 Hi everybody, my name's Adrienne. I work for or work with the Distributed AI Research Institute. I'm going to talk to you guys about surveillance and wage theft and forced labor. So wage theft in the US has been estimated to cost workers anywhere from $15 to $50 billion a year. To put that into perspective, robberies cost the US an estimated $500 million in losses in 2019 according to the FBI. Burglaries about $3 billion. Car theft around $6 billion. But politicians cannot stop talking about the rising crime rate in the US. Between 2017 and 2020, only $3.24 billion was recouped on behalf of American workers. Companies are literally doing cost-benefit analysis and realizing that it's cheaper for them to violate the law, even if they get caught, than it is to stop committing the crime. Even the picture in this triangle that I used for this presentation is an example of wage theft, as it was acquired by Starry AI, one of the new AI art generators that uses data labelers from the global south to scrape or more appropriately steal art from artists by way of the internet, who would otherwise be making a profit from their creations? One may conclude that $15 to $50 billion a year figure should be a lot higher, since AI art generators are not calculated into the annual total. Neither are standalone mom and pop businesses or app companies like Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, et cetera. It's very possible that the annual amount is double the estimate, somewhere closer to probably $30 to $100 billion a year. And this is a dismal statistic when you consider the fact that police unleash all manner of brutality to recoup far less on behalf of US corporations. The uprising that resulted from the police killing of George Floyd three years ago was a result of Floyd's alleged defrauding a corner store of a meager $20. So let's talk about, let's take a more micro look at wage theft as it pertains to Amazon delivery drivers. It's important to understand that Amazon drivers are not Amazon employees. They work for third party contractors called delivery service providers or DSPs. They're responsible for leasing their vans from Amazon, legal issues, medical benefits, insurance, workers' compensation, they have minimal control over hiring and firing and zero control over surveillance. Not paying workers for meetings, having them work through meals and breaks, that's a pretty universal kind of wage theft. High-tech surveillance is newer, but it's becoming more prevalent. For the working class being short-changed, this seven to almost $13,000 a year, it's the difference between renting an apartment or renting a room. It determines major life and medical decisions. It really, really matters. The majority of wage theft, the Amazon drivers, oops, lost my place, sorry. So the majority of the wage that the Amazon drivers endure is coming from surveillance, but workers in every industry are being surveilled more and more. White collar, blue collar, really doesn't matter. Surveillance of workers is a growing trend from keystroke logging software to geo-location tracking, social media monitoring to productivity data. Companies are able to keep an eye on every aspect of an employee's life, even the parts that are private, personal and off the clock. Aside from the intrusion, that's data collected and data collected can be monetized. And CEOs feel entitled to all of it, but where's the line? At what point does surveillance become stalking? Why is it imperative that I be on the same financial or class level as a CEO before I'm allowed to call a CEO a criminal? Amazon delivery drivers are surveilled in a number of different ways. So Amazon logoed vans have sensors that track drivers in real time. The rabbit package scanner tracks packages and drivers in real time. Ring doorbells and security systems record anything in their frame of view. Neighbors filming drivers that, that's it, they just film drivers and it's annoying. The mentor app is by a third party company called eDriving, said to be in place for fleet safety. Also the AI powered cameras is also by a third party company called Netrodine, also said to be in place for fleet safety. So some money owed to workers is very tangible. Others not quite as much. The difference between Amazon's required use of the mentor app versus Amazon's required use of the Netrodine cameras is a good way to illustrate the tangible money owed versus the intangible money owed. So the mentor app is downloaded on to a driver's personal phone. If mentor believes a mistake has been made while on route it issues a driver an infraction. Once a driver's hit with an infraction mentor will assign a playlist. A playlist is like a mini lesson between 15 and 30 minutes long with questions or interactive simulations said to be designed to help drivers eliminate bad driving habits. Ignoring playlist is ground for termination even though this is unpaid off the clock homework. So June 2020 mentor did this update that made it so that drivers could only use mentor on their phones if they agreed to allow the app to run in the background at all times. And Amazon will say, well drivers have the option to download mentor onto the rabbit scanner. But Amazon is fully aware that mentor the mentor app is extremely sensitive and putting it on the rabbit scanner dramatically increases the number of playlists thus the amount of wage theft. So the choice becomes one of performing massive amounts of unpaid labor or allowing mentor and by extension Amazon to track you at all times even when you're off work. Amazon has also maintained that mentors for safety but industry peers like FedEx and UPS don't use apps like mentor and have five times less injuries than Amazon drivers. Every time a driver stops hard or swerves sharply the mouth is dry. They are hit with an infraction. I would argue that the time I stopped on a dime because someone's child ran out into the street chasing a ball was not seen as bad driving by that child's parent. Or swerving to avoid a customer's dog was not viewed as an infraction by that pet's owner. Unrealistic delivery expectations are dangerous for the drivers and the community. And so the lawsuits continue to roll in though Amazon tries to push those suits onto DSP owners the community has been trying to hold Amazon directly accountable. More and more Amazon said it is for this reason that they fit in for fleet safety that they have added the Nexrodine AI powered cameras. I argue that their motives are probably not as altruistic. The cameras are set up both inside and