Au secours, mon patron est un algorithme (Intégrale) – Cash investigation

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Au secours, mon patron est un algorithme (Intégrale) 24 septembre 2019
Un repas livré en un clic, des amis à portée d’écran, des robots au service de l’homme : Google, Facebook, Uber… ont révolutionné notre vie. Mais ce monde merveilleux de la tech cache une réalité beaucoup moins reluisante.
Avec Elise Lucet et l’équipe de Cash Investigation, vous découvrirez que pour faire tourner leurs applications, ces géants de l’économie numérique emploient une armée de petites mains invisibles. Des travailleurs jetables, sous-payés, sans contrat de travail et sans protection sociale.
Sandrine Rigaud est partie à la rencontre de ces forçats du clic, qui partout dans le monde, pour quelques cents la tâche, nourrissent les systèmes d’intelligence artificielle.
Nous avons pédalé aux ordres de ces algorithmes pour livrer pizzas et burgers. Chemin faisant, nous vous raconterons comment les rois de la foodtech poussent leurs livreurs à bosser toujours plus vite. Des jobs où le risque n’a rien de virtuel.
Enfin, nous vous raconterons dans quelles conditions travaillent les nettoyeurs du net, ceux qu’on appelle les modérateurs de contenu.
Avec cette enquête de Cash Investigation, vous ne regarderez plus vos applications de la même façon.

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Hello Sir. So that’s welcome to the future in fact, that’s the story. Who is Cash Investigation? Not bad Cruzr! Good evening and welcome to the wonderful world of algorithms. You find it complex and yet you use it every day. With one push, they allow you to communicate with your friends, order a meal or watch your favorite videos. But behind these applications which have revolutionized our lives, there is an army of little hands, almost invisible, disposable and underpaid workers . Tonight, Cash Investigation takes you on a journey that is anything but virtual. to discover these click convicts: men and women at the service of robots and artificial intelligence. “Help, my boss is an algorithm”, is an investigation by Sandrine Rigaud with Grégoire Huet. We’ll meet up right after to talk about it. Tonight, Cash offers you a trip back in time. Hello Lionel, it’s already 7:10 a.m. Get up, open your eyes, it’s 2027. Don’t hang around, you have a meeting at 9 a.m. this morning. And in 2027, Sarah takes care of everything. For breakfast, what do I have delivered to you? Chocolate bread. Considering your latest health data, I recommend oatmeal with soy milk instead. Sarah is a virtual assistant who knows exactly what’s good for you. For your squash game, I selected Emmanuel. I crossed your data. This time, you are sure to win. Okay Sarah. For your dinner for two this evening, I reserved this restaurant. It is new and already very well rated. It’s perfect, Sarah. THANKS. Everywhere you go, artificial intelligences like Sarah anticipate your desires and do the work for you. Hello Lionel, let’s start. I have prepared for you a report of our last meetings. Isn’t life beautiful in 2027, with all these machines working for you? Thanks, we’ll put everything away. And above all, we don’t get carried away. While we wait for Sarah to change our lives, this is another story that we would like to tell you, with fewer special effects. This story takes place behind the scenes of the companies that are inventing our future. We’ll just have to stop filming because these are work offices. Business secrecy, as they say. And for now, it’s not exactly this wonderful world where the machine is at the service of man. Sometimes, it’s even quite the opposite. As soon as you use the Internet, there are humans like me hidden behind the machine to make you believe in the miracles of new technologies. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber. To run their applications, these giants of the digital economy employ an army of small, invisible hands. With new technology, you can hire someone, pay them a pittance, and fire them when you no longer need them. Disposable workers. And underpaid. On a good day, I can make up to $5 an hour. On a bad day, it can be as low as 10 cents. Do you have the right to pay less than the minimum wage? I’m not sure I want to answer that. We stepped into the shoes of a net cleaner, getting hired as a content moderator for Facebook. I saw things that will stay with me forever. I remember it like it was yesterday. We also pedaled at the orders of the algorithms to distribute dozens of pizzas and burgers. Along the way, we discovered how foodtech kings can treat their book. I tell you again, I discovered this document. In a sector where apps dictate their tempo, risk is not virtual. Oh my God. The young people who work for them don’t matter to them. One is dead, too bad, there are others. They will have others. He is a deliveryman who died during an Uber Eats delivery. Have you taken steps to ensure the safety of your delivery people after this? I told you, we will respond to you in writing. THANKS. To meet these new proletarians hidden behind your screens, we take you into the factory of the future, the best kept secret of the “Net Economy”. It’s like a sausage factory. They don’t want us to come snooping around to see how sausages are made. He ‘s Grégoire, the latest addition to the cash team. Well, ok… Now he regrets having sent us his CV, but at the beginning, he was really ready to wet his shirt. And don the outfit of the home delivery men who have invaded our streets. You feel ? But if ! That smell of sushi and greasy burgers that passes through the ring road to end up on your plate. Hum! If the advertising slogans are to be believed, this is the future, a pasta dish delivered any time. And anywhere! In France, this delivery market of the future is dominated by Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Two companies which are massively recruiting thousands of delivery people. And which on their site, promise them flexibility, independence, attractive income. A priori, the ideal job to earn money at your own pace. “Uber Eats” filming, premiere. Registering is super simple. Everything happens on the Internet. Just fill out a form. Three clicks later, Grégoire is contacted by Uber Eats, the largest in the sector. Uber Eats is a new service from the giant Uber, a company valued at $75 billion in July 2019. We didn’t add zero. Before starting, our delivery journalist is invited to an information meeting. If you don’t know anything about the new economy, welcome to the Uber planet. A cool planet where everyone speaks informally. A planet without bosses, without obligations and without employment contracts. At Uber, you’re the boss. Finally it’s you. This means that you are paid per order, and not per hour like an employee. But according to managers, it’s much more interesting. That’s good, Grégoire is a player. But yes, it’s true, at Uber, you’re the boss . This also means that before you start earning money, you will have to spend it. As we are independent, the equipment is our responsibility. Between the bike that holds up, the tights that keep you warm, the armband to be seen or the anti-theft device to avoid technical unemployment, the initial investment for Grégoire is more than 400 euros. For his debut, our journalist chose to cycle in Rennes, a city he knows well. The beep is the application which warns Grégoire that he can take a delivery. Once he accepts, all he has to do is follow the GPS to arrive at the restaurant. By messing around a little. When the order is in the bag, Uber’s GPS indicates the route to reach the customer. Here. Good evening ! Enjoy your food. Good evening. THANKS. Bye. And Grégoire continues like that all evening. Good evening. Thank you very much, have a good evening, enjoy your meal. It’s 9:30 p.m., I have half an hour left to manage to do one more race, to succeed in receiving my bonus, that is to say 25 additional euros. This evening, in Rennes, Uber is offering its delivery drivers bonuses if they complete a challenge, a challenge in French. To explain, we’re going to play a little video game. Hold on to the handlebars for the Super Biker Challenge. Grégoire is him. Every time he delivers an order, he pockets a burger. If he manages to deliver 9 orders between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., he succeeds in his first Uber challenge and his additional 25 euros. At 12 deliveries, the bonus increases to 35 euros. But to get the super bonus, Grégoire must deliver 15 races in 4 hours. There, it’s 50 euros. Well, it’s a failure for the super challenge. On the other hand, I managed to reach the first level, therefore doing 9 races and winning 25 euros. Which means that, in addition to my shopping, I reached around 75 euros. So over 4 hours, that’s around 18-19 euros per hour, which is really good. 75 euros in 4 hours, that motivates Grégoire. So to get the super bonus, he swallows the kilometers. On average, more than 40 per day. He cycles during the day in the rain. There, delivering under these conditions is really hardcore. It’s really very, very hard. He rides at night in the rain too. He pedals trusting his GPS. In one week, Grégoire delivers 63 orders. Oh damn, that just broke… Well, that one doesn’t count. Oh the potatoes… Oh it’s disgusting. Oh the construction site. By talking with the other delivery men, he understands that it is not so easy to get bonuses. Finally, in the super biker game, to succeed in the challenges, it is not enough to pedal fast. You also need to have orders to deliver. And that depends on the customers. So, after 213 kilometers, we do the math. In 39 hours, the equivalent of a good week of work, Grégoire received 358 euros. On average, a little more than 9.30 euros per hour. Despite his efforts, he only succeeded in one challenge, that of the first evening. To understand this bonus system, we ask for help from a specialist. Petronille Harnay is an economist at the Institute of Transport Sciences. She studied how delivery platforms work. She explains to us that it is not to please the delivery people that the Uber company created the challenges. The platforms need to have a large number of couriers on certain evenings. And so to attract them, they encourage them with bonuses. The point in fact is to encourage couriers to come on these evenings and manage their peak activity. And then on certain evenings when there is less activity, there is no need to add bonuses at that time. To explain this story of peak activity, nothing better than a game of Super Biker. This time the rules change a little. The player too. It’s Uber. To win, Uber must succeed in delivering all orders at the same time. Even when there are a lot of them. Take a World Cup evening, for example. Three times more delivery than usual. For Uber, with the usual number of delivery people, it’s impossible. Orders are not delivered or delivered too late and it is bad for business. So, to attract more delivery people, Uber is recycling the good old carrot system. Thanks to the bonus, there are now enough delivery people to deliver all the burgers. For Uber, it’s a win! That’s what managing your activity peaks is all about. This is the heart of Uber’s business. It is surely also to better manage its peaks that there is no salaried delivery person in the American company. There are evenings when there are a lot of orders, weeks when there are a lot of orders and others when there are fewer. If we only hired employees, that would mean that we sometimes pay people to do nothing. And then obviously, the main interest in recruiting independent workers is that in fact we will circumvent all the legislation on employment contracts. It means not paying employer contributions on a salary, it means avoiding paying everything relating to leave, paid leave for example. And above all, above all, and this is what is very important for the platforms, to avoid paying redundancy costs. Because in fact, these platforms, as they manage peaks of activity, they need at certain times to have a large number of couriers, at other times, they will terminate the contracts of these couriers because they need it less. After talking for a long time with the researcher, we understand better. At Superbiker, the big winner is never the delivery person. In the end, Uber always wins. A great operation for the company. Except that a grain of sand almost