Luther12
Elder Lister
Workers in the Nairobi office are among the lowest-paid for the platform
Daniel Motaung, a former Facebook content moderator employed by Sama, photographed near his home in South Africa on Feb. 11, 2022. Motaung alleges Sama wrongfully terminated him in 2019 while he was attempting to start a union.
In a drab office building near a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, nearly 200 young men and women from countries across Africa sit at desks glued to computer monitors, where they must watch videos of murders, rapes, suicides, and child sexual abuse.
These young Africans work for Sama, which calls itself an “ethical AI” outsourcing company and is headquartered in California.
Sama says its mission is to provide people in places like Nairobi with “dignified digital work.” Its executives can often be heard saying that the best way to help poor countries is to “give work, not aid.” The company claims to have helped lift more than 50,000 people in the developing world out of poverty.
This benevolent public image has won Sama data-labeling contracts with some of the largest companies in the world, including Google, Microsoft and Walmart. What the company doesn’t make public on its website is its relationship with its client Facebook.
Here in Nairobi, Sama employees who speak at least 11 African languages between them toil day and night, working as outsourced Facebook content moderators: the emergency first responders of social media. They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal or banned content from Facebook before it is seen by the average user.
Since 2019, this Nairobi office block has been the epicenter of Facebook’s content moderation operation for the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. Its remit includes Ethiopia, where Facebook is trying to prevent content on its platform contributing to incitement to violence in an escalating civil war.
Despite their importance to Facebook, the workers in this Nairobi office are among the lowest-paid workers for the platform anywhere in the world, with some of them taking home as little as $1.50 per hour, a TIME investigation found. The testimonies of Sama employees reveal a workplace culture characterized by mental trauma, intimidation, and alleged suppression of the right to unionize. The revelations raise serious questions about whether Facebook—which periodically sends its own employees to Nairobi to monitor Sama’s operations—is exploiting the very people upon whom it is depending to ensure its platform is safe in Ethiopia and across the continent. And just as Facebook needs them most, TIME can reveal that content moderators at Sama are leaving the company in droves due to poor pay and working conditions, with six Ethiopians resigning in a single week in January.
The office in Nairobi, Kenya, where Facebook content moderators began working in 2019, photographed on Feb 10, 2022. Sama was known publicly as Samasource until early 2021.
This story is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former Sama employees, as well as hundreds of pages of documents including company emails, payslips and contracts. Most employees spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of legal consequences if they disclose the nature of their work or Facebook’s involvement. The Signals Network provided psychological and legal support for whistleblowers quoted in this story.
“The work that we do is a kind of mental torture,” one employee, who currently works as a Facebook content moderator for Sama, told TIME. “Whatever I am living on is hand-to-mouth. I can’t save a cent. Sometimes I feel I want to resign. But then I ask myself: what will my baby eat?”
TIME is aware of at least two Sama content moderators who chose to resign after being diagnosed with mental illnesses including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. Many others described how they had been traumatized by the work but were unable to obtain formal diagnoses due to their inability to afford access to quality mental healthcare. Some described continuing with work despite trauma because they had no other options. While Sama employs wellness counselors to provide workers with on-site care in Nairobi, most of the content moderators TIME spoke to said they generally distrust the counselors. One former wellness counselor says that Sama managers regularly rejected counselors’ requests to let content moderators take “wellness breaks” during the day, because of the impact it would have on productivity.
Workers say Sama has also suppressed their efforts to secure better working conditions. In the summer of 2019, content moderators threatened to strike within seven days unless they were given better pay and working conditions. Instead of negotiating, Sama responded by flying two highly-paid executives from San Francisco to Nairobi to deal with the uprising. Within weeks Daniel Motaung, the attempted strike’s leader who was in the process of formally filing trade union papers, had been fired—accused by Sama of taking action that would put the relationship between the company and Facebook at “great risk.” Sama told other participants in the labor action effort that they were expendable and said they should either resign or get back to work, several employees told TIME. The workers stood down before the seven days were up, and there was no pay increase.
“At Sama, it feels like speaking the truth or standing up for your rights is a crime,” a second employee tells TIME. “They made sure by firing some people that this will not happen again. I feel like it’s modern slavery, like neo-colonialism.” (Sama disputes this characterization, and said in a statement that its content moderators are paid triple the Kenyan minimum wage.)
