Labour law change a step towards safety
California Superior Court. Her job was to enforce the social network’s extensive rules prohibiting certain types of content from its systems. She claims she witnessed thousands of acts of extreme and graphic violence from her cubicle in Facebook’s Silicon Valley offices. She says reviewing disturbing material on a daily basis caused her psychological and physical harm.
Facebook has thousands of moderators around the world, in cities such as Dublin, Texas and Manila. Increasing the number of monitors is part of Facebook’s response to allegations it has not done enough to combat abuse of its services, including Russian meddling, illegal drug content, and fake news.
People like Scolla are there to protect the public from having to witness disturbing content on Facebook.
Interestingly, although Scolla worked for Facebook in their Silicon Valley offices, she was not employed by Facebook. Technically, her employer was a different company, which provided workers to Facebook. This is similar to a labourhire company in New Zealand or someone working on secondment to a different business.
An employee might work for a business for years, in their offices, alongside their employees, but have no way to hold that business accountable if things go wrong because the business is not the employer.
To address this, the Labour Government has introduced the Triangular Employment Amendment Bill, which is before Parliament. Its purpose is to ensure employees under the control and direction of a business other than their employer can take a personal grievance against both their legal employer and the business that controls them.
Above all of this, our Health and Safety at Work Act applies to all business with workers, whether directly employed or not. Businesses must ensure workers’ health and safety as far as reasonably practicable. In a job such as that of a Facebook moderator, one would expect Facebook and the actual employer to provide content moderators with proper on-site and ongoing mental health treatment and support.
One very traumatic experience or a series of traumatic experiences, such as Brickell endured, can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. Steps need to be put in place to protect those who are engaged in work that exposes them to violence, nudity, hate speech, and the like.
Those engaged to do the difficult work of protecting society need to be treated with special care. A step in the right direction would be monitoring the health of workers regularly exposed to graphic and harmful images, providing counselling and support, and regularly giving them alternative duties as needed.
The Triangular Employment Amendment Bill is another step in the right direction. If passed, it will enable more workers to ensure they are fairly treated. Even now, health and safety transcends virtually all barriers. Businesses should be careful not to risk psychological harm or physical harm to anyone working for them.
Those engaged to do the difficult work of protecting society need to be treated with special care.