance and prevention research group, places shiftwork on their list of carcinogens. Yes, you read that right: shiftwork. I wonder if Samasource had this in mind when developing their program, setting up new operations in the developing world, and before offering menial computer training to members of rural communities who are used to being outside, moving their bodies? I would be more than a little disturbed to find out that along with marginally better pay and some keyboarding skills came significantly increased cancer risk (particularly breast cancer in women – Samasource’s explicit recruiting target) as well as well-documented and clearly predictable increases in cardiovascular problems, digestive disorders, reproductive health problems, hypertension, fatigue, stress, depression, and anxiety. If this is the case, and Samasource is exposing communities to a whole range of new physical and mental health problems, can we say that these communities are being uplifted by a few extra dollars? Or are they being further down-trodden by another well-intentioned, would-be silver bullet? Well, if there’s still any doubt, let’s look further. One of the slogans you come across on the Samasource website and in their videos is that “work is at the core of human dignity.” I think we would agree, but not without a significant caveat. Clearly, not all work, regardless of context or content dignifies the human spirit. I would suggest that meaningful work is at the core of human dignity. (Have we learned nothing in the last century?) In my mind, anything less and you’ve got something dangerously close to the infamous “Arbeit macht frei.” With Samasource actively seeking out and setting up operations in refugee camps, if nothing else they may want to get a better public relations team. Even in the 18th century, Adam Smith, the high priest of capital himself, warned of the deleterious psychological results of meaningless, overly atomized work. (Marx and even Charlie Chaplain had similar anxieties and warnings.) So, on which side of the fence does Samasource fall? Is Samasource offering vulnerable women and young people meaningful work? Are they even offering dependable, consistent work? It wouldn’t seem so. In fact, not in the least. Their communication team doesn’t even try to paint the work on their virtual assembly line as being anything but inane drudgery. And yet Samasource and its founders aren’t ignorant of the importance of meaningful work or of the value of a nurturing workplace, one within pleasant and stimulating environs. (And of course you wouldn’t expect them to be so ignorant given that employment is their very raison d’etre.) On their website Samasource entices prospective American employees, their future project managers, software engineers, and web designers, with a list of “10 REASONS YOU SHOULD WORK HERE.” Interestingly, no less than three of the ten items accentuate the meaningfulness of the work: “we feel good about what we do;” “our daily work has a huge impact on entrepreneurs and workers worldwide;” and “nothing is more satisfying than creating real livelihoods for thousands of people.” Obviously, meaningfulness is seen as paramount for Californians, given how heavily highlighted it is on this list. The list also highlights two other key points: “We’re right in the heart of San Francisco” and “Generous benefits and a fun office.” So which of these five important elements of work and a work environment do they offer vulnerable women, young people, and refugees around the world? Sadly, none. This paints a shocking double standard, a kind of relativism that doesn’t sit well with me. Given all of the aforementioned points, other than the work being digital, what is the difference between Samasource’s operation and, say, an offshore garment factory? Clothing companies such as Nike, Guess, and Banana Republic train their Bangladeshi and Indonesian factory workers, pay them better than they’d get working the fields or selling cigarettes in the market, and in some circumstances even clothe, feed, and house their workers. And couldn’t we also say that these sweatshop workers are also acquiring skills that will “increase their lifetime earnings” as Samasource says of its recruits? Certainly. So how is Samasource better than your run-of-the-mill sweatshop? Does the fact that the work is digital somehow paint a brighter picture? I can’t see how. And yet scholars and industry leaders alike hail Samasource and its founder as some kind of hero. For me, it’s hard to look at all of this and avoid the conclusion that the main function of Samasource is not to alleviate poverty or uplift those on the sour end of both historic and contemporary imperialism, but instead to perpetuate the problems embedded there, while ensuring that some of the wealthiest people and corporations in the history of the world grow wealthier still – and by significant margins. For instance, this notion of “$1/hr not $1/day” that’s offered up is clearly nothing more than your standard marketing department form of misdirection. Samasource attempts to shift the focus from the reality that Google would have to pay an American at least fifteen dollars, but probably more like thirty, for the same hour of work. In other words, Google makes a minimum of $14 for every $1 that they pay out to an Indian or a Haitian working on Leila Janah’s hyper-virtual-information-assembly-cloud-of-joy. For a sense of how this scales out, promotional material on the Samasource website aimed at American companies gleefully notes that by using their services a small IT firm can save “more than $20,000 per month