Foxglove, a legal NGO based in London, says it has informed Sama it is preparing legal action in relation to its alleged wrongful termination of Motaung. “Firing workers for trying to organize is against the law,” says Cori Crider, Foxglove’s director. “Daniel did a brave thing by blowing the whistle here—as was his legal right.” The Katiba Institute, a Kenyan public-interest law firm, is assisting with the case.
Sama denies that there was any strike or labor action. “We value our employees and are proud of the long-standing work we have done to create an ethical AI supply chain,” Shriram Natarajan, the head of Sama’s Nairobi office, said in an emailed statement. “We exist to provide ethical AI to our global customers and we are proud of the role our employees play in building new online experiences and cleaning up the internet. It’s a tough job and it’s why we invest heavily in training, personal development, wellness programs, and competitive salaries.”
Facebook says it spent more than $5 billion on safety measures in 2021. It contracts the services of more than 15,000 content moderators globally, most of whom are employed by third-parties like Sama. In response to a detailed set of questions for this story, a spokesperson for Facebook’s parent company Meta said: “We take our responsibility to the people who review content for Meta seriously and require our partners to provide industry-leading pay, benefits and support. We also encourage content reviewers to raise issues when they become aware of them and regularly conduct independent audits to ensure our partners are meeting the high standards we expect of them.”
A strike, struck down
Daniel Motaung was a 27-year-old university graduate from South Africa looking for his first job when he came across an online ad from Sama seeking Zulu speakers.
It was early 2019, and Sama had recently won a contract to provide content moderation for Facebook’s Sub-Saharan Africa markets. Sama placed job ads in countries across Africa, both directly and through agencies, looking for people with fluency in different African languages who were willing to relocate to Kenya.
Motaung, like many other moderators TIME spoke with, says he had little idea what content moderation involved when he applied for the job. He thought it simply involved removing false information from social media. He says he was not informed during his interview that the job would require regularly viewing disturbing content that could lead to mental health problems. After he accepted and arrived in Kenya, Sama asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and only then did they reveal to him the type of content he would be working with daily. By then, he felt it was too late to turn back.
Several other current and former content moderators described similar experiences of not being warned about the nature of the job. Two, from separate countries, said they had answered job ads placed via agencies for “call center agents.”
Elsewhere in the world, similar working conditions have landed Facebook in hot water. In 2020, the social network paid out $52 million to fund mental health treatment for some of its American content moderators following a lawsuit centered on mental ill health stemming from their work, including PTSD. In the U.S. and Europe, many Facebook content moderators employed by the outsourcing firm Accenture are now asked to sign a waiver before they begin their jobs, acknowledging that they may develop PTSD and other mental health disorders. African content moderators working for Sama say they are not asked to sign such a waiver.
According to payslips seen by TIME, Sama pays foreign employees monthly pre-tax salaries of around 60,000 Kenyan shillings ($528), which includes a monthly bonus for relocating from elsewhere in Africa. After tax, this equates to around $440 per month, or a take-home wage of roughly $2.20 per hour, based on a 45-hour work week. Sama employees from within Kenya, who are not paid the monthly relocation bonus, receive a take-home wage equivalent to around $1.46 per hour after tax. In an interview with the BBC in 2018, Sama’s late founder Leila Janah attempted to justify the company’s levels of pay in the region. “One thing that’s critical in our line of work is to not pay wages that would distort local labor markets,” she said. “If we were to pay people substantially more than that, we would throw everything off.”
Employees themselves didn’t see it that way. One day in July 2019, Motaung got talking to a group of other moderators who were hired four months previously. He recounts that many said they felt the job that they had applied for was not the one they were doing, and discussed their low pay and poor working environment. Some said they had done research that showed content moderators in other countries were being paid far more for the same work. They resolved to group together and take action to better their conditions. Motaung took the lead, and he and his colleagues created a WhatsApp group chat to begin canvassing opinion more widely. Soon, the group had more than 100 members.
Employees who were in the group chat say they discussed the trauma of the work and how many felt they had been hired under false pretenses. Kenyan employees said it was unfair that they were paid around 30% less than the foreigners in the office, and that they had not yet received the medical insurance they say they had been promised. Other employees were frustrated that Sama had recently introduced compulsory night shifts to meet Facebook’s demand for 24-hour coverage.
Based on the discussions in the chat, Motaung drafted a petition with a list of demands for Sama’s management, including that everyone’s pay be doubled. The document, seen by TIME, said that if management did not “substantively engage” with the demands within seven days, employees would go on strike.
