Idea: free market employment

[Aerozord]

So supply and demand in its truest sense is rarely applicable. It requires uniformity thats simply not in most products and services. The other aspect is accessibility.

Now job hunting sucks for all involved. Employees need to waste huge amounts of time filling out applications, taking tests, waiting on calls, ect. Employers need to sift through sometimes thousands of applications, hundreds of interviews, all just to hire a few people. I then got to thinking of a potential new way to do this. With the internet your ability to do many jobs from your home has become a reality. There are also jobs of relatively basic skills that are more about man-hours than quality. QA testing, scripting, telemarketing, customer service, ect.

My idea is to set up something more akin to an online auction house than traditional employment. Telemarketing for example. You toss all the jobs into a giant pool. People can then sit down, and simply decide to work. Given a brief explanation of their task, work however many hours they want. Then simply stop. Wage is determined by a free market model. If they want more workers than they need to increase wages to entice more people.

For the employee this has several psychological advantages. It is low stress, the market is always there and always hiring, long as you aren't strapped for cash you can wait for it to get high enough for you to work. If you are desperate you can just jump on at whatever the amount is and plug away. Humans also have a 'grinding' compulsion. We see it alot in games, just instead of grinding work for virtual gold you get real money. If its ever too much you can just walk away with no consequence beyond not getting more money.

There are of course lots of issues with this. You need some oversight system so you know people are actually working, and a way to easily get people to a base level of work. Maybe a virtual profile that adjusts your pay from the standard market price based on experience and performance. As well as the issue of things like healthcare being tied to employment.

Still I think its an interesting concept worth considering

[Menarker]

A few off-hand queries to ask: (Questions are rushed as I'm feeling groggy)


1) For jobs done on the computer, this could be fairly plausible, but what about tasks that need a person present? Let's take a super market for example. What determines who becomes the cashier, the packer, stocker or just rejected due to lack of space? What about trades which require a certain degree of training like construction?

2) How would your system hypothetically work for jobs/tasks that need to be done yet no one really wants to do? (Like Garbage-disposal). Would wages for those jobs increases as the increased need for it arises and then decreases as people start doing them?
This one in particular would give rise to a hectic society of jack of all trades since you can't rely on your one job to give you stable pay for any mildly long period of time, and the high paying jobs are probably the crappy ones because few people want to put up with that work.

3) What about companies that emphasize information security? Like how certain company operations/policies should not be shared, and hence why some companies have has a hiring requirement that you can't work for one of their rivals for some time after you worked for them due to conflict of interests.

4) How would this work for jobs that require a long-term commitment just to perform the job properly? Like game developer team or a teacher? Those individuals probably wouldn't lead to good results if they were swapped in and out or had multiple and possibly conflicting work styles with their also new co-workers. Kinda like competing to convince the team that your idea has more merit than the other.

5) For that matter, how would this work for jobs where your job is to assume responsibility for another living thing like a child or pet? (Like the teacher example above)

This idea seems interesting but would need a bit more elaboration. Otherwise it seems to lead to a "too many cooks spoil the soup" thing.

And why do I feel like this sound like this could be a reenactment of the plot of Bioshock?

[Aerozord]

This isn't to replace all jobs, just some of them. There aren't too many now, but I bet the number will increase. Like when tele-opperation becomes possible for jobs like trash pick up and various maintenance jobs. I know that answers alot of your questions but I'll get to the others that are still applicable

2) How would your system hypothetically work for jobs/tasks that need to be done yet no one really wants to do? (Like Garbage-disposal). Would wages for those jobs increases as the increased need for it arises and then decreases as people start doing them?

Pretty much yes. Now when you start your work the wage is locked for as long as you are working, but once you stop its whatever the current market price is. There would need to be limitations and perhaps "close prices" to discourage people from marathoning 20 hours at a high price. This does have some nice self regulating, times people dont want to work like holidays and weekends will have a smaller supply thus the wage will increase.

This one in particular would give rise to a hectic society of jack of all trades since you can't rely on your one job to give you stable pay for any mildly long period of time, and the high paying jobs are probably the crappy ones because few people want to put up with that work.

I dont see how this is a bad thing. The entire point is this requires little to no skill. You can only be so skilled at telemarketing. So why not pick up lots of skills and experience. Not sure about on a resume but a person that was a QA tester, de-bugger, garbage collector, and telemarketer sounds like a much better life then someone thats worked solidly in fast food for years. The jobs all suck but atleast they are varied.

Also yes, the crappy jobs will pay better. As they should, because those jobs suck.

3) What about companies that emphasize information security? Like how certain company operations/policies should not be shared, and hence why some companies have has a hiring requirement that you can't work for one of their rivals for some time after you worked for them due to conflict of interests.

kind of a give and take. Really high end security like information security would stay as is. Though this does have options if applied to large scale systems. Like if you are working on scripting a computer program. On one sufficiently large the specific part you are working on is such a relatively small piece its not a big deal. If you can work a way to ensure work for monitoring video security, only getting a few camera feeds out of hundreds and not being able to select which specific thing you are looking after makes abuse difficult. Of course if I'm wrong you can just not use this method, not like I'm saying it should be the one and only way of doing employment.

[synkr0nized]

Have you ever looked into Timebanking? It's not quite what you seem to be after, but it sounds like you might like what time bank communities have to offer.

[Osterbaum]

How about parecon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics)? It's got the part similar to your idea about compensation for 'effort and sacrifice', plus a bunch of other aspects allowing for the creation of a classless society.

