The investigation found that China’s data labeling companies have partnered with vocational schools, recruiting student interns to do this tedious work, often for subminimum wages and under poor conditions. Despite new regulations requiring employers to pay interns minimum wage and banning schools from taking commissions, many students are still being exploited. The work is often outsourced to poorer, inland regions, and tech giants have partnered with vocational schools in these less-developed areas to create data annotation internships. The students, many of whom come from lower-class and rural backgrounds, are particularly vulnerable to labor abuse.
Key takeaways:
- Vocational school students in China are being used as a cheap labor force for data annotation, a crucial but often underpaid and overlooked part of the AI industry. These students are required to complete internships, often under poor conditions and for subminimum wages, to fulfill their graduation requirements.
- Many students report that these internships, which involve tasks such as tagging images and screening videos, are more akin to manual labor than the tech skills they hoped to learn. Some students are even paid by the amount of data they process, rather than receiving a fixed wage.
- Several of China's tech giants have partnered with vocational schools to create these internships, and some schools reportedly take a cut of the students' already low wages. New regulations published in 2022 require employers to pay interns minimum wage and ban schools from taking commissions, but it is unclear how well these rules are being enforced.
- These students, many of whom come from lower-class and rural backgrounds, are particularly vulnerable to labor abuse. Without formal contracts and channels to voice grievances, they are easily subject to exploitation and abuse, such as long work hours and safety hazards.