Motaung knew that Sama employees stood a better chance of having their demands met by acting as a group, because Sama was dependent on “the client”: Facebook. If they all stopped working at once, he reasoned, Facebook would want to know why so much of its African content was no longer being moderated, and could put significant pressure on Sama to accede to workers’ demands. “I explained that alone, all of us are expendable,” he recalls telling his colleagues. “But if we go as a group, remember, they have a contract with the client. The terms of the contract are that [Sama is] to deliver on a regular basis, no interruptions whatsoever. We knew if all of us stopped working right now, they would not be able to replace us within a week or within a month.”
Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Africa, out of which Sama says many of its workers are hired.
The Alliance, as the group of employees began calling themselves, presented their petition to Sama’s management in a meeting on July 30, 2019. Two senior Sama executives from San Francisco joined via video-conference, but they dismissed the workers’ concerns, according to Motaung and others. “They told us there are lots of people who are dying to get this job, that they did research on the wages and this is a nice wage considering what people are getting in Kenya,” says one employee who was present during the meeting. A 2021 studycarried out by three MIT researchers found the average salary at Sama including benefits was approximately 2.5 times the Kenyan minimum wage. But even so, these wages only cover the basic costs of living, workers say, and don’t allow them to save or improve their financial situations.
Within days, the two executives from San Francisco had arrived in Nairobi, and Motaung was suspended from his job pending a disciplinary hearing. Sama told Motaung some of his colleagues had accused him of bullying, intimidating and coercing them to sign their names to the list of demands. He was told to stay away from the office and barred from talking to his colleagues. Motaung says the allegations that he bullied more than 100 of his colleagues into signing a petition for better pay and working conditions are ridiculous. He suspects that Sama intimidated several of his former colleagues into making statements against him. “It was just them pretending to follow a process so that they can get rid of me quickly, so that everything can go back to normal,” he says. Sama did not comment on allegations of worker intimidation.
Meanwhile, other employees involved in the attempted strike action were being invited to individual meetings with Cindy Abramson, one of the executives who had flown in from San Francisco. Two employees who were particularly vocal during the worker revolt said that Abramson flattered them in these meetings, suggesting that they had leadership potential, and dangled the prospect of promotion if they could convince their colleagues to stand down.
Three rank-and-file participants in the labor action told TIME that during their own one-on-one meetings, Abramson, whose total compensation in 2018 was $194,390, according to Sama’s public filings, intimidated them into revoking their names from the petition, saying that they must choose between disaffiliating from the Alliance or losing their jobs. Her warnings were especially stark toward Kenyan employees, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The Kenyans were reminded in the meetings that they were more easily replaceable than foreign employees, which many of them took as a threat of being fired if they did not stand down. Scared, many people started revoking their signatures from the petition. “They threatened us, and we backed down,” says one Kenyan employee, who reasoned that it was better to have a low-paying job than no job at all.
“There never was a strike or labor action,” Sama said in its statement to TIME. “Being a responsible employer, we wanted to see our team in person, meet with everyone face-to-face and address their concerns head-on. It’s why we flew members of our leadership team to our offices in Nairobi and it’s a decision we stand behind.” The statement also said that after employees asked for higher salaries, the company conducted a pay audit and found they were already being paid double the living wage for the region. Sama said it has since changed its onboarding processes to “be more transparent about what to expect and we intensified our onboarding program by developing new training modules to ensure team members were prepared on how to handle the functions of the role.” Abramson, who has since left Sama, declined to comment.
Two weeks after his suspension, Sama fired Motaung, claiming he was guilty of gross misconduct “for engaging in acts that could amount to bullying, harassment and coercion and that led to the disruption of business activities and put the relationship between Samasource and its client [Facebook] at great risk,” according to a termination letter dated August 20, 2019. (Sama was known publicly as Samasource until early 2021, when it changed its name as part of a transformation that also included switching from a non-profit organization to a business.) The letter also noted Motaung’s leadership role within the Alliance, and said that he had advised his colleagues not to attend one-on-one meetings with management. Sama did not respond to questions about its firing of Motaung, but said in its statement that it had dismissed three employees who had “violated workplace rules.”
In the days before he was terminated, Motaung was busy drafting documents that would have formally established the Alliance as a union under Kenyan law. “I think they found out. While I was doing that, I received a letter terminating my employment,” he says. Motaung’s work permit was then canceled, leaving him just three weeks to leave Kenya for his native South Africa.
