CONCEPT
Living Wage Commitment
Janah's operational insistence that living wages are quality strategy — that paying workers enough to live with dignity produces better output, lower turnover, and more sustainable client relationships than the race-to-the-bottom logic dominating the outsourcing industry.
The living wage commitment was load-bearing for the entire Samasource model. Janah argued, against the economic orthodoxy of the global outsourcing industry, that competing on lowest cost was not merely ethically problematic but operationally foolish. Workers paid starvation wages produced starvation-quality work. Workers paid enough to live with dignity, to develop professionally, to sustain stable lives, produced the kind of reliable, high-quality, sustained output that client relationships actually required. The argument converted dignity from overhead into strategy. It also converted a moral question into a question about what kind of output the AI industry actually wants to be training its models on — because the data the workers produce is the foundation the models are built on, and poor foundations eventually produce the consequences poor foundations always produce.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The commitment distinguished Samasource operationally from the broader outsourcing and data-labor economy. Industry-standard practice paid data annotators fractional wages that pushed