Article 1 Xu Shuang
Edited by Du Wenwen
"Mother workers", as they are usually called.
Most of the time, their job is to train AI in front of the computer - just like teaching their children.
In the propaganda and narration of the past few years, the stories of these women are usually linked with the grand words such as "new public welfare model" and "AI+poverty alleviation", and are regarded as the embodiment of rural women's realization of "white-collar work". People praise the AI trainers coming out of the mountains.
But this is actually a story of the "dream bubble" breaking down gradually.
Wu Tongyu, an associate professor of the Department of Sociology of Zhejiang University, and Xia Bingqing, an associate professor of the Department of Communication of East China Normal University, started fieldwork in 2019, when the labeling industry was just beginning to flourish, and has continued to this day. They visited various labeled workshops to try to understand the labor problems behind this emerging industry.
At first, in a poverty-stricken county in Guizhou, this seemingly decent, flexible and low threshold job could even solve the problem of left behind children for a long time - the local government and recruiters used it to summon women working in other provinces to "return to their nests". However, the competition and traps that followed pushed the women in it into a more difficult predicament than before.
So far, there are no specific statistics on mother workers in China. They are a group of people who are not accurately written.
Mother workers are not good at words, which is a point repeatedly mentioned by scholars. They seldom express their pain, but more become sacrificial roles in family decision-making and "women's role models" in publicizing their political achievements.
They taught AI, but eliminated themselves. It is like a "good chess piece", which is discarded when used up.
This spring, Phoenix Weekly interviewed two scholars. The following is their description, combining the content of the paper——
"White collar work"
When we saw Li Yan at the marking base, she was sitting on a low-quality ergonomic chair, her neck was leaning forward, and her eyes were flicking back and forth in front of the screen. The frame glasses blocked the expression on her face, and only dragged the mouse without stopping.
In front of her was a set of road maps of cars. But the 3D image scanned by the radar is a dot like object with unclear outline. Li Yan needs to accurately identify the obstacles near the car in the 3D picture by comparing the 2D picture and mark them on the panel one by one.
Tagging is to provide accurate training samples for AI algorithm, commonly known as "feeding data to the computer". AI acquires intelligent vision and semantic understanding ability by learning the patterns and rules in these data. This is the most basic and labor intensive link in the AI industry chain. Every AI cannot grow without it.
〓 A 3D point cloud map of the platform (source: network) In the base, there are more than 20 female workers like Li Yan, ranging in age from 28 to 35, most of whom are low educated women, single mothers or housewives - which is quite different from what we expected before coming to investigate.
After all, the social construct is that men are more suitable for computer work than women. Unexpectedly, "mother workers" are the main labor force in this base.
The base is located in a poverty alleviation community. The exterior wall is painted with a slogan, "Out of the mountains, seeking development, and living in cities and towns where the world is wide". The community buildings are similar to the factory dormitories in the south. They are uniform and tidy, with compact spacing. From a distance, it looks like a modern small western-style building, but when we get closer, we find that the overhead floor at the bottom is not well built, the pipes are exposed, and the fecal water flows everywhere when it rains.
The interior of the base is like another world.
Different from the assembly line factory where they used to work in the coastal area, there are windows, sunlight, computers and air conditioners, and no roaring noise from large machines. The base even hired a gardener to take care of the green plants. Like the Internet factory in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, everything is a white-collar office atmosphere.
Even the decoration is made in the style of Factory C, the source enterprise of the base, and the table is painted in the symbolic color of Factory C.
After the base operated for a period of time, a group of excellent mother workers were invited to study in the headquarters of Factory C. They went to work together with programmers to see how the vehicles could drive automatically.
After reading, mothers said that they felt their work suddenly became fresh and meaningful. During the interview with us, they kept repeating to us a whole set of concepts learned during the training, such as "to be a teacher of artificial intelligence", "as many people as there are, there is as much intelligence".
They try hard to connect themselves with the big factory, feel that they are also employees of the big factory to some extent, and laughingly say that they are "making money from the big factory".
Previously, they did not understand what AI was, and were disciplined to "feel" about it. Their families don't know what AI is or what their work is, and the only thing they care about is how much money they can get for this work.
When we first met Liu Cuimin, a mother worker, she was wearing glasses. After talking for a while, she took off her glasses, "because they don't look good".
This job is really eye-catching. Li Yan's eyesight declined very quickly for a period of time, so she was scared to go to the hospital for examination. Many people have eye problems after doing this job. Later, some mother workers bought anti blue glasses to wear even if they were not nearsighted.