outside of the bands. So take in for a second that the first four set of infractions address the driver by name as it informs them that they are guilty of committing one of the first four infractions. Then of the second set of infractions think of how many a driver actually has control over. Drivers don't design their own routes. They have no control over if U-turns will be necessary. How exactly would drowsiness be determined? Concepts like these are extremely subjective. Something as simple as yawning. Yawning is also a way of expelling stress. So a driver under extreme stress whether it be heat or time may be misidentified as drowsy and then hit with multiple infractions during their day. What also has never set well with me is that if you go back to some of the examples that I gave earlier, if the goal of all of this AI surveillance is in fact the safety of drivers, why then when a driver swerves hard or stops fast is the data from the cameras not being used in cooperation with the data from the mentor app to train algorithms as to when it is appropriate and in fact safe to stop hard like when someone's child runs out into the street or when it is safe to swerve sharply like when an animal or a car comes out of nowhere. This triangulation of data exists but is not being used to train delivery driver algorithms to ensure fleet safety. So what then is it training for? According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, forced labor by way of fraud can be determined by the following four characteristics. First, are workers being isolated physically or culturally? So the job itself is isolating, that's kind of a given. However, informational meetings including safety meetings are only given in English but drivers are hired from every culture speaking every language. They do not all speak English yet important meetings are only ever given in English. Second, is the employer taking unexpected deductions from worker pay? We just established the wage theft. Third, do workers appear to be being monitored when talking to or interacting with others? Again, we've established that they are pretty much monitored at all times. Fourth, and this is the big one. Once a worker is working an employer may also force defraud or coerce them into performing work not agreed on at the time of recruitment. So now there is nowhere in Amazon driver's job description or in the Notre Dame consent form where drivers are referred to or described as trainers. Yet AI by the nature of its very being is an entity that must be trained. As it stands now, the founder and CEO of Notre Dame says he is in this business for fleet safety with the goal of reducing long haul trucker turnover. Notre Dame began in 2015 where the trucker turnover was about 82%. Currently it's at 89%, so they're failing. The road to driverless car technology is said to be through a technology called high definition 3D mapping. The first company to create the first worldwide fully established high definition 3D map has pretty much cornered the market on autonomous vehicles. Only two companies are said to be even close as Netrodyn and another company called Mobile Eye. The chief technology officer and co-founder of Netrodyn, however, seems to be less concerned about fleet safety and more preoccupied with autonomous vehicles. In fact, he bragged in an interview that Netrodyn's driverry vision-based driver recognition safety program has captured and analyzed 1 billion minutes of driving video data in 500 million miles, 3D mapping the most US roads in history. Hyundai has a contract deal with Netrodyn to create high definition 3D maps. I guarantee you Hyundai's contract is for far more money than Amazon DSP owner. It makes me wonder if Amazon delivery drivers were aware that they were not just delivering packages but building the foundation for the next multi-billion dollar industry, would they be okay and content with $17 to $20 an hour and zero stock options? Though coercion is not illegal in the US, it is in fact a crime in the UK and signs of coercion help support claims of fraud. So I do believe there's space here for collaboration and strategic planning. So signs of coercion are one, isolating from friends and family, we've kind of already established that, depriving one of basic needs. So drivers being forced to reframe from eating and drinking to avoid using the bathroom. Three, monitoring one's time, we've established that. Four, monitoring one via communication tools and spyware, mentor, Netrodyn, ring systems, rabbit scanners, Amazon vans, neighbors filming. Five, control over one's everyday lives, like where you can go, what you can wear or when you can sleep. Drivers will be fired if they're not wearing an Amazon uniform even though they don't work for Amazon. Unlike UPS and FedEx, whose hours are set, Amazon drivers don't usually come back to their lot until their van is empty. So there were times when I got off work at 8 p.m., there were times when I got off work at 11 30 p.m. Which meant there were times when I went to sleep at 10 p.m. and there were times when I didn't go to sleep till 1 a.m. I had no control over when I got off, when I got home or when I was able to finally go to sleep at night. Six, depriving one of access to support services like medical services. Amazon famously employs their own medical services inside many of their warehouses and forces injured workers to utilize their company doctors. Now that Amazon has purchased one medical, I can only foresee this getting worse. Seven, repeatedly putting one down, referring to them as worthless. They literally refer to us as unskilled workers. So I feel like that's demeaning. And then eight, humiliating, degrading or dehumanizing a person, peeing in bottles, wearing diapers, using food stamps, being on welfare, serving fried chicken and watermelon for Juneteenth. Nine, controlling one's finances. I just think that goes back to wage theft. 