derailed the machine. You may have heard of it. This is a court decision that could change the lives of bicycle couriers, those who deliver for the Deliveroo or Uber Eats brands. The Court of Cassation ruled in favor of a courier who requested a reclassification of his status with an employment contract. This is important because it could help fight against the excesses of uberization. The Court of Cassation is the highest French court. In November 2018, these magistrates considered that a deliveryman was not self-employed and that he should be reclassified as an employee. For Uber and others, this potentially means thousands of requalifications. However, a year after the judges’ decision, the delivery men are still independent workers paid on a per-trip basis, without an employment contract. Foodtech companies have had a well-established strategy for a long time. Erase anything that could give the impression that these delivery people are employees. Amelia Fernandez and Johnny Porcher both worked for Uber Eats in 2018. They were notably responsible for recruiting delivery people and they describe exactly the same thing. At Uber, words are never chosen at random. We never recruit. What should you say instead of recruiting? We are setting up a partnership together. We say an activation for recruitment. For salary, we talk about turnover. And for the employment contract, we talk about partnership. In the same way, when we speak to couriers, the instruction is to never tell them you must do or you must. Anything that was in hierarchical form, we should not say it. Who gave you these instructions? The N+1, my manager. Do you think this was widespread at Uber Eat? Oh yes, absolutely. For everyone, manager, coordinator, they had the same vocabulary. Always leave some sort of suggestion. Anyway, I suggest that you do… As if we left the choice to the courier to do this or that, as he saw fit. In this case, he had a choice or… So in this case, he doesn’t always have a choice. He may be sanctioned if he does not do so. So the terms might be appropriate. Give orders without appearing to give them. Did you understand the trick? Another company detailed this strategy, in black and white. This company is Deliveroo, Uber’s biggest competitor in France. Their list of banned words should have remained confidential. Until the labor inspectorate got involved. In an internal note found by labor inspectors and dated April 2017, a little reminder for the company’s employees with a list of terms to avoid with delivery people. For example, job, CV or seniority. Opposite, the words to use instead. Shift, presentation sheet or duration of service. At Deliveroo, we don’t summon delivery people, we invite them. And we never fire them, we prefer to end the relationship. But it’s not out of courtesy. This is to avoid being put in court. The document recommends, for example, never falling into legal subordination, defined by order plus control plus sanction. That’s good, we just have a judge on hand. Nickel! And not just any one. So do I have good hair? Yeah, isn’t the light too bright? François Ballouhey’s specialty, before hairdressing, is labor law. Until his retirement in 2016, he was a magistrate in the Social Chamber of the Court of Cassation. A reference. We show him our interviews. Very interesting, as a testimony. And the list of banned words at Deliveroo. I find this list extraordinary. Firstly because it exists in writing. In France and in the Labor Code, there are not 36 situations. Either you are an employee or you are self-employed. You are not a pending worker. And these vocabulary recommendations aim to ensure that at no time do we have the feeling or the idea that it could come close to a vocabulary which refers to a so-called employment contract situation. So this clearly shows that there is an awareness on the part of the managers of these platforms that there is a risk that exists. It’s very well established, it’s a very refined system. Obviously, when flirting with the yellow line, it is better to be well advised. Otherwise, we risk ending up in Cash. That ‘s the moral of the little story that follows. Initially, nothing scandalous. October 2018, gathering of angry delivery men in Paris. At the time, we were just beginning the investigation. So we go around to ask questions and see what it looks like. A banner, union flags, a revolutionary speaking with his arms. On the scale of social protest, for us, it is a micro-demonstration with ultimately very classic demands. Beyond the slogans, what really surprised us that day, it’s the paranoia of the delivery men, who refuse to be filmed. We promise to blur the faces and move on. To tell you the truth, we had even forgotten a little about this demonstration. It was six months later that this somewhat banal story turned into a spy affair. When a source entrusts us with nearly 6,000 internal email badges at Deliveroo. In the mass of documents, a message reveals to us that the company is trying to identify delivery people who are a little too resistant. The message is dated October 22, 2018 and refers to the protest we filmed. The subject of the email is clear: “Identification of strikers” The author, a Deliveroo manager, explains that he identified a large part of the strikers using Monitoring Rider Location, Deliveroo’s geolocation system. And that’s not all. Once the strikers have been identified, we try to build cases against them. In another message, the same manager asks a colleague to do research on these striking delivery workers to find out what is wrong with them. For example, their refused race rate, the UN rate in delivery language, or possible stolen orders. To gauge the seriousness of these exchanges, we spoke to the former magistrate of the Court of Cassation. Driving out strikers is against the law. Sanctioning someone because they are on strike is prohibited by law. For you, as a judge, is this kind of thing serious? So, as a citizen, this is a serious thing. As a judge, this is a reprehensible thing. Using geolocation to identify strikers and to collect information about them likely to aggravate their situation and likely lead either to financial sanctions or even to the permanent disconnection of the platform is completely prohibited. Does it surprise you to see this kind of thing? I’m a little surprised yes, that it’s so clear Because traditionally in companies, we pay attention to these things. Responsible companies, as they say today, do not behave that way. At this point, it is the boss of Deliveroo that we want to ask our questions. Besides, we have good news. There it is. The company accepts the interview. It’s automatic. On two conditions. We only have 30 minutes and it is not the director who responds, but the person in charge of institutional relations, the “Corporate Communications”, in short, the man of sensitive affairs, Louis Lepioufle. Hello Mr. Lepioufle, thank you, it is very kind of you to accept the interview. We are very happy. Have some makeup if you want. Before joining Deliveroo in 2018, Moniseur Lepioufle worked in the office of the former Secretary of State for Digital. In November 2018, the Court of Cassation ruled that a delivery person who works for an online platform should be considered an employee. You know very well that the Court of Cassation is the highest court in France. Are you going to offer employment contracts to your delivery people at Deliveroo? The delivery people we work with do not want to become employees. They want to remain independent. And you know how? We interact with hundreds of them every month, we do opinion surveys. Interact how? We meet them physically every month, we interact with them. It turns out that two in three would refuse to work with Deliveroo if tomorrow they were to become employees. So you tell me about the feelings of the delivery people, you tell me that two out of three delivery people want to maintain this independent status, well, that remains to be verified, because it’s a bit complicated to verify all the same. I’m talking to you about justice and… Doesn’t that worry you, this ruling from the Court of Cassation which could set a precedent? There is an important element in this judgment of the Court of Cassation. The first thing is that it concerns a platform that is not Deliveroo and a platform that had different practices. If you are sure that your delivery people are independent, why did you write a memo for your managers, Deliveroo managers, with a list of words to never use with your delivery people? Um… I would like to see what document it is. Ah well, you’re going to see him, but I think you know him, I’d be very surprised if you didn’t know him. So look, we’re going to look, here are the terms to avoid and all the derived words, and here are the terms to use. This table dates from April 2017, and so for example, at Deliveroo, we should not talk about recruitment, but we should talk about onboarding. We don’t summon, we invite. We have no seniority, but we have a length of service. Obviously, there are words that scare you a little, legally. I don’t know this document. You don’t know this document? I am not personally familiar with this document. On the other hand, what I can tell you… I will approach it to you. Look at the. I’m surprised you don’t know him. I don’t know him personally. It’s a shame. If it was used at one time at Deliveroo, it is no longer relevant at all, it is no longer used. Okay, but what do you think about the fact that this was distributed to Deliveroo managers? I am not aware of this document, and at present it is not in use. But I’m asking for your opinion. I am not aware of this document, and at present it is not in use. But that’s because I’m asking you, I’m asking you what you think about it. Nice try, Élise. But Mr. Lepioufle obviously knows how to handle the elements of language. We counted, to answer this question, he repeated the same formula 24 times with a few variations. I am aware of the document so I do not prefer to respond… And what I can tell you is that I am not aware of this document, I am discovering this document. I didn’t know him before. This is the first time I have seen this document. What I can tell you is that this document is not currently used by Deliveroo. I didn’t know I could make you laugh so much… …You always give me the same answer so mechanically, I’m just asking your opinion. So I’ll ask you the question again. By having distributed this type of document to your managers, haven’t you flirted with the yellow line? I’ll tell you again. We are not currently distributing this document. So, I wanted to show you some images from October 2018. They are here, we will look at them together. You recognize, it was Place de la République in Paris. These Deliveroo delivery drivers were demonstrating at the time against a reduction in prices. Do we simply have the right to demonstrate when we are a Deliveroo delivery person? Everyone in France has the right to demonstrate, indeed. All right. I’m asking you this question and I’m asking you something that is not obvious, I think, to the general public, and even to us when we started this investigation. What is “Rider Monitoring Location” for you at Deliveroo? Because it’s a technique that we know little about. So, a delivery person, if you’re referring to the location of delivery people in real time, if that’s it? Yes. It is an automated system that actually allows an order to be assigned to a delivery person closest to the restaurant that received an order. All right. In the event of a social crisis, can this help you locate the strikers? So, not at all. We do not geolocate people who wish to protest or who wish to speak publicly at Deliveroo. Everyone is free to express themselves in France. All right. Are you sure ? Yes. All right. Because we had access to internal email exchanges, actually. Internal emails between Deliveroo managers. These emails show that you used your geolocation system to identify the protesters. So, I’ll show you the first one. There it is, it’s here, I’m entrusting it to you, so you can look at it more closely. “I think I identified a large part of the strikers thanks to Monitoring Rider Location,” which is therefore your geolocation system. And in this email, the manager who writes mentions the dates. You see, it’s here, October 12, 19 and 21, which are indeed the dates of demonstrations, dates of the demonstrations of