Li Yan always complains that she has to "grab her eyebrows and look at the screen" when she goes to work, which makes her "Sichuan eyebrows" deeper. But this is a kind of happy complaint based on economic satisfaction - the average monthly income of local residents is about 2000 yuan, compared with the label job with a monthly salary of 4000 yuan or 5000 yuan, which is quite good.
This job is a process for mother to adapt to new things. Everything on the label panel is presented in the form of parameters, which is more consistent with the logic of engineers and computers. At first, the mothers were not very proficient, but they were very diligent and willing to practice every day for free. In a few months, the monthly output value of some people increased from 1400 to tens of thousands.
Mothers are always diffident and shy of talking about their achievements. In fact, those we interviewed were all "top students" of the base, and their output value ranked first.
In the month of sufficient orders in 2019, the monthly income of mothers and workers with high output value even reached tens of thousands of yuan - although this only lasted for a few short months.
Become a "poor student" in the competition
The change began in 2020.
Factory C has successively set up a number of marking bases throughout the country. The Guizhou base where Li Yan is located is no longer the only "direct" factory. If the work is not good, the project will be handed over to another place at any time. This makes the competition between the bases more intense, and everyone has to "compete for orders".
Feng Zai, the manager of the base, is the key person. The young man who graduated from the "985" university is responsible for meeting the needs of Factory C and coordinating the work of mother workers. The base is poverty alleviation in nature. The community secretary is the general director and legal representative of the base. Feng Zai is selected by the secretary from the local residents.
In order to improve the efficiency of orders, one of Fengzai's strategies is to reduce the proportion of "mother workers" to less than 25%.
In the newly released recruitment information, the requirement was changed to "18-28 years old, high school degree or above, computer foundation and strong understanding" - which largely eliminated the mother worker group, and also shook the original intention of poverty alleviation in the base.
Another strategy is grouping to increase competition.
Fengzai gradually gathered the remaining mother workers into a group, which was what he called the "poor student group". He tried to avoid letting this group undertake difficult tasks, so as to reduce the impact of mother workers on the overall business ability.
Unlike the "poor students group", the workers of the other "10000 yuan household group" are young women workers with strong professional ability who are willing to work overtime. This is Fengzai's "golden team". With sufficient orders, the average monthly wage per capita can reach more than 10000 yuan.
Fengzai attached great importance to the "10000 yuan household group" and tried his best to keep the female workers of this group. At that time, there was a girl named Xiao Lin who was very capable in the group. She resigned because of long-term insomnia. When Fengzai came to see us, he said, "Something's wrong" and wanted to discuss with us how to keep the girl.
This is totally different from his attitude towards his mother workers. Since 2020, one after another mother workers have been persuaded to leave by Fengzai.
A pregnant mother was rated as "climbing too long". "Go back to take care of the children and don't come back to work," said Fengzai. The mother workers are often criticized for being "slow and inefficient". "Or you can go upstairs to the factory to do textile, where you are more skilled".
〓 A data annotation worker is working (source: Vision China) The leaders of the "poor students group" and the "10000 yuan household group" are from the early group members. Xiaohong, the leader of the "10000 yuan household", is a young and capable girl, ranking first in the output value group. But no mother worker ever worked as a group leader. The leader of the "poor student group" is brother Jian. Brother Jian is stiff and stubborn, and his overall ability is much worse than Xiaohong's. Because he and Fengzai are good friends, he took the management post.
Brother Jian will abuse his mother and workers. He used to @ someone constantly in the group, asking "why are you wrong, why are you learning so slowly, why can't you keep up with the latest rules", @ six or seven times in a row. You think, Mom is already in a hurry after making mistakes, and this interaction will only worsen the situation.
When angry, Brother Jian would hit the table hard, "Come here!" Mom stood, and Brother Jian sat there and scolded. Later, Liu Cuimin, a mother worker, wept bitterly when she told us about these experiences.
After grouping, some jobs that took too much time and effort but didn't have money were diverted to the mother group. Fengzai said that the mother herself could not do anything more difficult. But we think that mother has no chance to compete equally to prove her ability. They are considered as "the last" at first, and do secondary work, so they will naturally be eliminated as "poor students".
Qinzi, a young female worker, also complained for her mothers: "It's never their turn to do tasks with too much oil and water. They are often doing training sets or rework."