Daniel Motaung, a former Facebook content moderator employed by Sama, photographed near his home in South Africa on Feb. 11, 2022. Motaung alleges Sama wrongfully terminated him in 2019 while he was attempting to start a union.
In a drab office building near a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, nearly 200 young men and women from countries across Africa sit at desks glued to computer monitors, where they must watch videos of murders, rapes, suicides, and child sexual abuse.
These young Africans work for Sama, which calls itself an “ethical AI” outsourcing company and is headquartered in California.
Sama says its mission is to provide people in places like Nairobi with “dignified digital work.” Its executives can often be heard saying that the best way to help poor countries is to “give work, not aid.” The company claims to have helped lift more than 50,000 people in the developing world out of poverty.
This benevolent public image has won Sama data-labeling contracts with some of the largest companies in the world, including Google, Microsoft and Walmart. What the company doesn’t make public on its website is its relationship with its client Facebook.
Here in Nairobi, Sama employees who speak at least 11 African languages between them toil day and night, working as outsourced Facebook content moderators: the emergency first responders of social media. They perform the brutal task of viewing and removing illegal or banned content from Facebook before it is seen by the average user.
Since 2019, this Nairobi office block has been the epicenter of Facebook’s content moderation operation for the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. Its remit includes Ethiopia, where Facebook is trying to prevent content on its platform contributing to incitement to violence in an escalating civil war.
Despite their importance to Facebook, the workers in this Nairobi office are among the lowest-paid workers for the platform anywhere in the world, with some of them taking home as little as $1.50 per hour, a TIME investigation found. The testimonies of Sama employees reveal a workplace culture characterized by mental trauma, intimidation, and alleged suppression of the right to unionize. The revelations raise serious questions about whether Facebook—which periodically sends its own employees to Nairobi to monitor Sama’s operations—is exploiting the very people upon whom it is depending to ensure its platform is safe in Ethiopia and across the continent. And just as Facebook needs them most, TIME can reveal that content moderators at Sama are leaving the company in droves due to poor pay and working conditions, with six Ethiopians resigning in a single week in January.
The office in Nairobi, Kenya, where Facebook content moderators began working in 2019, photographed on Feb 10, 2022. Sama was known publicly as Samasource until early 2021.
This story is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former Sama employees, as well as hundreds of pages of documents including company emails, payslips and contracts. Most employees spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of legal consequences if they disclose the nature of their work or Facebook’s involvement. The Signals Network provided psychological and legal support for whistleblowers quoted in this story.
“The work that we do is a kind of mental torture,” one employee, who currently works as a Facebook content moderator for Sama, told TIME. “Whatever I am living on is hand-to-mouth. I can’t save a cent. Sometimes I feel I want to resign. But then I ask myself: what will my baby eat?”
TIME is aware of at least two Sama content moderators who chose to resign after being diagnosed with mental illnesses including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. Many others described how they had been traumatized by the work but were unable to obtain formal diagnoses due to their inability to afford access to quality mental healthcare. Some described continuing with work despite trauma because they had no other options. While Sama employs wellness counselors to provide workers with on-site care in Nairobi, most of the content moderators TIME spoke to said they generally distrust the counselors. One former wellness counselor says that Sama managers regularly rejected counselors’ requests to let content moderators take “wellness breaks” during the day, because of the impact it would have on productivity.
Workers say Sama has also suppressed their efforts to secure better working conditions. In the summer of 2019, content moderators threatened to strike within seven days unless they were given better pay and working conditions. Instead of negotiating, Sama responded by flying two highly-paid executives from San Francisco to Nairobi to deal with the uprising. Within weeks Daniel Motaung, the attempted strike’s leader who was in the process of formally filing trade union papers, had been fired—accused by Sama of taking action that would put the relationship between the company and Facebook at “great risk.” Sama told other participants in the labor action effort that they were expendable and said they should either resign or get back to work, several employees told TIME. The workers stood down before the seven days were up, and there was no pay increase.
“At Sama, it feels like speaking the truth or standing up for your rights is a crime,” a second employee tells TIME. “They made sure by firing some people that this will not happen again. I feel like it’s modern slavery, like neo-colonialism.” (Sama disputes this characterization, and said in a statement that its content moderators are paid triple the Kenyan minimum wage.)