over in-house costs”. Their highlighting of the fact that they’re a non-profit is a similar attempt to obfuscate what’s really going on. Being a registered non-profit in the United States simply means that, unlike scores of other American-based companies, they don’t have to hide their money in offshore bank accounts in order to evade the taxman; instead, they are legally exempt from paying federal taxes. And it isn’t as though the members of their San Francisco team are volunteering their time or even making minimum or meager “living wages”. Their employees are are determinately for-(high)profit. As well, no one is pretending that the corporations Samasource acts as a middleman and virtual front for are not making piles (and piles and piles) of money off the venture they’ve directly funded. In what way then, exactly, is this project not explicitly for profit? The profit is so thick and hot you can smell it wafting all the way up from Silicon Valley:
Google donates a million dollars to Samasource to get them off the ground
Google gets a tax receipt in return that allows them to write off the donation
Samasource then takes the million dollars and handsomely compensates its Ivy League staff of former bankers, corporate executives, and multinational marketing strategists
Samasource delivers virtually free labour for Google
If this isn’t outright exploitation and abuse (legal as it may be) I don’t know what is. This is exploitation of the most-at-risk, through the elimination of work for the less-at-risk (while carefully sidestepping labour laws, unions, and basic taxation – the very signature of neoliberalism and globalization), for the explicit financial benefit of the world’s most privileged and powerful. Thankfully I’m not the only one concerned. Adam Fish and Ramesh Srinivasan, two scholars from UCLA, have now looked at Samasource’s business model too and come away with similar questions and concerns. They ask very pointedly, “whether Samasource perpetuates rather than challenges a dependency whereby marginalized populations occupy subordinate positions within global networks, and where wealth and power concentrates at the top”. Unlike myself, Fish and Srinivasan were able to conduct interviews with Leila Janah and some of the Samasource team. These interviews give us further insight into the culture of the company and the thinking of its founder. Janah defiantly responds to Fish and Srinivasan’s concerns by remarking that “it is pointless to criticize labor outsourcing in a world where this is so widespread”. This causes one to ask how a person like Leila Janah – who sat as a visiting scholar at both Stanford University’s Program on Global Justice and Australian National University’s Center for Applied Philosophy and Ethics – can even formulate such a morally bankrupt statement? Apparently Janah adheres to the ethical code of most preschool playgrounds that says if everyone else is doing it then it must be okay. (Ad populum much?) However, as it turns out, her fallacious argument that outsourcing is beyond criticism because everyone outsources, is precisely the logic of her corporate idols, the criminal masterminds of Wall Street, so it’s all beginning to make sense. Janah explains to Fish and Srinivasan that she runs her non-profit “the Goldman way”. (Referring to Goldman Sachs: the company that actively defrauded their clients out of more money than the human mind can conceptualize; whose entire executive staff unashamedly lied under oath during the U.S. Senate investigation into their crimes; and who colluded with policy-makers to ensure that they would be considered “too big to fail.”) And so, when we learn that Janah also did a stint with one of the most problematic international organizations on the planet, the World Bank, her views come as no surprise and all of this, this whole scheme, begins to make much more sense and starts to smell very much like the enormous, vulgar pile of bullshit I feared it to be. In her 2009 TED talk Janah articulated her motivation for creating Samasource. She speaks of poverty in the developing world and about a tremendous loss of potential due to a lack of employment opportunity. Janah goes even further, saying that people in the developing world often turn to crime because the pay is better than formal work. (A curious premise, and pompous criticism of the poor, that ignores the work of her mentors at Goldman – the richest of the rich who would resort to criminal behaviour, over honest work, simply because it pays better.) Citing an article from Wired Magazine, she tells her audience that, in Somalia for example, “most pirates are fishermen that traded in their nets for guns because the payoff from ransoms is better than the payoff from fishing in their depleted waters”. She uses this example to show why Samasource, and the globalized neoliberal economics it brings, will alleviate the suffering of Somalis. Of course, so narrow and simplistic is her assessment of the situation that it calls into question all of her other reasoning. What she fails to notice or mention in her assessment is that it’s globalized economics and neoliberal logic at the heart of the problem in Somalia. Apparently Janah missed investigative reporting that same year about Somali pirates, by Joe Schlesinger, on CBC’s The National. Schlesinger’s report clearly explained how, with ever-larger markets to feed, international competition among companies, and diminished national and international regulation and monitoring (the work of globalization and neoliberal policy), foreign trawlers and tankers have been operating illegally in Somalia’s