Technology & Telecommunications

184 workers sued Sama Al, a contractor paid to moderate Facebook content in Africa for firing them illegally, after the company decided to not to renew its contract. A Kenyan court barred the company from laying off workers and ordered Sama to continue working for Facebook. When Sama disobeyed and stopped paying staff salaries, the court ordered Sama to pay back wages.  Read More

Bui Thi Nhung, a Vietnamese migrant worker working in New Taipei, Taiwan, at the technology giant Garmin informed management that she was pregnant in March 2023. Shortly after, Nhung was given untranslated resignation documents to sign which she felt obligated to comply with. After labor and human rights organizations raised an alarm, Garmin agreed to rehire Nhung.  Read More

Twitter, the social media company, quietly assisted Pentagon officials involved in putting a positive spin on the U.S. wars in the Middle East, according to new research into the Twitter Files, a tranche of internal company data provided to selected members of the media by CEO Elon Musk. Read More

Undercover Global (UC Global), a now defunct private military contractor, is at the center of a lawsuit brought by a group of journalists and lawyers against the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for allegedly spying on them when they met with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at Ecuador’s embassy in London. Read More

Protests over working conditions are mounting against Coupang, the biggest e-commerce website in South Korea. In July, workers took an air conditioner on a 50 kilometer march from the company headquarters to a Hwaseong warehouse to bring attention to their demands for respite from record high temperatures this summer. Read More

Employees of an Apple sales outlet in Towson, a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, voted to unionize in June 2022 to become the Big Tech company’s first unionized store in the U.S. This is part of a larger movement across the country, with workers at many companies like Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s expressing their interest in joining a union. Read More

Facebook’s parent company has been sued in Kenya over mental health trauma suffered by Daniel Motaung, a former content moderator who worked for Sama, a contractor hired to remove graphic and violent content on the social media site. Moutang is seeking compensation for all others who faced similar problems. Read More

Workers have been organizing to form unions at: Read More

Facebook employees have turned over internal documents to Whistleblower Aid, an NGO in Washington DC, that appear to show that the company deliberately chose to take Australian emergency service pages offline in February 2021 to force the government to water down a law to make Facebook pay for news. Read More

In late March 2022, workers at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, voted on whether or not to unionize. On April 1st, the election results were announced and the final vote count was 2654 “yes" and 2131 “no". This marks the first time US workers have successfully voted to form a union in Amazon's 27-year history. Read More