The relationship between young women workers and their mothers is very close. The young women's labor union took the initiative to rework the wrong projects for mothers, help them take care of the children in the base after school, and play with them. We usually call each other a sister. After work, we make an appointment to go shopping nearby.
Grouping did not make the relationship between women workers become tense, and everyone clearly knew who really bullied them.
Big Internet factories are good at digital quantification. Factory C has directly transferred the management mode of Internet employees to the labeling workers. They have developed a complex scoring system, and they have to convert everything they do. As a result, mother workers are not clear about their one hour output value.
They can draw orthographic characters and draw as many lines as they can. But every time they paid, the word "Zheng" was not consistent with the money they received. Some people said that they worked overtime until midnight, and finally found that they didn't earn a few dollars. We also tried to calculate the salary account. After nearly three hours, we didn't understand it.
What makes us sad is that even though Factory C has made the computing system so complicated, mothers are still trying to figure out how much money they earn from doing something and why they earn so little this month.
They will feel that this is their ability.
Monitoring and resistance
Frankly speaking, mother workers are the most honest, quiet and conscientious labeling workers we have ever seen.
Over the years, we have seen different marginalized groups making labels. The disabled workers love to chat during work, and the vocational school students always sneak out to play, or smoke and play games at the door of squatting buildings.
Only mother workers sit for a whole day and work quietly all the time. At four o'clock in the afternoon, when the child left school, he was distracted and took the child to his work station to do his homework. The noise usually does not exceed a quarter of an hour, and the office will return to a quiet working state.
Taking care of children while working is an implicit understanding of this label factory. The base is specially built inside the poverty alleviation community, and the recruiter's initial propaganda is "employment at home". However, this tacit understanding was gradually broken as Fengzai changed the management system.
Feng Zai's identity has been somewhat embarrassing. This is a society of acquaintances. Fengzai is younger than his mother. He is the "great nephew" of others in his seniority, but he has to establish authority to manage.
At first, Fengzai often had a "hard time"——
For example, when we first went to the survey, Fengzai stood on the small square, and just said, "Everyone must go to work on time", the mothers surrounded Fengzai and put forward their own reasons: to serve the family's breakfast, to send the children to school, and to do a lot of chores before going to work, "You haven't married yet, and you don't understand the difficulties of living". Some people directly questioned, "That's not what you said when you first recruited us".
In the end, Fengzai had to leave it alone.
When we went back a year later, we found that Fengzai would hide behind the camera and yell at people. Because he realized that online control can get rid of the trouble of acquaintances and more effectively implement power.
Li Yan mentioned that at first she thought the camera in the room was just a decoration, until one time, the camera suddenly made a yell from Fengzai, and she was scared. After that, every time she saw the camera, she had some psychological shadow.
This is very consistent with the emphasis of sociological theory. The logic of monitoring is that the monitored cannot know when someone is at the monitoring station, thinking that the monitor has been standing there. This can play a role of constant supervision and realize the tame of power.
The label base, which looks like a white-collar atmosphere, is actually built according to the monitoring logic of the factory, even more than the assembly line factory - factory inspection is straightforward, and the fear created by the camera is a hindsight, lasting shock.
When the base was transformed in 2020, a "professional team" from Henan Province came to help manage it. They built a manager's room on the second floor, with transparent glass walls, so that managers can supervise at any time. When mothers looked up, they could see these people busy inside, "as if they were doing something amazing".
Later, when the production capacity increased, the Henan team withdrew and Fengzai took power alone. However, instead of using the transparent manager's room, Fengzai renovated a completely closed room on the first floor. Recruitment, training and layoff were all completed in the "small black room".
In two years' time, we watched Fengzai change from a "young man" who was submissive to the villagers to a mature and strict manager.
〓 Working scene of a data annotation base (source: network) In the new platform economy, every worker is abstracted into an IP. For large factories, it is complicated to manage people from point to point. Therefore, my mother usually makes use of this to do some minor resistance.
For example, if a mother sneaks out to pick up her child from school during work, she will ask another partner to go on working under her IP address to avoid being found by the system. For another example, the mothers' residence is very close to the marked base, less than 1000 meters, which leads to misjudgment in the location of the clock in program. They took advantage of this loophole to punch in at home in advance.
But Fengzai also lived in the community and was familiar with the local situation. Soon, he adjusted the distance sensitivity of the program, which made the mother's tricks fall through one after another, and the resistance failed.
