Q&A: EU law 'last best hope' to protect ghost workers feeding AI

• Trump pushes for deregulation
• New EU due diligence law could protect workers
• Fears over race to the bottom without regulation

BRUSSELS - As the global race for AI dominance speeds up, European regulations on corporate due diligence in supply chains will be key to protecting the unseen workers who power products like OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to a digital labour expert.

Mark Graham, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute for the project FairWork, has been studying the evolution of outsourced digital labour since the first submarine fibre optic cables connected Kenya to the rest of the world more than 15 years ago.

In 'Feeding the Machine', published last year, he and co-authors Callum Cant and James Muldoon, revealed the intricate network of organisations behind the "janitorial work for the digital products that consumers in the Global North rely on".

Context sat down with Graham to find out more.

Why did you write the book?

I saw how more and more outsourced work in East Africa was being done to train algorithms. That's what got me interested in thinking about the connections between the sites of consumption in the Global North. If you're using a high tech product, whether it be a semi-autonomous vehicle or a chatbot, you don't necessarily think workers in Kenya make this. You might think engineers in Silicon Valley make this thing, but about 80% of the human labour that goes into A.I. is this data rather than all of the more high-tech engineering work.

Describe these ghost workers and their working conditions?

It's a relatively highly educated English-speaking workforce on what's effectively a digital conveyor belt. It's extremely tedious, badly paid work. Everything's monitored. So you're assessed on your speed and on your quality. And in many places, if you don't hit those targets, your goal is to come in at night or on the weekend unpaid.

Typically most of it is done in the Global South. It's relatively irrelevant to a company for most types of work if it's done in a place A, B or C. What matters is it's done cheaply, efficiently, and to a high standard.

Did it surprise you that there is little regulation?

It didn't surprise me. If you successfully push back, it's very easy for those jobs to flow elsewhere. If you're a politician in the Philippines and you try to improve the conditions for these workers, you don't want to kill these jobs. The only thing worse than bad jobs is no jobs.

Where I do see potential for regulation is on the demand side. If you look at regulations like the German supply chain law, the French supply chain law, and the EU's due diligence directive. That's where you have the potential levers of power.

Donald Trump is back in the White House. What does this mean for labour rights?

In the pre-Trump world, I had more hope that the various supply chain rules and the due diligence directive in Europe (Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive) would have the power to really create system change.

What we will almost inevitably see in the Trump era is the big American tech companies push back. The question is what will Europe do.

I see that EU directive as our last best hope to enforce decent standards in these global supply chains. The Chinese are not going to do it. The Americans are not going to do it. And no other country or trading bloc has the power to be able to create a Brussels effect and enforce standards globally.

Can invisible workers unite to fight for their rights?

You see signs of work organising happening all over the place. The issue is you can have workers successfully unionising, and the lead company says 'It's not worth the hassle, let's move these jobs somewhere else.'

That's the challenge for the coming years, for workers in these supply chains to think about how to connect to one another.

They are building the same tools, the same products, in effect, working for the same company. So how do they start to connect to one another and wield their collective power around the world?

Have tech companies changed their positions?

Five, ten years ago we didn't have any of these supply chain laws about ethical responsibilities. A lot of the change has come about because of activism, from workers and consumers. Now it's not good enough for Nike to say 'we don't make clothes, we outsource to sweatshops around the world'. They have to at least give lip service to the idea that they have the potential power to enforce standards in the supply chain.

What does this reliance on hidden labour mean for the future of work?

My worry with a lot of these sorts of jobs is that we're looking at a race to the bottom. So if there's no inherent stickiness to your job, there's no inherent reason why your job has to be done by you, as a skilled person, in the place that you're in. Then you're just basically a flesh robot. That's the irony of it, isn't it? That we're treated like machines, in order to train the machine, to act like a human.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

(Reporting by Joanna Gill; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst.)