Foxglove’s 2024!
2024 has been a great year for Foxglove and our partners – here is a roundup of our highlights!
Our work is only possible thanks to our supporters. They’ve helped with donations, petition signatures, emails to decision-makers and more. If you’d like to support our work please do so here.
A few of our highlights include:
Challenging Amazon’s union busting in Coventry
2024 was a huge year for Amazon workers in Coventry fighting for better pay and conditions. Together with GMB, we supported strike action, and the vote on whether Amazon should be forced to recognise their trade union.
This battle brought home the sheer size and ruthlessness of Amazon and its billionaire boss Jeff Bezos. Amazon fought a dirty campaign and the vote was lost by the tiniest of margins – 49.5% in favour, 50.5% against, which was 27 votes.
It’s hard to imagine Amazon would have won if they’d played fair. That’s why we launched a legal challenge with over 900 Amazon workers challenging Amazon’s union busting, specifically their one-click-to-leave-the-union QR code. We’re in court on that case in May.
Together with thousands of you, we also called for the new Labour government to change the law to prevent a repeat of some of the dirty tricks. This was a success – the legal changes should now go through.
Challenging the environmental impact of Big Tech & AI
Supporters ranked challenging the immense and growing environmental damage of Big Tech as a new priority in our last supporter survey (another one of those surveys will be coming soon!).
We agree, and we’ve been focused on Big Tech “data centres”, which suck up huge amounts of power and water. In the UK, the new Labour government seems a bit obsessed with building more data centres as a way to promote economic growth. They’ve announced a massive expansion of data centres across the UK, with Amazon set to build £8bn-worth of them.
We’ve been challenging the idea that ordinary people will see any economic benefit from Big Tech covering the country in data centres. And we’ve been demanding stringent environmental standards are applied.
We kicked this work off yesterday with submissions to a datacentre planning Inquiry in Buckinghamshire. You can read Foxglove and our partners Global Action Plan’s submissions here.
We argue the developers failed to provide enough information about the environmental impact of the data centre and challenged their vague details on the ‘environmental benefits’ promised to the public – as well as lack of concrete measures to hold the developers to account.
Protecting NHS data from privatisation
In 2024 we kept fighting to protect NHS data as a public asset despite the award of the Federated Data Platform to spy-tech firm Palantir. We scrutinised the operation of the Palantir contract, and also turned our attention to the new incoming Labour government. We argued that a new government should mean a new approach to NHS data, which respects patients’ privacy and protects NHS data as a public asset.
Labour announced a “national conversation” on the future of the NHS, including NHS data. Given that Foxglove and partners had to sue the last government for failing to consult the public, a “national conversation” appears to be a welcome change of direction.
On the other hand, the Health Secretary has also said he wants to “work hand in hand with the life sciences sector” when making use of NHS data. And a murky new law, announced a couple of months ago, contains some worrying clauses which could loosen the rules on patient data being shared with private companies without consent. We’ve been working with lawmakers on this issue and more on that soon!
Challenging the size and power of Big Tech
Whether it’s the way they treat their workers, neglecting the safety of their users, or trashing the environment, one of the underlying issues with Big Tech companies is that they are just too big. Being big gives them immense power, and they abuse that power to harm.
Turning the tide on abuses by Big Tech means challenging the size of these mega-corporations. In many cases they need breaking up. They certainly shouldn’t be allowed to get any bigger, by hoovering up the competition or extending their tentacles into new sectors.
There have been some glimmers of progress on this front. In the USA, the Biden government was pursuing a series of legal challenges to monopolistic behaviour by Big Tech companies.
The European Commission, and the UK’s Competition and Markets authority, have both shown some signs that they might be starting to catch on. 2024 got off to a great start here, with Amazon being forced to abandon a takeover bid for iRobot, the maker of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners, after Foxglove and others called on the EU to block the deal.
With this work a key priority for Foxglove has been challenging the attempts by Big Tech companies to extend their dominance of the growing AI industry. We’ve made submissions to European and UK regulators demanding scrutiny of AI so-called “partnerships” (AKA power grabs) such as the Microsoft/OpenAI deal and Amazon/Anthropic deal.
Facebook content moderators in Kenya
Foxglove has been standing with moderators who worked at Facebook’s content moderation centre in Nairobi, Kenya, since 2022 – when former Facebook content moderator Daniel Motaung bravely blew the whistle on the terrible conditions there.
Working with incredible Kenyan lawyers at Nzili Sumbii, our partner in Kenya, we’ve supported moderators to take legal action against Facebook and its outsourcing companies. The aim of these cases is to force Facebook to take responsibility for improving the pay and conditions of its content moderation workforce around the world, and to secure justice for moderators who’ve been subjected to union-busting, discrimination, and unfair dismissal.
In all of our cases against Meta, they try to argue again and again that they’re a US company and shouldn’t be held to account in the Kenyan courts.
In September, we had a big win when the Court of Appeal rejected Facebook’s arguments and said our case supporting 185 unfairly sacked moderators and Daniel Motaung can now move forwards.
We hope that 2025 will be the year that these brave moderators finally see justice in Kenya. Foxglove is ready to support them all the way – and to make sure that the impact of their work is felt by Big Tech’s content moderators all over the world.
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