which we showed you the images. So this geolocation system allowed you to identify strikers. This is what a Deliveroo manager wrote in an email exchange. So on this specific case, I don’t know exactly, I am discovering this document with you, so I am not in a position to comment, I think you will understand it well. These are very specific elements. On the other hand, what I can tell you is that we do not identify the strikers with Deliveroo. It is the opposite that is written. On this point, to clarify… “I think I have identified a large part of the strikers, thanks to the rider location monitoring”, it is written by one of your managers. And now, this is extremely recent. There is no identification of strikers in France. Proof that yes. We do not identify the strikers in France. If this is proven, we will of course condemn this practice. All right. So we will even go further, because the same manager asks in another document, and there you will see that it is quite clear, to compile files against the demonstrators. So look at this document, you will see it with me. “Thank you very much, I think we have our leaders”, this is what is written here at the very beginning, “Can you check for all these names, orders never delivered and therefore stolen”, and later, “All what you can find that doesn’t suit them.” That is to say that not only… You spot them thanks to geolocation, but it goes further than that. That is, you are trying to build a case against them. In any case, that’s what we think we understand in this email, clearly. I, once again, discovered this document, you present it to me, you will understand that I am discovering it and therefore I do not have the context and that I do not wish to comment on it further than that. Okay, but do you think it’s normal to draw up lists and then… to make a blacklist, because that’s what it is, it’s a blacklist of strikers. What do you think ? It’s still serious for a company. So I’m just asking for your reaction. I told you this in the previous document, and I will repeat myself in this document. These are documents of which I am not aware and which I am discovering before you. It’s not… I mean, it’s Deliveroo managers exchanging this with each other. So I’m very surprised that you don’t know about it. I told you, I discovered this document. All right. Will you keep us informed? Yes with pleasure. Can we call you back, ask you what happened next? Yes. Because it’s still important. Quite. Ok. Thank you, Mr. Lepioufle We have been open, so no problem there. Thank you very much, Mr. Lepioufle. Thank you. That’s very nice. Bye. Thank you He doesn’t say much, Mr. Lepioufle. But after this interview, he sends us an email about the identification of the strikers. To prove it, he sends this photo of the front door of Deliveroo which was allegedly trashed by delivery men after the rally in the street. However, we read and reread them several times, the internal emails. And it is indeed a question of identifying strikers, never delinquents. After this blacklist affair, we would like to continue with a light, airy subject . But we have to talk to you about security, and more particularly about the case of Franck Page, the boy who smiles in the photo. Franck was 19 years old and his life was ahead of him. He was hit by a heavy goods vehicle in January near Bordeaux, while making a delivery for Uber Eats. As we follow the procession which pays tribute to him, we cannot help but notice the large advertising poster just behind. The day after the funeral, we found Franck’s family. Until the day of the accident, his parents did not know who he worked for. I think he just told me he was doing food deliveries by bike. So I asked him all the time if he was careful, if he was paying attention and he reassured me that yes. I didn’t really have the time to realize what this kind of job was, no. No. For me, I saw him happy to carry out an activity. So. It was after the tragedy that the family inquired and discovered the Uber system. Pushing teenagers like that, to make them believe that they can easily earn money in a very short time, by going hard, hard, hard, we are still on the public highway. Did Franck follow… Even if only… Any training, I don’t think so. There you are, you come. We give you a bike and then go for it. Until then, it hadn’t happened yet. Unfortunately, it happened to Frank. But if it doesn’t change, it could happen more frequently. There could be other victims. The day after the accident, an Uber deliveryman left them a telephone message to talk about his work and more particularly the bonus system. This confirms everything we’ve been saying so far. The unnecessary risks that couriers are forced to take to maximize their profit. After this interview, we verified that on the day of the accident, Uber was not offering a challenge with bonuses. But several questions remain. Does the bonus system push delivery people to take more risks? How far do they go for an extra 25 or 30 euros? It was Antoine Augis who contacted Franck’s parents to tell them about the challenges and risks he takes every day, even since the fatal accident. For one day, I was calmer, I did less stupid things, I ran fewer red lights. But reality quickly catches up with you and tells you: “Well no, but if you want to make money, you’re going to have to do these things.” Because that’s what also allows us to earn our living. And all this to win… To win 30 euros more for the evening. Yes, but it’s always nice to come home with 70 instead of 50. To motivate delivery people when the weather is complicated, the American company also offers bonuses on stormy days. We’re talking about real storms. Those who are given first names and who trigger weather alerts. Like that of January 29, 2019. Storm Gabrielle began to shake the Gironde road this afternoon. We expect up to 130 km/h, the peak should be around 9 p.m. You have to be vigilant, so really try to stay at home. Do not take your vehicle otherwise you do not have the need. That evening, the prefect of Gironde placed the department on orange alert and asked the population to limit their movements. On TV, we were told to stay at home, it was really very violent. And Uber gave us a bonus to force us to go to work. Because they know very well that there will be very few delivery people, because it’s raining, so there are fewer, there’s wind, there’s a storm. And I went anyway. In the end, it was the worst evening of my life. I won a lot, I earned 130 euros for the evening, but I almost took six cars every 15 minutes. Because my bike, hop, to the left, hop, to the right. It was my bike that ultimately guided me, it was not me that guided it. So too dangerous. 130 euros, but much too dangerous. For me, that ’s for sure, I won’t do it again. I say that, but I think I’ll do it again because I won. Was that before or after Franck’s death? It was after Frank’s death, too. It was after Franck’s death. Less than two weeks after death. By talking with Antoine, we discover something else. By following Uber’s GPS, a bicycle delivery person may very well find themselves on expressways. He shows us the video he filmed with his phone. All the Uber delivery people we met during our investigation had this type of mishap. With experience and miles, they discovered that Uber Eats GPS was a GPS for cars. Is Uber really aware of the dangers it poses to delivery people? To find out more, we ask Johnny Porcher and Amélia Fernandez, the two former managers of Uber Eats. A day when there are no accidents, whether the most minor or the most serious. Today, there is not a courier who is not hit by a car on his bike. And a lot of the accidents that happen are during challenges. Is Uber Eats GPS suitable for bikes? So in fact Uber Eats’ GPS is based on a car route. So GPS can put bikes on lanes that are only reserved for cars? Yes. And headquarters knows? Oh yes, they know it. We looked for statistics on the accident rate among delivery people. But in France, there are no official figures. To find data, you have to take the train. Direction Belgium. Until 2018, most Belgian delivery drivers had employee status. Hello, I am Sambrine Rigaud. Sarah, delighted. Delighted, thank you. At that time, Sarah managed the contracts of 4,000 Deliveroo couriers. And in the event of an accident, she takes care of the paperwork. We have the period, the month of the accident, the seriousness of the accident, with stoppage, without stoppage, work or serious. As Sarah is the picky type, she kept everything, even the statements with the details of the accidents. Here we have a collision with a van hitting him in the back. In this case, the victim went over his bike and hit the road with his head. In this case, the victim was hit by a car that was following him, with a hit-and-run incident at that. From this data, she makes lots of Excel tables, pie charts, curves. And she finds two numbers. If we start from the total number of delivery people, 4% have had accidents. But for Sarah, this figure is not representative. As some delivery people only work one or two hours per month, others 8 or 15 per week, it is better to calculate from another figure. The number of FTEs, full-time equivalents. It’s a bit technical, but basically, we take all the working hours and see how many full-time delivery people that corresponds to. And that changes everything. There we see that the accident rate is much higher. It stands at 39%. That is to say that if you work as a full-time courier, overall, the probability of having an accident… …will be 39%. In any case, it was 39% in 2017. We can perhaps extrapolate this data. Which is huge. Which is huge, yes. 39% work accidents. This is more than 10 times the average for French employees. The figure could have been even higher. Because in 2017, the Belgian couriers who were used for Sarah’s calculations were paid by the hour, without Uber’s bonus system. So after Franck’s death, and what we discovered about bonuses on stormy evenings, or car GPS, we have a lot of questions to ask the boss of UberEats in France. Frankly, Frankly, the car hideout, we would have preferred to avoid. But as Stéphane Ficaja, number 1 at Uber Eats in Europe, refuses our interview requests, we wait for him in the street before a conference on the status of delivery workers during which he is due to speak. Well, that’s what was planned. But on the big day, surprise, he disappeared from the program. It is a certain Marine Charpentier who replaces him. The young woman with short hair in the photo. On this subject, a little friendly advice: always be wary of photos. Because of the hair, we almost missed it. By the time we arrive, we redo the introductions. So here is Marine Charpentier, the boss’s replacement, with longer hair, and on the left, Rym Saker, Uber’s communications manager. The one we’ve been asking for an interview with for weeks. Why does Stéphane Ficaja refuse to answer Cash Investigation’s questions? So we, at the communications department, are in the habit of answering all questions concerning the status of workers, etc. in writing, because it is a subject that deserves to be answered in a factual manner. and precise. I would be delighted to respond to it in writing, as we do for all of your colleagues, to whom we respond in writing. But Mr. Stéphane Ficaja has already made televised interventions, why does he refuse to answer us? He has made television interventions which concern subjects over which he has mastery, that is to say business subjects. Here we enter the legal domain. Do you know, have you heard of Franck Page? Please, let’s go. Have you heard of Franck Page? Is this a serious enough topic that you can take the time to answer me for a few minutes here? A few minutes here, I told you, we will take all the time necessary to answer you. In writing. Do not hesitate to send me your questions and we will answer them as we are accustomed to doing with all your brothers. So, it was a delivery person who died during an Uber Eats delivery. Have you taken steps to ensure the safety of your delivery people after this? I told you, we will respond to you in writing. Please, this is an important topic. Ms. Charpentier, this is an important subject. Can you answer us? We try several times. But as we enter the meeting, we are kindly asked to turn off our cameras. We therefore have to wait until the break to see the communications manager again and ask her