The Kenyan justice confirmed Tuesday, March 28 its decision to suspend the dismissal of 260 content moderators employed by the company Sama, a subcontractor of Facebook in East Africa.
Ten days ago, 43 moderators took legal action for “illegal dismissal”. They accuse Sama and Facebook of illegally dismissing them en masse, in retaliation for their union demands, then blacklisting them to prevent them from being recruited by Facebook’s new subcontractor, the Majorel company, which already provides the moderation of part of the content of TikTok.
“It is an anti-union operation disguised as a dismissal. It’s not like Facebook is pulling out of the moderation market. The company only changes subcontractors to replace Sama with Majorel. However, the moderators who worked for years for Sama and who applied for Majorel were told that they were on a blacklist and had no chance of being recruited because they had worked for Sama”, according to Cori Crider, a lawyer at FoxGloves, an association specializing in new technologies, which supports the plaintiffs.