Now when we talk about digital labor, we all say "trapped in algorithms and systems". But we want to emphasize that there is a set of "human logic" behind the algorithm, which makes the space for the weak to resist smaller. As a fellow townsman and relative, Fengzai turned his knowledge of mothers' details into a weapon to fill the "blind spot" of the algorithm and make the control more comprehensive and thorough.
Similarly, the Internet industries such as express delivery, take away, taxi, etc. have the existence of Fengzai. If algorithmic control represents the abstract, indifferent and "computational" side of technology, then through the kids, we can see the more complex back.
Dachang, Fengzai and Mummy workers are actually triangular power relations, often in alliance with each other. Fengzai doesn't always stand on the side of the big factory. Occasionally, he will work with his mother and workers to exploit the "loopholes" in the algorithm.
When Factory C released the "very fragrant" data task, Fengzai relaxed supervision and called on everyone to grab new data packets to avoid being preempted by other factories. He even found plug-ins from the Internet to provide technical support for "cheating".
The occasional and small-scale alliance between Fengzai and the mother workers actually weakened the resistance of workers to some extent, but prevented large-scale collective resistance.
Return, broken dreams
For mothers, going out to work in their youth was also a kind of resistance.
Before returning to her hometown in Guizhou, Li Yan was a female worker on the assembly line of an electronic factory in Dongguan. She went out to work when she was a teenager. She married and had children in other places.
Local people in Guizhou call going south to Guangdong "killing Guangzhou": a single person "killing" to the city to earn money and support his family. Li Yanai told his story of "killing Guangzhou" with a proud tone. For women workers, "killing the masses" means that they have courage and are willing to try new things at all costs, which is very bold.
The lives of these two generations of women in the village almost relay the history of working in China's coastal areas: in the late 1990s, manufacturing flourished, and they went to garment factories to make a living; Around 2010, a large number of service industries emerged, and they went to restaurants as waiters, or stood at the counter to sell jewelry... They changed their identity with wave after wave of policies.
〓 Guizhou karst landform provides the possibility of low-cost power generation for the data industry
In 2015, the policy turned to eliminate the gap between urban and rural areas and promote rural development, so migrant girls returned to their hometown.
What drove young migrant girls to go out was their desire for freedom - to escape from marriage and rural reality for a short time. For this reason, some people stole out several times. This time, the persuasion of the local government was very successful because the female migrant workers were willing to return.
They will use the guilt of female motherhood to emphasize that mothers have an obligation to take care of the family and children.
For example, because you used to work outside for a long time, children and the elderly were left unattended - many mothers are very fond of this rhetoric, internalizing all problems into their own responsibilities.
In addition to ideological mobilization, there is also an economic incentive policy - relocation of housing in different places. Each family needs one person back to get a quota for resettlement housing.
Previously, most of the mother workers' families lived in the village on the mountain. The local government wanted to rebuild a gathering place at the foot of the mountain, which was equivalent to replacing the original village with the relocated community.
But the villagers are not used to living in buildings, especially the elderly, who always want to run back to the stockade to live. For the community, if women in a family can stay here, the family is more likely to take root in the community 。
In order to stabilize these women, the community promised to help them find jobs, and offered 250 to 400 yuan of subsidies every month to ensure that the labor force would not flow out again. Most of these families are couples working outside. In order to settle the housing quota, women are usually the ones who are "sacrificed" in the family internal negotiation of "who leaves who stays".
For mothers who work in coastal areas all the year round, they are used to the instability of work for a long time. They do not know what is included in the five insurances and one fund, have not signed formal labor contracts, and do not have basic labor security awareness.
But the mother workers are not like the "Sanhe God" day workers, who work day by day. They came back with hope, looking forward to doing some small business after a year or two. But this job is actually a dream breaking process.
The decrease of salary is a big blow to mothers.
Li Yan used to be the female with the highest output in the base, earning more than 10000 yuan per month. After getting her salary, she bought toy clothes for her son. She tidied up all the toys in the house. She lives seriously.
But when we went there for the second time, she became obviously unhappy. After being grouped, Li Yan can only get 1400 yuan per month. She doesn't buy toys for her children, and her relationship with her husband has become much weaker - her husband, who works in other places and bears the main financial pressure, seldom goes home.
Although we have come down from the cottage, our thinking still follows the ethics of the traditional rural society.