our questions about the safety of delivery people and the famous bonus for stormy days. No, but we have the documents. Yes. We have the documents, if you want, I’ll show them to you. I’ll show them to you. Yes, More than three months after this exchange with the communications director, we are still waiting for responses from Uber. Even in writing, we received nothing. In the jungle of the new economy, there are visible workers like delivery people. And all those whose existence we don’t suspect. Millions of men and women, all day, in front of their computers. All over the world, little hands power the algorithms of new technologies. But before telling you about them, we need to explain to you what AI, artificial intelligence, is. So, it’s over there, then? It is over there ? The entrance there? Continue here… where are we actually going? In which hall? So come over here, my darlings. And for that, nothing better than a visit to the high-tech Disneyland, the Viva Technologie show. So there it is: “Welcome to the future” in fact. That’s the story. Come on, welcome to 2030, 2040. Here we go. With Elise, you will really enjoy the future. To do that, you just need to put on a headset, like multi-colored neon lights, sentences with data in them, and then have easy contact. Do you speak ? No, you don’t talk. We’re not in 2040 yet , are we? This is where companies showcase their latest innovations. I’m going to change my hair color. So, at Cash, we can also see the future rosy. And even make robot friends. Maybe we’ll go up there? Who is Cash Investigation? Not bad, Cruzr. Thank you so much ! We like him, Cruzr. But our favorite is little Pepper. Hi you ! Hi ! How can he recognize emotions? That is to say, he has already recorded emotions? The machine that learns is what we also call artificial intelligence or AI to be stupid. Artificial intelligence is the technology of the future. And one of the biggest challenges for the digital giants. Companies like Facebook, Amazon or Google. We’re going to eat Google macaroons. Pull yourself together, Elise. This is a decoy. Google’s specialty isn’t macaroons. It’s artificial intelligence. THANKS. Come on, a second chance. To understand everything about AI, we have an appointment with the big boss of artificial intelligence at Google Europe. Watch out, brain. We realize that this is ultimately something that we talk about a lot now, but which is not so new. His name is Olivier Bousquet. He is French and a polytechnician. To see it, it’s a four-hour train ride. Time to get a little makeover. He receives us in his offices in Zurich, Switzerland. Are you okay, Constantine? Very well and you ? Thank you for your hospitality. Good morning ! Welcome. I’m delighted to be here with you. Thank you for your hospitality. Are we following you? Great. For us, the communications department of Google France made the trip. Nice welcome. Simple question to start with, what exactly is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence today is essentially this technology that we call “Machine Learning” in English, “Automatic Learning”. So we teach machines? So exactly, the idea being that, when we want to have a computer carry out a complex task, we can traditionally explain to it in detail the task to be carried out, a series of instructions to carry out, or with automatic learning. Instead, we can show examples of the task to be performed. And by showing him enough examples of the task to be carried out, he will be able to automatically create what we call a model which will allow him to carry out this task. To make AI child’s play, Google has launched a program that allows anyone to create their own artificial intelligence system. An example perhaps. Let’s imagine that you are an amateur photographer and you have taken lots of photos of the sky and you want to classify your database by the type of clouds that are in these images. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to take all of your photos and initially label them by hand. So there, we see “Cyrus”, “Altocumulus”, another “Altocumulus”, “Cumulus”, Exactly. And so there are around 2,000 images. A photo, a title. A photo and a title. Exactly. A definition. So. There you have 2,000 photos. Approximately 2,000 photos. What we’re going to do is now, these are the examples that we’re going to show to the computer. And so we will now go and train the computer, make it learn what we are trying to teach it, this concept of type of cloud. And what I’m going to be able to do now is give him an image that’s not part of all these images we’ve seen. So here we’re going to take, I don’t know, an image here that I downloaded. from the Internet. But that I could have taken a photo there. That’s it, you could take a photo now and put it in the system. And there you have it, the system said, from what it learned, it is able to say, there it is, it’s a cirrus. He immediately recognized the cirrus. So, for me to understand correctly, that means that I still have to show this computer to it and make it learn hundreds and even thousands of photos of clouds so that at one point, it can make the difference clearly between the two. We agree with that. Exactly. Instead of describing what the cloud is, we show him examples of clouds. Did you get it? Okay, let’s move on to practical work. If we developed an AI capable of recognizing… well, Élise Lucet. You never know, it might interest the communications departments of large companies. To train the AI, if you have followed the specialist carefully, you must show the machine where Élise is in the photo. And that, hundreds, and even thousands of times. It takes time. A lot of time. So, to avoid spending your nights there, Google suggests you have it done by someone else. A company that trains its artificial intelligence. “Figure Eight”. A company specializing in manually adding labels to your images. Behind this obscure formula, flesh-and-blood workers hidden in the machine. To unravel the mysteries of manually adding Labels, welcome to the west coast of the United States. In San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the laboratory of the world of tomorrow. It is the cradle of all the high-tech giants. Brands like Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Netflix and Google, obviously. This is where we find the headquarters of “Figure Eight”, the company that helps Google identify its data. We have a meeting with the boss, Lukas Biewald. This is Lukas. Hello Lukas, delighted. Thank you for agreeing to see us. I know you have a tight schedule. Thank you. At 38 years old, this Stanford graduate has already worked at Microsoft and Yahoo before creating his company. Time to set up the microphone. Quick tour of the premises in “California Startup” mode. There, he’s the best-dressed employee in the company. Too cool and relaxed. And he is probably our worst dressed employee. Do you play table football? I think I’m doing really well. Here is our canteen area. This is where I like to work. You see my coffee getting cold. And in the reception hall, the inevitable hunting board. Here are some of our clients and what we have done for them. This is Twitter. We helped them clean up their networks and remove unwanted profiles. Do you know American Express? Yes. Does it exist in France? Yes. I’m very proud to have worked for a company like Tesco, the supermarkets. We helped them improve their search engine so that people could find what they were looking for. I don’t see Google. You know , why aren’t all our customers here? To be honest, we couldn’t fit them all. It was too much. This is Mr. Brown, from communications. But it’s a good sample. At the end of the owner’s tour, we finally understand why this name, Figure Eight. We chose Figure Eight as the number 8, because for us, this society is like a loop with its two parts. On one side, the human part for labeling, and on the other, “machine learning” which learns and improves thanks to humans. It’s a constant back and forth. It’s a magnificent loop where everyone brings what they do best, humans and algorithms. Thanks to us, there is an interaction of the two, and that’s why we’re called Figure Eight. So much for the beautiful concept of symbiosis between man and machine. To see how it works in practice, we stop laughing and take out the computer. This is a good example. There are plenty of companies today that want to make autonomous cars. Tesla, for example. They are building a system so that cars drive themselves. But of course, it’s important that these cars don’t run over pedestrians. Do you see that? This is what the car camera sees. It is important that the car can identify a pedestrian in this image. And for that, we have to show the cars where the people are in these images. This is where Figure Eight comes in by having real people do this work and get paid for it. Their job is to see all these images taken by the car and to say where the people are in them. And they get paid for that? Yes, they are paid to surround people in pictures. How much ? You know, for this job, I’m not too sure, but it can be, I don’t know, around 10 cents per image. Who does this work? Do you have employees doing that at Figure Eight? We work with independent contractors. What do you mean by independent contractors? People who log onto our site and want to do that. How many people work like that for you? You mean like that, like workers? Yes. You know, these are people who come and go as they please. I would say around 100,000 people who work for us regularly every day. But there are also millions of people who log in from time to time to do a single task. And where do these people live? They live all over the world, in the United States and all over the world. Millions of people paid to feed artificial intelligence. It’s intriguing. But to convince these independent contractors to testify, we need months. The first one to agree to meet us lives 900 km north of San Francisco, Oregon. Jared Mansfield entered Figure Eight three years ago. Since then, he has spent several hours a week on the site. Every day, he is offered a list of tasks that he can do for money. For example, training a search engine. There you have an example. The request is “cheese ravioli”. The two answers we offer you are organic cheese dough or dough to reheat in the microwave. Since they are not ravioli, I have to answer that neither answer is relevant. What’s the point of doing this? In my opinion, it is to improve an algorithm. This way, when someone goes to their computer and searches for a product, the algorithm offers them something that really matches their search. For every 10 responses, Jared gets less than a dime. To get an idea of ​​what it can bring, let it work for 30 minutes. During these 30 minutes, he answers 180 questions. How much did you earn? 15 cents. For how long ? A half hour. So that’s 30 cents an hour? Yes, which is not a decent living wage for sure. But do they have the right to do that? They have the right to do what they want. It’s me who comes to see them to earn a few cents on this site. There is no contract between them and me. No contract, no salary, no guaranteed minimum. Just the law of supply and demand. Spending a little time with Jared, we realize that training artificial intelligence is a bit like delivering for Uber, only less well paid and more transparent. From time to time, I think that I am part of a class of invisible workers. A new class of proletarians scattered all over the world. And all together, we train machines that will end up doing the job and replacing us. Jared is a philosopher. He still has the means to afford it. To earn a living, he has a real job. He sells chicken in this supermarket for a little over $1,500 a month. Figure Eight is just more to pay for extras. Leaving Jared and Oregon, we too registered on Figure Eight and took advantage of our American trip to train artificial intelligence. On the site’s home page, we are offered small tasks for 1, 2 or 12 cents. We first choose this one, Circle objects on images Following the instructions, it takes us several minutes to circle 10 objects and touch 2 cents. In the list of tasks, Figure Eight also suggests evaluating search engine responses, as Jared does. or listen to conversations to tell if the person being recorded is male or female and if they speak English. We work for hours, without ever exceeding 30 cents an hour. It’s hard