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San Francisco Unicorn 'Scale AI' Accused of Wage Theft (sfgate.com) 27

Posted by EditorDavid from the working-for-Scale dept.
They provide training data to top AI companies including OpenAI and Meta, according to its web site. Founded in 2016, San Francisco-based Scale AI now has over 900 employees, eventually growing beyond "unicorn" status with over $1.35 billion in ivnestments. In May the company's valuation was over $14 billion, with investors including Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Cisco, Intel, and AMD (as well as earlier investments from Y Combinator and $100 million from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund). SFGate calls them "a buzzy San Francisco startup with high-dollar ties across the tech industry".

But SFGate also report Scale AI "was sued Tuesday by a former worker with allegations that the company is committing wage theft and misclassifying workers." Steve McKinney filed the suit against Scale and several top executives, including 27-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang, in San Francisco Superior Court. With the filing, the former contractor aims to be a lead plaintiff for a class-action lawsuit against Scale; a judge will need to certify his proposed class of current and former contractors within California...

McKinney, whose complaint says he was paid on an hourly basis and worked on a project eventually sold to Meta, is accusing Scale of amassing its clout and cash by exploiting workers. "Scale AI is the sordid underbelly propping up the generative AI industry," the complaint says, before rattling off a list of allegations about its treatment of contractors. The document accuses Scale of bait-and-switch hiring promises; demanding off-the-clock, unpaid work; denying overtime pay; and unfairly booting contractors from projects...

The Tuesday complaint calls Scale's control over its contractors "Orwellian." The company makes contractors download a tool to track much of their computer use, including by taking periodic screenshots, the suit alleges. The lawsuit also alleges that Scale reassigns the workers to varyingly paid projects and docks pay if a task takes more than it was supposed to, plus posits that Scale is in violation of California's "ABC" test, which monitors use of the designation "independent contractor." It argues that contracted "Taskers" like McKinney should be classified as employees instead...

The complaint, along with arguing for class-action certification, seeks restitution, punitive damages and changes to Scale's worker classification model.
The article adds that "Per Fortune, Scale's armies of contractors marked up images for Cruise and Waymo to help autonomous cars understand their surroundings..."
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San Francisco Unicorn 'Scale AI' Accused of Wage Theft More

San Francisco Unicorn 'Scale AI' Accused of Wage Theft

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  • For something as low-skill as image markup, why were they using American contractors?

    Open an office in Mumbai or Manila, save a bundle on wages, and avoid the legal hassles.

    • It isn't always cheaper to use cheaper labor. If labeling is really important to you, then you have to have each image labeled more than once by different people. The more inconsistency in labeling, the more times you have to pay to have each image labeled so that you can ascertain what the correct label should be at your desired confidence level.

      If your labelers are only 90% accurate, then each image has to be labeled 5 times for 99% confidence across all images of a large corpus. But if your labeler
      • Arrgghh thats << ... when is this site going to just allow me to type or use Unicode?

        • Poll question: When is this site going to just allow me to type or use Unicode?
          * In the next year
          * In 2-5 years
          * In 6-10 years
          * In 11-99 years
          * In 10^2-2^10 years
          * More than 2^10 years
          * Yesterday, but they have to build Mister Fusion first
          * They are almost ready to do it but CowboyNeal hasnâ(TM)t given his final approval yet [editors: Use of â(TM) (curved apostrophe) instead of ' (straight apostrophe) is intentional]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
            I heard somewhere that slashdot runs an a rather ancient version of php, I wonder if it even supports unicode. Be that as it may, unicodevwould probably also require so e code changes yo correctly handle non orinting caracters so rga funny trics with usernames can be stopped.and since slashdots owners ( whom ever it is this week) seam to be mor interrested in shirt term rent extension rather than long term survival anything beond the bare minimum to keep the site up seams to be to much to hope for. Unless i

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by davidwr ( 791652 )

              Allowing characters commonly copied-and-pasted from sources (like curly-quotes) being allowed in the subject and body of submissions and replies would be a great start.

              If you can't do that, at least give a warning if my subject line or comment has any character that got changed or dropped because it wasn't okay, so I have a chance to go back and correct it.

  • Come work for ScaleAI. We'll pay you $50 an hour with no benefits to train our AI models!

    Just so we can understand the current economics of education -

    Tutoring high school students is $15/hr.

    Tutoring business people is $30/hr.

    Tutoring an LLM is $50/hr

    We're fucked people. We're absolutely fucked.

    • Why? Sounds like the highschool students are getting a good deal. The tutors aren't.

      • Why? Sounds like the highschool students are getting a good deal. The tutors aren't.

        Missing the point. When teaching the machine pays a LOT more, no one will bother teaching humans.

        Making humans unemployable, isn’t a good deal. For any human wanting to live and survive in a peaceful society.

        • First off , if you can still make $15/hr teaching hoomans then someone will show up to tutor the hoomans, at least until AI can do it better for less.

          Secondly, someone's gonna make bank training this AI at $50/hr! Sure beats working for McDonald's.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      Tutoring high school students is $15/hr.

      In SF the minimum wage is $19 per hour.

      • Tutoring is usually a private arrangement between the tutor and student (or their parents), and there's nothing stopping the tutor asking $15, or $19, or doing the tutoring for free.

        • Tutoring is usually a private arrangement between the tutor and student

          There is no private opt-out to minimum wage laws.

          Babysitters, tutors, and other casual workers are often paid less than minimum wage, but nonetheless, it is illegal.

          there's nothing stopping the tutor asking $15, or $19, or doing the tutoring for free.

          It's legal to ask. It's illegal for the employer to accept the offer and pay less than minimum wage.

  • Scale AI HR: [input to internal AI chatbot]* Should we screw our workers when it comes to pay?
    [Internal AI chatbot]: Of course.

    * Internal AI chatbot is trained on possibly-accurate data that strongly suggests it's normal/ok to screw workers when it comes to pay

    --
    To the Scale AI's lawyers: The above is intended as sarcasm and is not based on any facts known to me and should not be taken seriously. Any resemblance to actual reality is coincidental.

  • The real question (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Do they have AI shitting on the sidewalk and in the alleys? Because that's the true San Francisco experience. Extra points if they just program them to drop dog shit in front of Nancy Pelosi's compound. Of course, then she would have the decision whether to complain or just embrace her green nature and use it for fertilizer in her food garden that she doesn't have.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      She would have to sober up from the vodka in her coffee cup first. Otherwise she might stumble face first into the dog shit. Actually, that sounds like her entire political career.

  • how is that perfectly legal arrangement part of the lawsuit

    "I was working a a cashier in the store and they had a camera on the register and me 24/7"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      Because according to Scale, the people are NOT working for Scale, they are independent contractors (1099) and so are exempted from various protections for employees.

      The suit argues that the level of control Scale exerts on the 'independent contractors' legally makes them employees.

  • "27-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang"
    Who did they think they were working for? Did this sound like a benevolent company that cares about workers? They are getting very rich from their connections and apparently limitless bullshitting ability. At some point we just need to realize we don't work in a labor paradise. Labor is labor, and will be treated as such until the next market crash, where labor will be fired promptly without need for justification. The only way to claw back a decent share of the pi

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