: Facebook Content Moderators in Kenya to Receive Pay Rise Following TIME Investigation #WorldNEWS Facebook content moderators based in Kenya will receive a salary increase of between 30% and 50%, in

Facebook Content Moderators in Kenya to Receive Pay Rise Following TIME Investigation #WorldNEWS
Facebook content moderators based in Kenya will receive a salary increase of between 30% and 50%, in a move announced two weeks after a TIME investigation drew attention to low pay, poor working conditions and alleged union-busting by Sama, the outsourcing company that is their direct employer.
Every content moderator will receive an extra 20,000 Kenyan shillings (6) per month, Sama told employees in a meeting on Tuesday, according to sources who attended.
The raise means that the lowest-paid Facebook content moderators at Sama will now take home around 50,000 Kenyan shillings (9) each month after tax, or around . 20 per hour for a 9-hour working day. This is up from around . 50 per hour previously. Sama also promised that all content moderators would receive a yearly bonus worth one month of their salary, as an incentive to remain at the company, according to the sources.
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Read More: Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop
Even with the pay rise, Sama employees remain some of Facebook’s lowest-paid workers anywhere in the world. By comparison, outsourced content moderators for Facebook in the U. S. are paid a typical starting salary of per hour.
In the meeting on Tuesday, Habel Kamau, a human resources director at Sama’s Nairobi office, said that the salary changes were not a result of the TIME article. “The truth is that this conversation was still going to happen with these events occurring or not,” he said.
Kamau added that the pay increase had been made possible because of decisions to cut budgets elsewhere within Sama and did not indicate that the company would receive any more money from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to cover staffing costs. Sama did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment for this article.
The meeting did not address TIME’s revelations that Sama managers have been accused of suppressing a unionization effort in 2019. Daniel Motaung—a whistleblower and former employee who led more than 100 Sama workers in an attempted strike—told TIME that he had been fired following his efforts to secure better pay for staff.
In a statement to TIME, Motaung welcomed the news of the pay rise, but said that it was too low. He noted that in 2019, organizing employees had called for their pay to be doubled. “This increase will make a difference but it wont change their lives,” Motaung said in the statement. “They still wont be able to buy a house or feed their families in line with the lifting the poor out of poverty narrative that Sama continuously boasts about. ”

Aart Verrips for TIMEDaniel Motaung
TIME spoke to several serving content moderators at Sama who were pleased with the pay hike, but others said their feelings were mixed.