Foxglove, a legal NGO based in London, says it has informed Sama it is preparing legal action in relation to its alleged wrongful termination of Motaung. “Firing workers for trying to organize is against the law,” says Cori Crider, Foxglove’s director. “Daniel did a brave thing by blowing the whistle here—as was his legal right.” The Katiba Institute, a Kenyan public-interest law firm, is assisting with the case.
Sama denies that there was any strike or labor action. “We value our employees and are proud of the long-standing work we have done to create an ethical AI supply chain,” Shriram Natarajan, the head of Sama’s Nairobi office, said in an emailed statement. “We exist to provide ethical AI to our global customers and we are proud of the role our employees play in building new online experiences and cleaning up the internet. It’s a tough job and it’s why we invest heavily in training, personal development, wellness programs, and competitive salaries.”
Facebook says it spent more than $5 billion on safety measures in 2021. It contracts the services of more than 15,000 content moderators globally, most of whom are employed by third-parties like Sama. In response to a detailed set of questions for this story, a spokesperson for Facebook’s parent company Meta said: “We take our responsibility to the people who review content for Meta seriously and require our partners to provide industry-leading pay, benefits and support. We also encourage content reviewers to raise issues when they become aware of them and regularly conduct independent audits to ensure our partners are meeting the high standards we expect of them.”
A strike, struck down
Daniel Motaung was a 27-year-old university graduate from South Africa looking for his first job when he came across an online ad from Sama seeking Zulu speakers.
It was early 2019, and Sama had recently won a contract to provide content moderation for Facebook’s Sub-Saharan Africa markets. Sama placed job ads in countries across Africa, both directly and through agencies, looking for people with fluency in different African languages who were willing to relocate to Kenya.
Motaung, like many other moderators TIME spoke with, says he had little idea what content moderation involved when he applied for the job. He thought it simply involved removing false information from social media. He says he was not informed during his interview that the job would require regularly viewing disturbing content that could lead to mental health problems. After he accepted and arrived in Kenya, Sama asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and only then did they reveal to him the type of content he would be working with daily. By then, he felt it was too late to turn back.
Several other current and former content moderators described similar experiences of not being warned about the nature of the job. Two, from separate countries, said they had answered job ads placed via agencies for “call center agents.”
Elsewhere in the world, similar working conditions have landed Facebook in hot water. In 2020, the social network paid out $52 million to fund mental health treatment for some of its American content moderators following a lawsuit centered on mental ill health stemming from their work, including PTSD. In the U.S. and Europe, many Facebook content moderators employed by the outsourcing firm Accenture are now asked to sign a waiver before they begin their jobs, acknowledging that they may develop PTSD and other mental health disorders. African content moderators working for Sama say they are not asked to sign such a waiver.
According to payslips seen by TIME, Sama pays foreign employees monthly pre-tax salaries of around 60,000 Kenyan shillings ($528), which includes a monthly bonus for relocating from elsewhere in Africa. After tax, this equates to around $440 per month, or a take-home wage of roughly $2.20 per hour, based on a 45-hour work week. Sama employees from within Kenya, who are not paid the monthly relocation bonus, receive a take-home wage equivalent to around $1.46 per hour after tax. In an interview with the BBC in 2018, Sama’s late founder Leila Janah attempted to justify the company’s levels of pay in the region. “One thing that’s critical in our line of work is to not pay wages that would distort local labor markets,” she said. “If we were to pay people substantially more than that, we would throw everything off.”
Employees themselves didn’t see it that way. One day in July 2019, Motaung got talking to a group of other moderators who were hired four months previously. He recounts that many said they felt the job that they had applied for was not the one they were doing, and discussed their low pay and poor working environment. Some said they had done research that showed content moderators in other countries were being paid far more for the same work. They resolved to group together and take action to better their conditions. Motaung took the lead, and he and his colleagues created a WhatsApp group chat to begin canvassing opinion more widely. Soon, the group had more than 100 members.
Employees who were in the group chat say they discussed the trauma of the work and how many felt they had been hired under false pretenses. Kenyan employees said it was unfair that they were paid around 30% less than the foreigners in the office, and that they had not yet received the medical insurance they say they had been promised. Other employees were frustrated that Sama had recently introduced compulsory night shifts to meet Facebook’s demand for 24-hour coverage.
Based on the discussions in the chat, Motaung drafted a petition with a list of demands for Sama’s management, including that everyone’s pay be doubled. The document, seen by TIME, said that if management did not “substantively engage” with the demands within seven days, employees would go on strike.
