WORK
The Muldoon Study
The 2023 AI & Society peer-reviewed study — by James Muldoon, Callum Cant, Mark Graham, and Funda Ustek Spilda — that documented how Sama's conditions after Janah's death contradicted the principles Samasource had been founded on, and identified the countervailing institutional pressures required to sustain dignified digital labor.
The Muldoon study is the most rigorous academic examination of what happened to the organization Janah founded after her death. Based on fieldwork at three of Sama's East African delivery centers, the study documented conditions that included wages of approximately two dollars per hour to workers while the outsourcing firm billed up to twelve dollars per hour to clients including OpenAI and Meta, insecure employment, tightly disciplined labor management, gender-based exploitation, and inadequate support for content moderators exposed to traumatic material. The study's significance for the You On AI Field Guide is structural: it provides the empirical test case for the claim that institutional commitments require continuous human stewardship to survive market pressure, and it identifies the specific countervailing institutional forces — organized workers, civil society oversight, regulation — required to sustain dignified labor when individual leadership is insufficient.