to imagine that at that price, some people have made it a real, full-time job. We are in Maine, on the east coast of the United States, near the border with Canada. We have an appointment with one of those little invisible hands of the internet, the human part in the Figure Eight loop. Her name is Dawn Carbon, she is 46 years old. Nice to meet you ! Thank you for your welcome. I had never seen so much snow. And again, you’re lucky, we had a big storm last week. Dawn raises her three children alone in this house. The American version of our HLM. This is what public housing looks like here in Maine. It’s not so bad. This is where she lives and works, all day connected to the Figure Eight website. I turn on my computer just before 7 o’clock. I do the first tasks. I stop at 3 p.m. and start again after 9 p.m. That’s 8 hours a day minimum. You see, I don’t do this halfway. There you can see that I did 6,445 missions in total. Since when ? Three years. Look, there are three levels. When you start at Figure Eight, you are at level zero. You have to answer lots of questions with as few mistakes as possible. And then you go to level 1. And level 3. You can have access to all the jobs offered by Figure Eight. And what level are you at? I’m at level 3. It’s been a while now. Since she is considered a good student, Figure Eight offers her more tasks than a beginner. But it’s not necessarily more interesting. There, I have to surround people. I don’t really like doing that. The hardest part is finding suitable tasks. And right now, there’s not much. And above all, it is not better paid. Very good day, I can make 5 dollars an hour. And on a bad day, it’s around 10 cents. I had very good days, until February. Do you think this is fair compensation for what you do? No. No. No, not at all, no. But I live in an isolated area. There is a lot of snow and very few jobs. This is what allows me to earn a little money. And by staying at home. Dawn prefers to work from home because her youngest daughter, Jen, is autistic. And when she gets home from school at 3 p.m., Dawn wants to be there to take care of her. It was ? Good or bad day? Good. Really ? With her autism, I have to be ready to jump in my car at any moment to pick her up from school. It could happen once a week, or not at all, or three times a week. It forces me to be available all the time, which wouldn’t be possible with a real job. Dawn receives $750 in welfare every month. To pay all the bills, it’s not enough. That’s why she signed up for Figure Eight. By working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, she tells us she earns an average of $250 per month on the site. But on Figure Eight, when your name is Dawn or Jared, you don’t negotiate. If you refuse the job, there is always someone else to do it. These ghost workers, available all over the world, are perhaps the secret of Lukas Biewald’s good humor. But he is not alone in the niche. On the Internet, other companies offer this type of repetitive and underpaid tasks. The most important, Clickworker. And above all, Amazon Mechanical Turk. A platform from the giant Amazon and its boss Jeff Bezos, the inventor of the concept in 2005. Call it “micro-work”. Microwork. A phenomenon that worries even the ILO, the International Labor Organization, the UN agency responsible for defending workers’ rights around the world. Hello Janine, thank you for your time. Janine Berg is the subject specialist at the ILO. She answers us by Skype. With globalization, we have seen the emergence of a global workforce in the industrial sector. This is the next step. It is the service sector that has succeeded in dividing work into very small tasks that can be distributed to workers all over the world. They are all competing to do this job. And this is what allows wages to be lowered. And this has been made possible thanks to the advancement of technology. For employers, it doesn’t cost much. This is above all the advantage. In her report, Janine Berg calculated that microworkers earn on average $3.31 per hour, without any rights in return. This extreme precariousness is the key to Lukas Biewald’s model. Through further investigation, we found an archive from 2010 which summarizes his vision of social relations. We listened to it several times to make sure we understood correctly. The whole point of the Internet and new technologies is that you can hire someone very easily, make them work for 10 minutes, pay them a pittance and fire them when you no longer need them. 10 years later, since he is in front of us, we want to know if he still thinks the same thing. But when we start talking about working conditions, the boss in Figure Eight is much less funny. Do you have an idea of ​​what the people who work for you earn, their average hourly income? It really depends on the task you choose to do. And it’s difficult to measure working time on the Internet because people can connect to the site without necessarily being working. So I do not know. According to a report from the International Labor Organization, people who work on sites like yours earn on average $3.31 per hour. Is that roughly what you pay? I don’t know. Can you pay less than the American minimum wage? Yes it’s possible. So is it legal? I’m not sure I want to answer this question. Can we talk about something else? We talked about a conversation about artificial intelligence. Yes, but it’s the same thing. We also want to talk about workers and ask questions about that. Yes, but I prepared it for a discussion about AI, not work. You know, I think we should… I don’t want to do that, actually. We could find someone else to answer these questions. Are you not comfortable with the subject? Not really. Actually, you’re right, that’s part of the point, but it’s really not what we expected about AI. We don’t even have time to take out the archives. Lukas Biewald leaves without saying goodbye and leaves us alone with the communications director. Our last chance to ask questions about how society treats these independent contractors, as they’re called here. While working on the subject, I discovered that many workers complained of having suddenly lost their account. Unfortunately, I’m the one who will have to leave now. It’s 11 o’clock. So you don’t want to talk about humans in the loop? That’s not my role. I think we’re done there . We talk about AI, but not humans. This is what we had prepared. Sorry. It’s a shame. To have the answers to our questions about Lukas Biewald and his conception of social relations, we must try something else. The day the boss of Figure Eight made his exit on disposable workers, next to him, there were other entrepreneurs, but also researchers, like Lilly Irani. Ten years after this conference, it is in South Los Angeles, in the California of TV series, that we find her. Thanks for the parking space by the way. Nice. Lilly Irani teaches at the University of San Diego. And one of its specialties is the culture of work in high-tech. We’re lucky, she has a very good memory. Do you remember if anyone in the audience reacted after this rather brutal sentence in a certain way? To be honest, there was zero reaction. I remember very well, after the intervention, everyone went to talk to him. And for me, there were just two or three people who came to see me to talk about ethics and working conditions. Imagine, it’s a room full of people, very educated in San Francisco, and no one flinched. How do you explain that? The people who work in these environments are people who have never asked themselves how to pay the rent at the end of the month, or how to pay the bills when you are sick. These are not the people who are forced to accept a poorly paid job because there is no other solution. And that’s what happens when you go to big schools like Stanford, Harvard, where they teach you that you are part of the elite, that you are going to be a future leader and that you have the power to change the world . An elitist Silicon Valley disconnected from the rest of the world. This is the first key to understanding Lukas Biewald’s logic but not the only one. These little high-tech hands are invisible because of the nature of computer programs. When you are an employer, you write a code and you send it without knowing who is going to do the work. Workers are just identified by figures and numbers. You don’t see them. Developers and analysts have no idea who they are. Do these ghost workers know who they work for? Have they ever heard of Lukas Biewald? With them we listen to the Figure Eight boss’s statements about work. With new technology, you can hire someone, pay them a pittance, and fire them when you no longer need them. They brag about paying people pennies and goodbye! Ok, I’m going to start getting angry on my own, like when I’m in front of my computer. It’s a little surprising to see how he handles his speech about workers. Actually, no, it doesn’t surprise me that much. But it really sucks to see that when you know they can pay more. He could at least have the decency not to brag about it openly. He’s clearly saying, you hire someone for a few minutes and then you can fire them, without needing to see them, bye bye. The fact that it’s the boss of the company who says that people are disposable is not normal. I do not like that. You want me to tell you ? I’m not disposable . After meeting Dawn and Jared, we find it less sexy, artificial intelligence, supposed to change our lives. And at Google, what do they think of these shadow workers who feed their system at low cost? We ask Olivier Bousquet, one of the brains behind the American giant’s artificial intelligence. Do you know who the people are who work in particular for Google’s labeling or annotation systems? I haven’t met them myself. All right. So you don’t know how they work, in what conditions they work? So, for those in Figure Eight, I don’t know. To understand what this work of annotating or labeling images to train artificial intelligence involves, we simply registered on Figure Eight. And we never managed to earn more than 30 cents an hour to do this job. Do you think this is a fair remuneration for doing this work? I’m not an economist, I can’t answer you. You are a man and a business man, so you have an opinion. If you like, it’s difficult for me to express an opinion on this question, since there are lots of jobs that are well or poorly paid. No, but it’s very poorly paid. Yes, I understand that, but there are other poorly paid jobs. I’m not saying it’s a good thing to promote this kind of work. So you condemn him? I would say that I think it’s not a good thing to use this kind of service, if indeed, as you say, I don’t have the figures myself, I haven’t tried it myself- even to work, to do this work. But indeed, it is a job that is tedious and not remunerative. You should take the test, right? Since it is used to manufacture and build your artificial intelligences. You should take the test. You’re right, I’m interested, I’ll do it. We didn’t just sign up for Figure Eight. We also met men and women who work very regularly on this site and who, for some, only have this activity to make a living. I would like to show you their testimonies, because since you have never met them, it will allow you to hear what they have to say. On a good day, I can make up to $5 an hour. On a bad day, it can be as low as 10 cents. I tell myself that I am part of a class of invisible workers, a new class of proletarians scattered all over the world. So, that’s what these people are telling us. Quite simply a reaction, I’m just asking you for a reaction to what you’ve just heard, because you’ve never met them, and here, we’re giving you the opportunity to meet them. Of course. So indeed, their situation is not enviable, I would say. And I think that raises the question of this type of work which is not the prerogative of Google, it is not Google which created this type of… of work. No, but for now, you use it. Through Figure Eight, which is one of your major partners, which is developing this, you use it to feed your artificial intelligence, your artificial intelligence system. We actually use this type of work. So a reaction. But I think it raises the question of whether we really have a framework that is acceptable from an ethical point of view to govern this kind of work. And it seems that this is not the case. And I would say that this is perhaps one of the points that