Last year, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the world. For ByteDance, the owning Chinese company, it has been a gold mine. It doubled its earnings in 2020, totaling more than $ 34 billion, an increase of 111% over the previous year. The company has already been valued at more than 400,000 million. And as it did in many places, TikTok exploded in Brazil in particular, being the country where the most was downloaded. app. Thus began an expansion of operations in the country: it has hired local executives and opened jobs.
To keep the application running, the company hired staff to transcribe the content. But the job was not what it seemed.
The offer, the scam. An investigation by The Intercept recounts the testimonies of some workers and the precarious life they led during that time. Actually, it seemed like the deal of the century. A remote work opportunity, without fixed hours, and paid in dollars. And all at a time of extreme economic crisis. The transcription job was simple: listen to the audio of the TikTok videos and write down what was said. The text would be used to develop the artificial intelligence of ByteDance.
But the plan to make a quick buck turned into hell. Many of them resigned in the same way they acquired the job: through a WhatsApp message. They had no contract or documents regulating employment. And then there was the payment trick. Since TikTok is a short video format, much of the audio that needed transcription was only a few seconds long. The payment was supposed to be $ 14 for every hour of transcribed audio. But of course, putting the second-long clips together in an hour took about 20 hours. That turned out in the end to just 70 cents an hour, three-quarters of the minimum wage.
Without contract. The transcription work was based on a model of economics gig, or temporary, a favorite of tech companies. Workers are not protected by labor laws and are considered independent contractors rather than employees or wage earners. For TikTok transcribers, the payment was based on the number of transcripts they made rather than the hours they worked.
They were hired through subcontractors and separated during the process in chat groups on WhatsApp to streamline communications. In these chats, dozens of them complained about the workload. In several cases examined by The Intercept, workers said they had not received promised payments. ByteDance’s Brazilian office declined to comment on the matter and referred the outlet to the company’s offices in the United States. The US branch also did not respond.
All for WhatsApp. According to the investigation, this chain of subcontractors made its way through Pakistan before ending up in Brazil. The subcontractors were looking for potential workers on social media. The first point of contact for many interested applicants was a WhatsApp account belonging to one Natasha De Rose, a clinical psychologist based in Rio de Janeiro who functioned as a de facto recruiter despite not having a direct link to the company.
A call was posted on their Facebook page that read: “Whoever needs a freelance job and is willing to commit to remote work, I am recruiting people to work on pt-br transcription. More information ONLY ON MY WHATSAPP.”
Covert. All chat group titles featured ByteDance’s name, plus a number. Managers said that ultimately the work was being done for ByteDance. The transcription service was carried out through an application downloaded from a link whose URL began with “Bytelemon”. Even a banner on the page read: “This app is only for ByteDancers and Teams related to ByteDance.”
According to videos of meetings and records of conversations, the money to finance the project came from abroad and was transferred from an account that belongs to Maria Clara Alarcão. But neither Alarcão nor De Rose are employees of ByteDance. Alarcão’s LinkedIn profile, which is almost empty, describes her as a “project manager.” The profile follows a single company, Transcribe Guru, a transcription platform. But in a message to the WhatsApp group, Alarcão said that ByteDance hired her: “As I explained in the meetings, we were hired by a Chinese company, ByteDance, to provide transcription services to a client.”
Behind the curtain. And what is Transcribe Guru? Co-founded by Pakistani businessman Izhar Roghani, it offers transcription and translation services. Their website displays the ByteDance logo among a list of their clients. “We have a global workforce of more than 500 employees, most of them from Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Libya, Brazil, Pakistan, Portugal, China and Palestine,” the company boasts on its website.
In a WhatsApp audio message, one of the managers of the Brazilian transcription project, Leandra Narciso, explained that she and others who work with her are part of an extended chain of outsourcing. “Izhar doesn’t even have a contract with ByteDance, they are outsourced,” explains Narciso. And he explained that although ByteDance is a “good company”, the chain of subcontractors means that there is less money to invest towards the end of the chain. “By the time it reaches us,” he says of the contract money, “the value has already dropped a lot.”
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