Open letter to President Biden from tech workers in Kenya

"Open letter to President Biden from tech workers in Kenya" is a 97-signatory open letter published on 22 May 2024 by Nairobi-based data labellers, content moderators, and AI workers employed through outsourcing arrangements with Meta/Facebook, OpenAI, ScaleAI, and Remotasks, hosted on the website of Foxglove and timed for the Kenyan state visit at which President Joe Biden and President William Ruto announced a US–Kenya Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership. The letter is co-signed by 72 named workers and 25 anonymous signatories, endorsed by Dr Willy Mutunga, former Chief Justice of Kenya, and was cc'd to US Trade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai. The signature grievance line — "Our working conditions amount to modern day slavery" — anchors the letter's central argument that US Big Tech companies' outsourced content-moderation and AI-training labour in Kenya operates outside the conditions that the same companies would be required to meet at home.

Argument and demands

The letter's opening framing is structural: "US Big Tech companies are systematically abusing and exploiting African workers. In Kenya, these US companies are undermining the local labor laws, the country's justice system and violating international labor standards." The grievance is described in concrete terms — workers describe moderating content involving "murder and beheadings, child abuse and rape, pornography and bestiality, often for more than 8 hours a day" for less than $2 per hour, without adequate mental-health support, with PTSD outcomes that recurring Foxglove case-monitoring data later corroborated at 100% of the workforce tested. The letter situates these conditions inside two specific recent events. First, Meta's content-moderation workforce in Kenya was dismissed en masse after attempting to organise — a sequence that became the Foxglove-supported litigation arc covering Daniel Motaung's individual case and the parallel 185-moderators mass-dismissal challenge. Second, in March 2024 ScaleAI's outsourcing partner Remotasks exited the Kenyan market without notice, leaving its data-labelling workforce unpaid for completed work.

Against that backdrop the letter makes four numbered demands of the US administration. First, that the Biden administration commit to engaging with workers in Big Tech supply chains during the US–Kenya trade negotiations and publish draft negotiation texts so that affected workers can scrutinise them. Second, that any strategic trade agreement include provisions preventing union busting, require compliance with the core conventions of the International Labour Organisation, and establish enforcement mechanisms with real consequences for breach. Third, that US courts be enabled to hold Big Tech companies accountable for labour and human-rights violations arising from their operations abroad. Fourth, that Kenya's constitutional sovereignty guide all aspects of the partnership negotiation, including the recognition that Kenyan workers' rights are not subordinate to the trade architecture being constructed above their heads.

The signature framings carry the same posture into individual register. The letter's lead spokesperson Kauna Ibrahim Malgwi, a Nigerian former Sama content moderator, frames the asks not as redistribution but as workplace dignity: "Everyone wants to see more jobs in Kenya – but not at any cost. All we are asking for is dignified, fairly paid work that is safe and secure." Joan Kinyua, a long-serving data labeller who would the following February co-found the Data Labellers Association as its founding president, frames the trade-negotiation demand directly to the addressee: "use your power to ensure protections for digital gig workers like us are baked into this new trade partnership."

Signatories and organising lineage

The 72 named signatories are drawn from the Nairobi-based African AI supply chain that runs through Sama, Majorel, Teleperformance, and Remotasks on the moderation and data-labelling sides. Among the named signatories carried in the corpus are James Oyange, founding committee secretary of the African Content Moderators Union, and Kauna Ibrahim Malgwi, one of the union's founding figures. The roster also includes Joan Kinyua, Richard Mathenge, Mophat Okinyi, Trevin Brownie, and Nathan Nkunzimana — names that recur across the Foxglove-supported Meta litigation, the May 2023 Nairobi summit at which the African Content Moderators Union was founded by a vote of more than 150 Facebook, TikTok, and ChatGPT moderators, and the February 2025 launch of the Data Labellers Association in Nairobi. The signatory base, in other words, is not an ad-hoc coalition assembled for the letter but the public face of the standing Nairobi tech-worker organising infrastructure that the 2022–2024 litigation, summit, and union-formation arc produced; Daniel Motaung, in exile from Kenya, is not among the signatories.

Posture within the corpus

Within the corpus, this is the first publication anchored on the content-moderator and AI-data-labelling worker-organising slice, and it closes the gap between the publications slate's existing reportage anchors on AI labour (the worker-side voices already in the corpus through the African Content Moderators Union, the Data Labellers Association, and the Africa Tech Workers Movement) and the publication-side artefact through which those workers themselves directly addressed a head of state. It complements the Authors Guild and Artists 4 Safe AI open letters on the publications slate — both letters by professional creators about generative-AI training-data harms — with a structurally distinct register: a letter by AI-supply-chain workers about the conditions under which the AI products that those creators object to are produced. Where pub-authors-guild-open-letter-on-ai-2023 addresses six Big Tech CEOs from the consumer-creator side, this letter addresses the US head of state from the labour-supply side of the same systems, naming the same companies (Meta, OpenAI) from underneath rather than from across.

The letter also extends the Foxglove org-as-publisher pattern from the strategic-litigation register, in which Foxglove appears in the corpus through its body of casework, into the publications register, where Foxglove's role is to host and convene a publication whose authorship belongs to the workers themselves. It establishes the structural template the corpus would expect of subsequent worker-led open letters in this register: collective signatory base drawn from the standing organising infrastructure rather than from an ad-hoc roster, named-individual framings drawn from the union's organising spokespeople, and a head-of-state addressee timed to a specific bilateral-negotiation window — here the US–Kenya Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership announced during the May 2024 state visit.