Motaung knew that Sama employees stood a better chance of having their demands met by acting as a group, because Sama was dependent on “the client”: Facebook. If they all stopped working at once, he reasoned, Facebook would want to know why so much of its African content was no longer being moderated, and could put significant pressure on Sama to accede to workers’ demands. “I explained that alone, all of us are expendable,” he recalls telling his colleagues. “But if we go as a group, remember, they have a contract with the client. The terms of the contract are that [Sama is] to deliver on a regular basis, no interruptions whatsoever. We knew if all of us stopped working right now, they would not be able to replace us within a week or within a month.”
Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Africa, out of which Sama says many of its workers are hired.
The Alliance, as the group of employees began calling themselves, presented their petition to Sama’s management in a meeting on July 30, 2019. Two senior Sama executives from San Francisco joined via video-conference, but they dismissed the workers’ concerns, according to Motaung and others. “They told us there are lots of people who are dying to get this job, that they did research on the wages and this is a nice wage considering what people are getting in Kenya,” says one employee who was present during the meeting. A 2021 studycarried out by three MIT researchers found the average salary at Sama including benefits was approximately 2.5 times the Kenyan minimum wage. But even so, these wages only cover the basic costs of living, workers say, and don’t allow them to save or improve their financial situations.
Within days, the two executives from San Francisco had arrived in Nairobi, and Motaung was suspended from his job pending a disciplinary hearing. Sama told Motaung some of his colleagues had accused him of bullying, intimidating and coercing them to sign their names to the list of demands. He was told to stay away from the office and barred from talking to his colleagues. Motaung says the allegations that he bullied more than 100 of his colleagues into signing a petition for better pay and working conditions are ridiculous. He suspects that Sama intimidated several of his former colleagues into making statements against him. “It was just them pretending to follow a process so that they can get rid of me quickly, so that everything can go back to normal,” he says. Sama did not comment on allegations of worker intimidation.
Meanwhile, other employees involved in the attempted strike action were being invited to individual meetings with Cindy Abramson, one of the executives who had flown in from San Francisco. Two employees who were particularly vocal during the worker revolt said that Abramson flattered them in these meetings, suggesting that they had leadership potential, and dangled the prospect of promotion if they could convince their colleagues to stand down.
Three rank-and-file participants in the labor action told TIME that during their own one-on-one meetings, Abramson, whose total compensation in 2018 was $194,390, according to Sama’s public filings, intimidated them into revoking their names from the petition, saying that they must choose between disaffiliating from the Alliance or losing their jobs. Her warnings were especially stark toward Kenyan employees, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The Kenyans were reminded in the meetings that they were more easily replaceable than foreign employees, which many of them took as a threat of being fired if they did not stand down. Scared, many people started revoking their signatures from the petition. “They threatened us, and we backed down,” says one Kenyan employee, who reasoned that it was better to have a low-paying job than no job at all.
“There never was a strike or labor action,” Sama said in its statement to TIME. “Being a responsible employer, we wanted to see our team in person, meet with everyone face-to-face and address their concerns head-on. It’s why we flew members of our leadership team to our offices in Nairobi and it’s a decision we stand behind.” The statement also said that after employees asked for higher salaries, the company conducted a pay audit and found they were already being paid double the living wage for the region. Sama said it has since changed its onboarding processes to “be more transparent about what to expect and we intensified our onboarding program by developing new training modules to ensure team members were prepared on how to handle the functions of the role.” Abramson, who has since left Sama, declined to comment.
Two weeks after his suspension, Sama fired Motaung, claiming he was guilty of gross misconduct “for engaging in acts that could amount to bullying, harassment and coercion and that led to the disruption of business activities and put the relationship between Samasource and its client [Facebook] at great risk,” according to a termination letter dated August 20, 2019. (Sama was known publicly as Samasource until early 2021, when it changed its name as part of a transformation that also included switching from a non-profit organization to a business.) The letter also noted Motaung’s leadership role within the Alliance, and said that he had advised his colleagues not to attend one-on-one meetings with management. Sama did not respond to questions about its firing of Motaung, but said in its statement that it had dismissed three employees who had “violated workplace rules.”
In the days before he was terminated, Motaung was busy drafting documents that would have formally established the Alliance as a union under Kenyan law. “I think they found out. While I was doing that, I received a letter terminating my employment,” he says. Motaung’s work permit was then canceled, leaving him just three weeks to leave Kenya for his native South Africa.