10, making threats or intimidating a person. A good example is them threatening drivers with termination for not wanting to deliver in areas that drivers deem are unsafe. So a good example would be saying, I don't wanna go to this secluded area with poor lighting where the signs say I shoot first and ask questions later. I've really gone to those places. You don't wanna deliver there. And 11, just your classic gas lighting for anything that I wanna answer. So AI is the next evolution of our capitalist society, not just in the US, but the world at large. In theory, it'll allow a CEO to grow an entire empire almost nearly alone, but before chatbots can conceivably be our doctors or our kids' teachers, before our food can be cooked by a robot chef and delivered by an autonomous vehicle, every inch of our world, every ounce of information ever created will first be collected. Data labelers will be enticed by big name companies to label everything on earth. They'll sign up on platforms that won't always pay them and will many times be locked out for asking legitimate, clarifying questions. This will further embed the cultural bias coming out of Silicon Valley. Content moderators in Kenya and India will be lured by these same companies with promises of well-paying jobs, only to find out that they're getting paid pennies while the constant exposure to images of suicide, abuse, and violence leaves them with severe mental health issues. So I say let's call this what it is. Fraud, coercion, human trafficking, forced labor. It's a worldwide problem. And as researchers, we have to be willing to speak the truth when we dig it up and then hold our leaders accountable to protect every community, not just our own. After all, if this is what California's response was to shoplifting, imagine what could be accomplished if we forced them to admit the true nature of our current CEO class. Thank you. Thank you so much for that great talk. We do have time for questions. We have about three minutes. So what's your advice for users? Like, don't use Amazon, so what do you think? I mean, I think that shit is sales because it's really hard sometimes. There's times when I've tried to like look things up on Amazon and then go to the company and try to buy it directly from the company and the company would be like, go buy this on Amazon. Yeah. You know, it's really hard. You could start there. When I was still driving for Amazon, I would tell my customers and the customer notes to write stuff to the drivers, like unionize now or this. First of all, drivers can't unionize. You have to be an Amazon employee first before you can unionize. And the DSP owners in their contracts haven't written that their workers can't unionize or they'll pull their contracts. So it's a really tricky thing. I'm really more about policy and making our government do their job because for many countries, like in the US, the DSP model is actually illegal. But our policy makers and our politicians are chicken shit. So it's really their problem and their fault. But how do you light a fire under them to make them fix it? Drivers can't do it. And the Amazon employees can't do it. They have the least resources, the least money, the least time, the least pull. I would talk to anybody that you know that works there. I would talk to any policy makers that you know. Anybody that has any power, that's where I would start because the workers can't do it. Thanks for sharing your story. I don't know if you'll notice because it sounds like you're all very isolated. Well, when you were driving, you were all very isolated from each other. But do you think that there's any way to tell how much support there would be for more enforcement, for more regulation? Because the companies seem to be very good in these sort of gig economies of spinning this stuff to workers to make them believe that this is a threat to their jobs and they need to support the companies against enforcement or regulation. So do you see any way through that or to even know what's going on? I don't know. I know in California gig workers did so much work and they got the AB5 passed and then DoorDash and Lyft and everybody pieced up and put billions of dollars into killing or pushing through Prop 22. And I think that goes back to saying workers can't really do it because who can fight that? Nobody has that much money and they convinced all these other organizations like the NAACP to support them instead of single black moms that are driving for DoorDash who actually need you to support them. And so it really comes down to being a money issue. It's still kind of in the courts but it's, I mean all these depressing answers because it's like, I don't have some. It's like a money issue. And so that's why I always say put pressure on these politicians and if you have even one person that you know that's in power, put your finger on them and make them do something right because I have friends that have burnt out so badly. I have friends that have been docs. I have friends that are getting death threats and people don't take that as seriously as they should have. I think people romanticize organizing and they romanticize grassroots stuff and it's like, oh my God, it's so amazing. You guys are wonderful. And it's like, no, this shit is scary and I'm tired. So. We have time for one more question. Okay, I have a question. Yeah. So you mentioned that some of the stuff is illegal here and that some of it's also illegal in the UK. Has the UK been more successful in enforcing policies or is the situation better there? Do you know? Well, the coercion and forced labor thing is brand new. Like I haven't even been able to discuss this with anybody yet. So I'm hoping to start talking to people out there and just kind of use this as an angle because I don't think it's gonna fly in the US yet. And my hope is that if I can talk to somebody in the UK and they can be like, well, this is actually illegal out here so that'll be a pressure point. We'll see and if they maybe can force them to say, well, if you're not their boss technically, then this part is illegal. So at the very least, if you're not their boss then you can't force them to use this surveillance. And I know it's just a little piece, but at least it's something to give these small business owners some ownership over their own businesses. Cause right now it's not really a business. I compare it to like modern day sharecropping, right? Because you lease your vans from Amazon. Amazon can fire your employees. You get only Amazon packages. And if you say anything that Amazon doesn't like, they yank your contracts. And now you're underwater cause you have vans that you still owe money on. You have no packages to deliver. You have employees that you have to pay. You essentially don't even have a business informed. So my hope is that by working with the UK, even if they can make moves that we can't in the US that'll help to move the needle a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe have some ripple effect. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you so much for the answer and thank you for the great talk. We have another round of applause. Thank you.