Compensation for effort and sacrifice

Albert and Hahnel argue that it is inequitable and ineffective to compensate people on the basis of their birth or heredity. Therefore, the primary principle of participatory economics is to reward for effort and sacrifice.[3] For example, mining work — which is dangerous and uncomfortable — would be more highly paid than office work for the same amount of time, thus allowing the miner to work fewer hours for the same pay, and the burden of highly dangerous and strenuous jobs to be shared among the populace.

Additionally, participatory economics would provide exemptions from the compensation for effort principle.[3] People with disabilities who are unable to work, children, the elderly, the infirm and workers who are legitimately in transitional circumstances, can be remunerated according to need. However, every able adult has the obligation to perform some socially useful work as a requirement for receiving reward, albeit in the context of a society providing free health care, education, skills training, and the freedom to choose between various democratically structured workplaces with jobs balanced for desirability and empowerment.

The starting point for the income of all workers in participatory economics is an equal share of the social product. From this point, incomes for personal expenditures and consumption rights for public goods can be expected to diverge by small degrees reflecting the choices that individual workers make in striking a balance between work and leisure time, and reflecting the level of danger and strenuousness of a job as assigned by their immediate peers.[3]

[Aerozord]

How about parecon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics)? It's got the part similar to your idea about compensation for 'effort and sacrifice', plus a bunch of other aspects allowing for the creation of a classless society.

cause the goal is ease of employment. Its to give people an ever present option for employment and to cut out alot of the cost for jobs where, really your resume doesn't matter and you are ultimately hired on the whim of the person interviewing you.

The market system is to compensate for the flood of applicants getting these jobs. Many of these I used as an example the reason more aren't hired has more to do with the minimum investment a company must put into each hire with the risk of termination costs. Without this and an increased turn over I think it will equalize itself. Of course I could be wrong. But in theory it works

[Tev]

Amazon did basically this with their Mechanical Turking (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) project.

[Aerozord]

Amazon did basically this with their Mechanical Turking (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) project.

quite similar, but the fact it just puts money into your amazon account makes it unsuitable for paying bills, buying food, other daily needs. Is a nice proof of concept though

[Krylo]

quite similar, but the fact it just puts money into your amazon account makes it unsuitable for [. . .] buying food

Well, actually, they have a grocery department now.

[Aerozord]

buying food online sounds absurdly expensive. at the very least inefficient. Oddly enough that only works for those that dont need the money. Cause if you desperately need money said money is going towards bills

[Magus]

quite similar, but the fact it just puts money into your amazon account makes it unsuitable for paying bills, buying food, other daily needs. Is a nice proof of concept though

No, you can get a cash check. Just there are problems with that:

1. Cash check is subject to income tax and all that, whereas if you had it transferred into Amazon Bucks (hehe) it wasn't. Now even if you have it turned into Amazon Bucks they wanted your SS number so it could be reported on your income tax return. I basically abandoned it after that, even though I doubt I'd ever make enough to have to pay tax on it, it's just an extra headache come tax time I don't need.

2. It's simply not economically feasible to use it as a job, even as a minimum wage job, because you simply cannot do things fast enough to make those 1, 2, 5 cent a piece things add up enough fast enough to even make minimum wage, at my calculation after several evenings I figured out I was only making a few dollars per hour, and the things where you may be paid, say, 10 dollars, like writing the subtitles for a video, inevitably are so undervalued that you would spend, say, two hours doing the transcription (to do it well), i.e. 5 bucks an hour, which is less than minimum wage.

Plus, the person who receives your work gets to decide whether it meets their standard for payment. If it doesn't, you get something like .35. For all you know, they kept your transcription and just bilked you the ten dollars, AND you're out that two hours of time.

I put some time and effort into Mturk several evenings and while it was nice to get some Amazon Bucks as a job it seems like it would be nearly impossible to use, at least for an American. If you lived in a third-world country and had access to it though it might actually be quite nice, not sure.

Your free market employment thing would require a different system or some sort of third-party arbitrator to determine if the job is being done correctly or at a good quality.

And it's not as if temp companies don't already sort of fill this niche in a way. You could undoubtedly improve this system but I don't think you have to reinvent the wheel. Like if you created that system where people worked as telemarketers per home and received the materials from companies and you could create some kind of oversight for that to prove they made x amount of calls, then yes, that does sound like an interesting idea for that particular type of job. Lots of people might like to make a little extra cash working as telemarketer on top of a regular job, but don't want to work in a callcenter.

[Aerozord]

Your free market employment thing would require a different system or some sort of third-party arbitrator to determine if the job is being done correctly or at a good quality.

And it's not as if temp companies don't already sort of fill this niche in a way. You could undoubtedly improve this system but I don't think you have to reinvent the wheel. Like if you created that system where people worked as telemarketers per home and received the materials from companies and you could create some kind of oversight for that to prove they made x amount of calls, then yes, that does sound like an interesting idea for that particular type of job. Lots of people might like to make a little extra cash working as telemarketer on top of a regular job, but don't want to work in a callcenter.
Thats my big issue, I cant think of a fair form of oversight. All current methods rely on the discouragement caused by employment investment which is basically what I want to get rid of.

Maybe the trick is just making the oversight something rarely invoked. Say calls are monitored like most of these things. But normally its never used, except when a complaint is launched. Then the employer can review it and if it was valid place a black mark on the employee. Give it an expiration date. Then have an overall rating. While not perfect it might be enough to discourage abuse to a reasonable level

[Magus]

It would probably require some sort of specialized equipment. Like the person as part of the job receives a phone to use just for the telemarketing with a very large memory that keeps track of the numbers they call and how long the calls are. Or maybe even records the calls, too, as I know they do that when telemarketers call for "quality assurance". But you still have this system where someone is doing the QA on the calls, and that person is hired by the company. No idea how to make that a completely unbiased arbitration.