A new database developed by the news outlet Documented examines the chronic issue of wage theft in immigrant communities. In a conversation with co-host Maryam Ahmad, one of Documented's reporters, Lam Thuy Vo explains how the project grew out of conversations with the communities she reports on.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Sam Dingman: Maryam, you made an interesting discovery today.
Ahmad: I did! So, Documented is an outlet whose work I've been following for a while. They're an outlet focused on immigrant communities in particular. While most of their coverage is often New York City-based, they also cover issues across the state, whether it's labor issues impacting immigrant farm workers, or immigration courts, or just changing policies overall.
So, they've had this database called the Wage Theft Monitor for years now, resulting from a lot of community discussions on the issues facing the immigrant community: one of which was wage theft, especially for undocumented immigrants. But this week Documented has relaunched it as the Business Monitor, which has now expanded to include workplace safety and health violations, along with wage theft cases. It's this big map and database that you can go through. It's very interactive. I spoke to Lam Thuy Vo, an investigative reporter and data journalist at Documented, and she said she hopes this reporting brings more attention to labor issues for immigrants rather than immigration enforcement actions.
Vo: As the news cycle continues to focus largely on immigration enforcement, which of course is important, but is not the only thing that impacts people, the Business Monitor hopefully pushes forward the topic of labor and the topic of immigrants needing to get paid for the labor that they do, and so hopefully this particular project puts pressure on businesses to do better and puts pressure on lawmakers to also continue to pay attention to the subject.
Dingman: A really critical distinction there between these types of stories about this issue. What exactly is in the Business Monitor database?
Ahmad: So the map, which is all of New York State, relies on reports and data from the New York State Department of Labor and from the Federal Occupation and Health Safety Administration. Lam spent months going through the data and combing through it, and she said interestingly, the businesses who had the most issues with wage theft were really of all kinds.
Vo: It can be a dim sum restaurant that owes laborers money because they didn't pay them for their meal breaks, or so. It could also be a franchise that we all know, Dunkin' Donuts, is very prominent in the database, right? And so it's an interesting thing to see it so widespread among a lot of working class professions. And so I think what's important for us to think about is that some of the people who already earn the least amount of money might be impacted, particularly by this type of wage theft.
Dingman: So, Maryam, you mentioned that Lam spent months going through this data. Was there anything in particular that really stuck out to her the most?
Ahmad: You know, Sam, she did say something very interesting, not necessarily about the data itself, but the conception of the database. The map came about as a result of a community needs assessment the outlet did, basically engaging with immigrant New Yorkers and asking them what they thought were the most important issues they were facing as a community. And Lam said, in the age of digital platforms and news outlets running now, on the Internet and on websites, the building of the Business Monitor, in particular, was an example to her of the importance of community engagement by journalists.
Vo: There's an importance in rebuilding a relationship with people and with audiences that builds accountability on our end as well. That means we have to be accountable to the people that we cover, and not just try to get traffic from random places, from random people on the Internet who find our stories. And so, I do hope and believe that this model of doing an information needs assessment, or doing a community priorities assessment, is a way of opening that door again.
Dingman: You know, that is such a fascinating point that Lam is making, Maryam, because I mean, it is true that digital tools make it possible for local journalism to travel in ways that are unprecedented when we think back to previous eras of media. At the same time, working with, manipulating those tools often requires sitting at your desk, not being out in the community talking to people.
Ahmad: Right, exactly, and also in a slightly unexpected turn, we also discussed AI and how she thinks that the existence of AI — and the fact that, you know, there are these AI news summaries that exist on our browsers and this reliance on traffic for news websites — she thinks that the existence of AI proves the further importance of journalists as people directly connecting with the communities they cover.
In that same vein, I also posed a question to her because she had to spend so much time going through this data and combing through it, making sure it was all classified correctly: Why comb through all this data when hypothetically you could have an AI program do it for you?
Here's her answer:
Vo: An AI is a statistical, probabilistic machine, and it will just use what the most prominent code is, the most prominent question asked. And when you're serving an audience that's very specific, and when you're serving an audience that is very marginalized and oftentimes not part of the mainstream conversation, part of the main text that is being used to to train AI, then it is even more imperative that you stand in as you're going through this, to then say "this is important to immigrants, this is important to immigrants, and this is important to immigrants."
Dingman: That's a very interesting example of the thing we often hear about AI, which is that it's very good at looking for patterns. It's not necessarily good at curating information.
Ahmad: Right, editorial judgment was something that was very important to Lam in going through this because she knows the community she's reporting on, when it comes to specific locations or specific restaurants, it was something that she thought was very important to curate and go through.
Dingman: So this Business Monitor project clearly took a very long time. A lot of very significant revelations came out of it. What is she looking to report on next?
Ahmad: So Lam said she's hoping to dig into the data they've collected more. Part of the reporting they've done already has been on safety for hospital workers, in particular. That's kind of why this became an umbrella of including workplace injuries and safety concerns. She's also following this, [which] I found very interesting, what she called "algorithmically managed jobs," particularly for gig workers, where essentially an algorithm is designating the work, and this is specifically for like delivery workers, Uber drivers.
And she said this would impact specifically immigrants who are often gig workers who use it kind of as an entry point into the economy.
Vo: It's also coming for nursing now. There's like a lot of people who are trying to bring algorithmic oversight to nursing and assign nurses to different places using algorithms. And I think what's interesting is that labor law is there to protect you. But what if you don't have a boss? What if your boss is not a person but a statistical machine?
Dingman: "What if your boss is not a person but a statistical machine?" That is reporting that is relevant, obviously, to immigrant communities and increasingly to all communities.
Ahmad: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the specific aspect of Lam focusing on immigrant communities and when it comes to labor was very striking, and I'm curious to see what else comes out of this Business Monitor.