We went to eat at Li Yan's house, and she stayed in the kitchen silently, busy with a lot of people's meals. Her mother-in-law did not work and leaned against the kitchen door, criticizing Li Yan's action of dipping oil into the spoon and saying many vicious words. After their wages fell, Li Yan and her family became more and more humble at home.
The female workers in the period of working younger sisters exchanged money for status - used the money earned in the factory to help their younger brother go to school. Although there are problems in doing so, they can indeed gain the right to speak. Li Yan can straighten her back at home when she marks that she earns a lot of money. Later, her salary shrank, and her confidence in her mother-in-law disappeared.
What's more, mothers are trapped by this community. They are deeply involved in the relationship between mother and son, husband and wife, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and have to assume the responsibility of family division. They often say, "Alas, if I can't, I will go out to work."
But in fact, they still stay here, and they also find other jobs nearby if they don't make any marks. They can't leave this home at any time, as they did when working as female migrant workers. They are trapped in a worse situation and lower sense of value than those of female migrant workers, and can't get out.
In fact, Li Yan used to live a rich life as a migrant worker in the coastal areas. They could go out singing, shopping and buying clothes with their little sisters on weekends without children and old people.
However, after returning to the resettlement community in Guizhou, life became much more monotonous, and the track was almost two or one lines home and the marking base at the door of home.
They are not familiar with the world outside the community. We stayed in a hotel seven or eight minutes' walk away from the community. There was a morning market at the door, and we could buy fresh vegetables and fruits cheaper than the supermarket in the community. But they stayed for nearly two years, and did not know the existence of hotels and morning markets at all.
This is very hurtful. When people go out and see the world, they have some self-awareness and independent life, but they come back. There must be a lot of pain, but they can't express such pain, and only repress the "self" again.
Although we onlookers all felt that the situation before and after such a contrast was obvious, the mothers never expressed "regret coming back".
As mothers, no matter how bad the situation is, they will not say the words "regret returning to their children".
A useful chess piece
On the surface, the rejection of mother workers is related to the overall industrial development trend.
At present, the most basic data annotation work has been seriously saturated, many of which have been replaced by automation, and the rest are "more difficult tasks" that cannot be solved by machines. Relevant reports show that in the next five years, there will be a shortage of millions of annotation talents in the era of big model. The labeling projects of these large models require more and more people's skills. Of course, the mothers are not really incompetent, but they are not allowed to do this part by default.
The fundamental reason why mother workers were abandoned was that they were obedient and clever, and their resistance was much weaker than those male workers who threatened suicide. It is easier for the management to abandon them.
But you think, why don't they just cut all of their mother's work, but turn them into a group and leave some of them here?
After all, mothers are good chess pieces.
Over the years, under the mode of "AI tagging+poverty alleviation", many "women's models" in the tagging industry have been born, and the image of mother workers has been magnified infinitely. They have been pushed out in various media interviews and become publicity tools with performance nature.
Those important achievements that have been built into "poor women's workshops" are also used to attract women's foundations and policy subsidies. But in fact, the real wages of these mothers are kept to the minimum level by level.
In addition, some marking bases established for non-government cooperation and purely commercial purposes will tear off this "fig leaf" - mother workers, or middle-aged women with low education, are not the main force of employment.
In private, mothers always complained to us: "Why should we go to the interview? What we do every day has to be repaired, and we only earn 2000 yuan a month. I felt very guilty when I was interviewed."
They felt remorseful and sorry, and felt that they were not worthy to be interviewed by the media on behalf of the base, as if "only those who earn more and are capable can be interviewed on behalf of the base". Mothers don't know that the division of labor leads to their poor performance. They are always used to attributing all problems to themselves.
At the end of November 2020, at the end of our research, this marking workshop was still expanding, from the earliest 40 people to 180 people. Even if some people continue to leave their jobs, the mother worker group does not shrink significantly.
However, poverty alleviation is no longer the most important thing in the local area. It is also a question mark whether this base will try to keep the "symbol" of mother workers in the future.
On the last night before leaving Guizhou, we invited some familiar mother workers to the bar to drink, sing and teach them to play dice.
Li Yan was a little drunk that day. She blushed and laughed all the time, holding people to talk crazily. Everyone was very happy. When we recalled working in coastal areas, we always liked to go to bars and dance together. "After many years, it seemed that we had returned to that free time".
(Li Yan, Liu Cuimin, Feng Zai, Xiao Lin, Xiao Hong, Qin Zi and Jian Ge are pseudonyms)
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