goes in the direction of what we are trying to do with artificial intelligence. That is to say that we recently published, more than a year ago now, ethical principles of artificial intelligence, which consist of saying that artificial intelligence must be developed in such a way as to be beneficial to society, so as not to reinforce or accentuate inequalities. But that is not the case today. So, there are a whole variety of things that are done with artificial intelligence. You shouldn’t just show that aspect. I agree that it must be taken into account. Now, we must see that with these same technologies, we can do things that are remarkable. Let me give you an example. A tribe in the Amazon uses… this kind of technology to fight against deforestation, for example to listen to sounds and raise the alarm when there is a chainsaw approaching. But here, I hear what you are saying. But in fact, what I’m telling you is that on the one hand, we have the feeling that there is a showcase of artificial intelligence. And then, when we look at what is happening behind, and there, we are very, very far from the world of tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, we are in the world of yesterday or the day before yesterday. You take a shortcut. With people who are exploited, objectively, who are paid very little, without a contract. I agree. There is a problem there. There is a problem with the supervision of this type of work, of employment, which is not well supervised. I agree. Why have you been working with them for so many years? That’s a real question. I am not responsible for partnerships myself. But I am committed to looking into this question, because indeed, it is something that raises questions. At least to ensure that Google’s practices in this area are compatible with our ethical principles. Is it a commitment? Yes. Artificial intelligence today at Google is an ethical matter, a question of principle. But that wasn’t always the case. During our investigation, we met Kristy Milland in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada. She has been training artificial intelligence on Amazon Mechanical Turk, Figure Eight’s biggest competitor, for 14 years. She told us a story that chilled us. We had aerial images of people walking. They were images at night and apparently in the desert. Our job was to show where the person was going, where they were going to be a few seconds later. At the time, I didn’t really like it. I thought it was to anticipate the move. But then I understood. It was a drone. I was showing a drone how a person moves. And why do that? To indicate a target, show the drone where to aim. I was probably training a drone to kill people. Training drones to identify targets. This is not a science fiction scenario, this is what Google did. In 2017, the American army launched an artificial intelligence program for its drones, called “Project Maven”. The program could be used to improve the effectiveness of drone strikes and has even already been used on the ground. Google wins the market. Internally, the program caused a scandal. The company is backtracking. The matter still deserves a final clarification with Olivier Bousquet. The question that arose was, yes or no, is Google choosing to provide technology for this? And the answer was very clearly no. We stopped the project. The answer was first yes, then no. The answer, when we had the information, was very clearly no. We stopped the project. And if the question arose again, we would refuse to enter into such a project. It’s very clear. Thank you, Olivier Bousquet. Thank you so much. THANKS. THANKS. You are welcome. Bye. Bye. Ah, need to take your mind off things? We have what you need. The beach, fresh orange juice and an Internet connection to stay on social media. Are we not okay here on Facebook? Always with friends and even when we are far from them? Marc, that was the plan, right? I started to create a service to put people at the heart of technology. Because it is the relationships between humans that matter the most. This is how we give meaning to what we do in life. It’s nice, the boss’s speeches. But with more than 2 billion users, the group of friends becomes difficult to manage. Between violent videos, calls to hatred or pornographic images, we have to clean up. And it’s not always robots that do it. Again, there are humans hiding behind the screen to do the job. Determining whether something is hateful is very complicated. But I am optimistic. Within 5 to 10 years, we will have implemented artificial intelligence capable of doing this automatically and understanding all the nuances of a language. But today, we are not there. For now, it’s our users who report the content and we have people afterward who sort it. Facebook elegantly calls these people who sort to clean up the network content reviewers, “content moderators” in French. On its site, the company admits to employing 15,000 people around the world. In Ireland, Portugal, the Philippines or the United States. We asked Facebook if we could meet with moderators to interview them. But they didn’t really like it. So we do things differently. To meet with moderators, we identify Facebook’s main moderation contractors. multinationals like “Majorel”, “Cognizant” or “Accenture”. And we come across this job offer for a moderator responsible for taking care of the French market, in Portugal. After the bike, we said to ourselves that a trip would be good for him . To understand the job of content moderator, Grégoire responded to Accenture’s ad and got the job. Before taking off, he receives this contract proposal with the amount of salary. 800 euros gross per month. Barely more than a Portuguese minimum wage. Plus 7.63 euros meal allowance. In the document, Facebook is never mentioned. Even when insisted, Accenture refuses to give the name of its client. And I was wondering, now that I’m accepted for the job, knowing that I’m leaving, can you tell me what company I’m going to work for? No, we can’t tell you anything at the moment. We can’t give you a name. We are not allowed to give names. Welcome to Lisbon, a great destination for a romantic weekend. But for Grégoire, it’s another program, and this is where it happens, in the Accenture offices. Before starting, our journalist is invited to an information meeting. It’s a little swaying, that’s normal, he’s filming with a hidden camera. Hello, I have an appointment at Accenture at 9:30 a.m. Grégoire is not alone. 12 people start at the same time as him, another Frenchman, Italians and Spanish. It is a human resources manager who welcomes them. Welcome everyone. I’m here to help you with your relationships with Accenture. OK ? After the small administrative point on leave or health insurance, the group can finally know who they work for. But shhh! It’s a secret. We warned you. You can’t say you’re working on this project, okay? The customer is really very demanding. You can’t say you work for Facebook. If someone asks you, you say Accenture, ok? We use a code name here in the box. CEO. So if I’m talking to colleagues at Accenture who aren’t working on the same project, and they ask who I work for, I can’t tell them it’s for Facebook. It is prohibited and it is completely confidential. Nobody knows we work for Facebook. Code name, confidentiality clause, ah, and cell phone ban too. For 800 euros per month, Facebook offers you the life of a secret agent. And if you’re the talkative type, the following argument should calm you down straight away. You have signed a confidentiality clause and you are obliged to respect it. Otherwise, we can take you to court. In fact, cleaning up social media is a bit like washing your dirty laundry with your family. We have to do it, but above all, we don’t talk about it. Why so many precautions? What does this job consist of? We continue with Grégoire, always in complete discretion. Before becoming a moderator, Grégoire must follow training which lasts three weeks. Moderating content for Facebook isn’t just about removing violent videos or racist jokes, it’s more complicated. And for the moment, the algorithms do not know how to manage everything. For each decision, you must justify your choice based on very precise rules. This is what we learn during training. In the program, each day is dedicated to a theme. For example, nudity, violent images or hate speech. That day on the menu, it was dark humor and bad jokes. You delete the video if the person you see in the image, so you have to see a real person, is suffering. If the joke is about an event, we don’t delete it. You just need to report the content. Small example with a bad joke about September 11th. What do we do when we make fun of an event? We report. Yes, we report. Perfect. It sounds stupid, but there are dozens of rules like that for each category. Not always easy to understand. Take nudity, for example. Depending on the parts of the body that are seen or their inclination, the moderator should not make the same decisions. You will understand better with the exercises. This photo, for example. Grégoire decides to delete it. Well, according to Facebook’s rules, he’s got it all wrong. Explanation with the teacher during the debrief. As his head is not there, it should not be deleted. You see, he just has his head between his breasts, but we can’t directly see the contact with the nipple. So we don’t do anything. You see, that’s why I have such a hard time understanding. When you have an artistic nude photo, and you just see a nipple, you have to remove it because the nipple is 100% exposed. But on the other hand… There, you have a photo that is almost pornographic and you don’t delete it because it doesn’t match your rules. Your problem is that you reason from your point of view. But we are here like at school, to learn rules. Apply Facebook rules without asking questions. Here, it’s principle number 1. A philosophy that we repeat to you all day long. We need rules, they are the ones who make them. We are just here to apply them and do our job. Sometimes we don’t agree, but that’s the job. It’s their platform, it’s not ours. If you don’t understand the reasoning behind Facebook’s policies or think some rules are stupid, you know what? This is not your social network. If you want to enforce your rules, you create your social network. A speech that ends up transforming you into a machine. Pedro worked for six months as a content moderator for Facebook at Accenture. He agrees to answer us on condition of remaining anonymous. Two years after leaving the club, Pedro still can’t forget what he saw on his screen. We weren’t prepared for that. We don’t prepare you psychologically for it. All these things that we hit ourselves in the face and that we can’t deal with. It hits you like a wave. And we don’t even ask you for your opinion. If you give me a million euros, even a billion, I won’t do it again. It’s not for me. What Pedro describes, this wave that we take in the face without being prepared for it, is exactly what happens to Grégoire. For him, it starts on the fifth day of training, during practical exercises. A succession of horrible images. Sometimes unbearable videos that you have to watch carefully to make the right decision. According to Facebook criteria. Oh damn, they’re burning her alive… And on the screen of her office neighbor, another Frenchman, the same monstrous scenes. What is this, a guy who is having his stomach cut open? Excuse me, can I go get a glass of water? I’m close to vomiting, I just took a break because I saw dismembered, charred bodies… People throwing themselves from the top of towers to crash to the ground Nausea, body trembling , hands trembling, psychologically it was really very hard. And it’s like that every day, for Grégoire and his entire group. Fortunately, to feel better, they can always count on the useful advice of trainers. If you are uncomfortable with what you see, please let me know, take a short break, go out, dance the macarena and then come back. If the macarena is not enough, the company has provided psychologists for the most traumatized moderators. That day, for Grégoire, the level of violence crossed a new threshold with this video lasting several minutes. The guy gets decapitated. Oh fuck. And at the break, everyone empties their bags as best they can by telling each other their story of the creepy video. There was this girl with two boys and he was playing with a gun and suddenly, without meaning to, the girl shot the boy and he collapsed like that. And you see, she was panicking. Oh that’s not true. At the time, I felt really bad, you see. I was quite sad. And then, after a while, it finally passed. I managed to continue. It was during the afternoon debrief, with a former moderator who had trained, that Grégoire realized how damaging this job can be. I can panic in the street because I have seen so many accidents, panic scenes, my brain makes the connection. So as soon as I see someone running in the street, I start to panic, I can’t stand it anymore. Oh yes ? Yes, it’s like a little post-traumatic stress disorder. Do you have this? Yes. Well, I don’t take any medication, but I can no longer see people running in the street. But you still do this even though you have this trauma? For me, it’s important. It’s like I’m cleaning up all the dirt from the web so that it’s not a 14 year old girl who stumbles upon it. I have to see it, but I know why. Two years after his resignation, Pedro still has very clear memories of certain videos. I saw things that will stay with me forever. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was very intense sometimes. I remember some days, we were all there, productive, working. And then suddenly, someone gets up to go outside and cry. Traumas that accumulate. And, for him, on top of that, the impression of being of no use. If you see someone getting killed, all you can do is hit the “Delete” button. You simply erase it from the platform . And you look no further. You can’t call the police, for example. You can never be satisfied with what you do. You go around in circles like that. We bombard you with all this stuff. And you have to deal with all these emotions that come at you in a day, for 8 hours. How many were you in your group? There were 30 of us at the beginning, 30. And then it started to decrease. Every month, there were some who left. Now there must be 3 left. According to Pedro, many would not tolerate the job and would resign. To understand what Pedro experienced, what Grégoire and his colleagues are going through, we have an appointment with a psychiatrist. THANKS. Professor Thierry Baubet is a specialist in what we call post-traumatic syndromes. For example, he works with the police officers who intervene during attacks. We show him the testimonies we filmed. Potentially traumatic images, such as those described here, can have several effects. For some people, it will simply be the effects of anxiety. That is to say, it can make you anxious for a while, sometimes significantly, with panic attacks. But in a certain number of cases, there can really be what we call a traumatic break-in. That is to say… One of these images or some of these images will lodge deep within us and come back to haunt us constantly. And what is particular about post-traumatic disorders is that when these images keep coming back, they keep producing the same distress each time. And so it is a distress that lasts and does not go away, if you like. We also talk to him about the famous confidentiality clauses imposed by Facebook. The culture of secrecy and the ban on speaking about it to third parties is a process that belongs to the register of what we call mental control. Mental control is something that is used by different movements, such as sectarian movements. And that makes you even more vulnerable to traumatic impacts. Anxiety, trauma, distress. Cleaning up social media can be expensive. Grégoire decides to end the experiment after two weeks during the training period. When it was time to leave, we had almost forgotten the amount of his salary. On his pay slip, the hourly rate, 4.62 euros, gross, we specify. For his office neighbor, it’s a little hard to digest. You realize ? I got paid more selling ice cream. By selling ice cream? Yeah. Oh, it’s hard. After this immersion, we contacted Accenture. For any response, a terse email without any reference to Facebook, but with this sentence, the well-being of our employees is a priority. To finish this journey among the web scavengers, the little invisible hands behind your Facebook or Instagram walls, we need to introduce you to someone. Sarah Roberts is the first researcher to be interested in the profession of moderator. She is essential on the subject. We meet her at the university where she teaches, in California. For us, she analyzes the rise of content moderation in recent years. We are talking about a phenomenon that is reaching a magnitude and scale never seen before. Billions of content shared every day on Facebook, hundreds of hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute, etc. Companies have had to hire more and more moderators. Their numbers have increased exponentially. Initially, it was an almost non-existent expense. And then it became a massive load for these boxes. In addition, these are expenses that bring no return, it is not like a new product, there is no return on investment. So the way to solve the problem was to move this workforce to countries where labor is not expensive. This is how they solved the equation. This is why companies like Facebook use subcontractors. But for the researcher, this is not the only explanation. This is obviously to lower the cost of labor, but it is also to create distance between them and those who work as content moderators. For the companies, it’s a way of avoiding responsibility, by distancing themselves geographically and morally. And then if, in a few years, moderators suffer psychologically or emotionally, these companies will always be able to say that they have nothing to do with it, that they are not legally responsible, even if they are the ones who need this work . Despite these precautions, three former moderators filed a complaint against Facebook a few months ago in the United States. All worked for subcontractors. They all say they are victims of post-traumatic stress disorder because of the horrors they saw. Since they don’t even answer our calls at Facebook anymore, the easiest thing is to go there. In Paris, their offices are on the top two floors of this building. And the boss of the social network in France is Laurent Soli. I’m Élise Lucet, Cash Investigation. We would like to meet Laurent Soli. So, No, we have been sending emails for over a month. And we actually wanted a meeting. You tell him it’s important. Thank you so much. That’s very nice. Owl ! We will be able to wait in the pretty green armchairs while waiting for Laurent Soli. Ah, it’s moving! Oh well no, it’s not him. Hello Sir ! Yes quite ! Yes but sir, it’s been a month, almost a month and a half now since we wrote to this specific address. So if you like, what we have difficulty understanding is that the communications director told us: “We understand, it’s important, we are paying very particular attention to your request.” And now, for ten days, no one has answered us. There, obviously, everyone has been playing dead for ten days. No, I’m not saying it’s forbidden. I’m simply saying that out of a desire to offer Facebook the possibility of a contradictory position, it’s important that we give them a voice. We gave him time for this, 5 weeks is not 5 minutes. No, but do you work on Facebook communications? We will never know the name of Laurent Solly’s guardian angel. But since we’re here, we’re still enjoying the comfortable green armchairs a little. And we wait in the hall. Okay, so we’ll try sending them a Facebook message. We never know. Sending a Facebook message to people at Facebook isn’t stupid, right? A little thumbs up. Ah yes, a little inch. We send ? With a nice photo. We really thought he was going to pick up the phone eventually, Mr. Solly. Instead… We received an email from the communications manager to explain to us how Facebook, with its partners, pays close attention to the well-being of content moderators on its platform, which is a top priority. For us, our top priority is always the interview with Laurent Solly, the boss of Facebook France. Three months after our first request, it is on display in the Playel room, to play the melody of perfect understanding between Facebook and the media. The company, and the company has said it and written it, is very concerned about the place of the media, their role in society, their role in democratic societies. We believe, as you see, in the diversity of media, in this biodiversity. More than believing it, I am delighted to be able to tell you that here, at least for my company, we are doing it concretely in France. THANKS. Lulled by this sweet music, we try our luck at the exit, as he leaves the room. He arrives, stays a little hidden… He arrives there. Ah, he’s there. Ah well, he turns around. He doesn’t like the media, actually. Hello Mr. Solly! Mr Solly, hello, this is Élise Lucet, Cash Investigation. Hello, we are doing a survey on content moderation. And we met your content moderators for Facebook. Some suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and others have after-effects years after working for you. You are the boss of Facebook, you are faced with employees who work for your content moderation. I don’t want to answer you face to face about this method. That’s all. No, but neither do we! We would like to do a face-to-face interview with you, calmly. We answered you on that, madam. I have lunch ma’am, I’m sorry. At Facebook, content moderation is closed. And too bad for the invisible cleaners of social networks. Before leaving, some news from the sector. While the little hands work in the shadows, business continues for the giants of the new economy. While Amazon is looking to acquire a share of Deliveroo, Uber Eats is getting into football by becoming a partner of Ligue 1 and OM. A few weeks after our filming in the United States, Lukas Biewald, the boss of Figure Eight, sold his company for 300 million dollars. At least now he has a good reason to laugh. Good evening Bérangère Couillard, you are a La République en marche MP and you are rapporteur of the bill which aims in particular to change the status of these platform workers. You have of course heard about this vote which caused a lot of noise last week, it was in the United States, in California to be exact, where the Senate approved a bill which aims to reclassify self-employed workers as employees. Honestly, if it’s confirmed it would be a revolution, right? Indeed, it will be a revolution because these are independent workers who normally have to work independently. But what do you think about it? I think that this is not what independent workers want. I met them at length. I am the mobility rapporteur, you talked about it. I did 80 hours of auditions, I met all the actors. The representatives… But you think they are against being called employees? The vast majority, I assure you, want to remain independent, but want to be able to do things independently. Barbara Gomes, thank you also for being with us on this set. You are a specialist in labor law. You know the issue very, very well because you wrote a thesis on it. You are a PC parliamentary collaborator. Do you consider today that California is leading the way? She has been leading the way in this area for a while now. This is the first state where we had a ruling which rightly considered that a VTC driver was not an independent worker. She worked for Uber, She led the way. with a ruling from the Supreme Court. And today, it is leading the way with specific legislation. But what do you think of what Bérangère Couillard says? The majority of self-employed workers wish to remain so, and do not want to be employed. I think there is a distinction to be made between independence and autonomy. These workers want autonomy. And this is a demand that is not specific to independents. Employees also know autonomy very well. On the other hand, independence is something else. And I think that’s a distinction that needs to be made. Bérangère Couillard, you tabled a text in Parliament which was voted on a few days ago to change the status of these precarious workers. Am I wrong or are we really very, very far from what is being decided at the moment in California? We’re not very far. The reality is that what independent workers want is to be able to be free to work when they want and how they want. So in fact, the only thing is that we allow them to do it thanks to the law. We allow them to have a right