waters for years. The show explored how Somali fishermen lose the equivalent of three hundred million U.S. dollars annually to illegal foreign (mostly European) fishing. It also showed how incalculable damage to the local environment and human health has been done by international shipping firms who, motivated by greed (“the Goldman way”), are able to save $1,000 U.S. per tonne dumping toxic waste (including uranium from Canada) into the unprotected waters off Somalia rather than paying to dispose of this material properly at legal waste facilities. Informed by the United Nations Environmental Program, Greenpeace, and the Canadian National Somali Congress, this CBC report suggests we think of Janah’s “pirates” – those men who risk their lives at sea defending their sovereign territorial waters against foreign threats – not as pirates at all but as an informal Somali coastguard. So these starving, sickened people who’ve been plagued by decades of war and robbery by the international community need not be further demonized or taken advantage of by the likes of Leila Janah and her crack team of bankers and lawyers who can’t wait to stick their fangs into Somalia’s, and the rest of Africa’s, already substantially wounded heart. If they really wanted to help Somalis, Samasource and its partners could do far better by creating opposition to corrupt and illegal business practises and by shoring up international law and enforcement regimes. They might also think about supporting local labour organizers and fledgling unions – something the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and many others, have found to be an essential factor in dramatically reducing poverty, the stated goal of Samasource. Research clearly shows that “no country has ever achieved widespread prosperity and created a large middle class without strong unions”. And yet Samasource doesn’t help their workers to form unions or even talk about unions at all. Is that because unions, and the improved rights, conditions, wages, and benefits they bring, get in the way of their bottom line and that of the mega-corporations they support? No. I’m sure that’s not it. Noting the cultural bias Janah brings to her company encourages us to look at other cultural dimensions as well. We might look at Samasource in terms of how it navigates and supports the cultural expression and diversity (the social context) of the many varied locales in which it conducts business. (It sure does seem Janah believes that all non-Californians are robots in one large, sterile, cloud-factory.) Here again Fish and Srinivasan raise important questions. In their work, “Digital labor is the new killer app”, they note that Samasource brings with it (to Gambia, Ghana, Haiti, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda) their own vision of empowerment. As though nothing was learned from five hundred years of colonialism, Samasource doesn’t come looking to configure their model to the local reality, or seek out local ideas about how their own development should unfold. Instead they wish to achieve their own American objectives on foreign soil. Fish and Srinivasan ask why the Samasource model couldn’t be more participatory. They wonder why there isn’t at least some power shared with the communities in which Samasource installs itself. And, critically, they ask why these communities are forced to privilege a Western economic and professional model over expressions of their own culture, something grassroots and homegrown? It is said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet this appears to be the very model Samasource is working from. Ignoring nearly all we’ve learned from colonialism, industrialism, and even recent events like the collapse of the U.S. economy, Samasource seeks to boldly go where literally everyone has gone before. They arrive with their own fresh brand of colonialism, cultural imperialism, crony capitalism, and labour exploitation – claiming they expect different results. And why? Because they have a MacBook Pro and the latest Instagram upgrade? Seems so.
Like Samasource, we know that many of the colonialists and industrialists of past centuries claimed to have the best of intentions. Surely countless letters and journal entries from the colonies contain phrases like: “liberating the natives”, “bringing dignity and respectable work to the poor”, “uplifting the weak and destitute”, “alleviating suffering”. But – especially when you’re a team of the most highly educated, best experienced, heavily funded folks on the planet – I don’t give a shit about your intentions, I care what you actually do. I mean, you can’t set to impact and transform the entire globe and then plead ignorance or miscalculation in hindsight. Google and Microsoft are creative industry leaders, ones with virtually unlimited resources, that employ the most innovative minds they can get a hold of. It is simply not good enough for them to enable precarious, low-skill, low-wage, short-term labour under deprived and depressing circumstances. Is there any doubt that in just minutes and without much effort at all anyone could improve upon the Samasource model? (I just did much of the work for you...) I hope this happens. If nothing else, maybe Samasource can see that they act as ambassadors for everyone in the West when they set up shop throughout the developing world and in the poorest communities around. Certainly our image abroad could use a boost. And they could help greatly by not perpetuating the stereotype of us all being privileged, money-grubbing do-gooders with no sense of history, perspective, or humanity.