to disconnect, a right to refuse a ride, which they did not have. not the opportunity to do so because the platforms were actually putting pressure on drivers and delivery people. So the law will allow these drivers to regain their freedom. Does this mean that specifically, you are asking that the platforms cannot terminate? to a delivery person’s contract because he refused a ride, for example? Exactly, these were things that were applied, it is unacceptable. The platforms put pressure on the drivers and told them, for example, after five refused journeys, they would simply be kicked out of the platform. But in this text of law, you also propose that the platforms inform the delivery people of their remuneration before the journey. Well, we have done our investigation, this is sometimes already the case in fact. So we say to ourselves that this is progress in small steps. No, very few, because in fact, there were still a lot of delivery people or drivers who did not know the amount of their fare and who also did not know the destination. And today, I don’t know a craftsman who doesn’t know the price of the service he is going to perform, the cost of the work he is going to carry out. So, this is something that was expected from drivers and delivery people. Barbara Gomes, enshrining this in the law, is this progress or are these small steps? We are dealing with platforms. who always fire people as they wish when they are not satisfied. This is still happening today. They exercise power over these workers. The real way to put an end to this is simply to apply the law, namely no dismissal, and therefore no breach of contract, without real and serious cause. And I don’t see the point in setting up some form of intermediary system that says, there you go, by charter, if you like, it would be nice not to deactivate them for no reason. In your bill, Bérangère Couillard, you also propose that platforms establish charters for their delivery people. What exactly will these charters be used for? So, there is a charter which was proposed in the bill which was tabled by the minister, therefore Elisabeth Borne at the time, which therefore brings new rights, the possibility in fact that the platforms bring rights new. Which ? For example, having mutual insurance. social rights, and this will also define very important points. To have in particular the criteria which can define the end of a contract. We were talking about it earlier. Criteria which will be defined, which will be approved by the Ministry of Labor. The possibility also of having the criteria for connection. We will surely talk about algorithmic management, it is a subject that we absolutely need to look into. That is to say, basically, the delivery people are aware of what exactly is in the algorithm that directs them. In fact, there you have it, the connection, how is the connection made between the platform and the driver or the delivery person? And the delivery person or drivers will be able to have, if you want, the history, to have their profile and to know the rating too, because they are rated by the platforms, you have to know that. Because we have read the bill, we see working conditions improving, preventing professional risks to which workers may be exposed, sharing information. and dialogue between the platform and the workers, but we say to ourselves that it is a list of good intentions, it is very vague in fact. This is not a list of good intentions, because for example, we are talking about risk prevention. When you see the number of accidents that have occurred in recent years, you have in particular cyclists, delivery people who have died on bicycles, these are things that must absolutely be avoided. Today, platforms must take their responsibilities and inform and train their delivery people or their drivers in the case of butter. But do you really think that these charters will be used for that? I mean, will there be an obligation? Are these not good intentions? In fact, in any case, the main players, we will say market leaders, have already committed to implementing these charters. So in any case, the entire sector will put these charters in place. Barbara Gomes, what do you think of these charters? You are undoubtedly familiar with the professions of freelance journalist, model and VRPC. These professions experience great autonomy in the way they work. There are not necessarily mandatory days on which you have to work. This is a very variable event. Why not offer this autonomy to workers? Everything already exists. Labor law is in reality extremely modern, extremely flexible. So, having a charter which is in reality to take away rights from workers, because the court of cassation is formal, once again, they are employees. So, from that moment on, a law which does not allow labor law to be applied to them is a law which is intended not to apply these provisions to them for political and ideological reasons, as we have seen . saw in the report. Christophe Degryse will join us on this set. Good evening, thank you for being with us. You are responsible for the prospective unit at the European Trade Union Institute. And it’s very interesting because you are observing the evolution of the status of these 3.0 workers, but not only in France, throughout Europe. The platforms, as we have said, affirm that the majority of these workers, these bicycle delivery men, want to remain independent workers, do not want to be employees. Is this what you are checking everywhere in Europe? First of all, what we see is that the case law which is gradually developing today in the different countries of the European Union is extremely contradictory. So we have courts which say that these workers are independent, indeed. Other courts which say that these workers are… must in any case be considered as employees, because they are in a relationship of subordination and economic dependence. For the moment, we don’t really have an answer. So it’s actually blurry. It remains extremely vague. I think there is a very interesting initiative led by a platform in Denmark, which gives its workers a choice. after having worked for 100 hours on the platform, to choose the status of independent or employee. And what is the result? And I couldn’t tell you the result, because it was a test phase, so it will be evaluated in a year. But what is interesting is that the platform leaves you with a choice. Quite frankly, if bike couriers, those we talked about in our survey, became employees, wouldn’t that call into question the business model of these companies like Uber Eats or Deliveroo? Uber went public. Last spring, in the IPO prospectus, Uber announced as a risk for potential investors in the platform the fact that… Uber workers, Uber drivers could be reclassified as salaried workers. Which, in this case, would pose a threat to Uber investors. Bérangère Couillard, is n’t your priority to preserve these jobs too? Of course, there are 40,000 jobs affected in France. So at some point, we must be able to preserve them, but not at any cost. And so what I want is for them to sit around the table, and moreover the law provides for it, there is a discussion phase which takes place during… A year between partners, because the reality today is that the so-called representative unions do not represent these employees. Not yet, we’ll talk about it. Not yet, not yet. And so, they need to sit around the table, to review a little bit how they can set up professional representation, and therefore to negotiate for improvements in their working conditions. Barbara Gomes , do you have the impression that there is employment blackmail on the part of these platforms? We are evolving, yes, but slowly, because otherwise, we could throw out 40,000 people. Already, there are no jobs. Things need to be clear. There is an activity, there is a job, but there is no job. Because employment is work which gives access to a status, which gives access to protection against dismissal, which gives access to leave, which gives access to social protection and work accidents, to work accident compensation. That ‘s called employment. Today, we have people who work without having access to employment, that is to say categories of people who we find completely normal to leave in a category of under-employed, if not sub-citizens. That ‘s important to say. Self-employed people will enjoy being underemployed because according to you they don’t have a job. Ah but I love being self-employed, it feels great to be independent. Independent workers, self-employed, they have a job. When we control the market, when we make our own decisions about what we do, when we do it, when we negotiate this stop, this is not the case. This is what we will allow by law. And so today, what is fantastic is that we have people who are said to be independent but who have nothing to do with independence. This is what we allow by law. You do not highlight everything we do in this mobility law. you remain attached to employment. Forgive me, question to all three of you to close this debate. Some economists say today that the employment contract as it exists today is the 20th century, today we are in the 21st century, so it is over, and that we must evolve towards much more flexible contracts which could be closer to these contracts for independent workers. What do you think, Barbara Gomes? I think this is a process that is in no way technical, legal, but political. Labor law is effective, it is modern, it is flexible, it allows great adaptations, really, to each party. It’s not from the 20th century. It is not from the 20th century, it was in the 20th century, it will be, it is also a right of the future, it is the right of the employment relationship which governs the relationship between a person who depends on another to survive, who is his subordinate, and the person who makes him work, organizes his schedule. Today, the employment contract, the trial that we put against it, is precisely its protective vocation, because, really, we heard it in the report, the idea is how we go about being able to exploiting people for nothing, with a minimal price, always with the idea of ​​putting them aside when we no longer need them. And that’s what labor law doesn’t allow, and that’s what’s disturbing. Christophe Degryse? In certain countries, attempts have been made to create a third status, the status of self-employed employee. So, we held a major conference with the University of Bordeaux a few months ago, and we heard testimonies from lawyers who came to say that it was not a solution, it did not resolve the problems. It does not work. I do not think that the question of reforming labor law with the creation of new statutes would necessarily be the solution to this question. On the other hand, if I may add one point, I think that one of the truly fundamental questions is that of the introduction of collective bargaining in the platforms. Collective bargaining for social dialogue exists in all sectors of economic activity in the European Union. There are social dialogue committees in all sectors, but not in the platform economy. So that would really be necessary. I think we need to bring social dialogue into the platforms through the door or through the window. Bérangere Couillard. Yes, I think that the Labor Code is not at all obsolete. It will continue and I agree with Ms Gomes on this subject. On the other hand, you have to know how to modify it with will, but also with a trembling hand, because it is important to make the right decisions. And I agree with Mr. Degryse on the fact that it is absolutely necessary that discussions take place between the parties in order to achieve good representation. This is precisely the whole subject of the mobility law. Thank you to all three of you for coming to our set. Before leaving, some information. You can find the long interview given by our journalist Sandrine Rigaud to our colleagues at UN, which devotes, you see their issue, to the new proletarian of the web. This is of course in partnership with Cash Investigation. It hits the newsstands tomorrow and I believe that Barbara Gomes, you participated in it too. So thank you very much, that’s the end of this show. We will meet again very soon for a new investigation. But the evening continues. with a documentary dedicated, listen carefully, to virility. Excellent end of the evening on France 2, thank you, good evening.