“I need some strong dudes to hang drywall,”
yells the truckdriver. A mob of eager workers rushes forward; soon the
rickety truckbed is full of strong dudes who’ll hang drywall all day
and go home with minimal pay.
Many of our brightest young college graduates will be facing career
choices like those of the “strong dudes,” as bigcos redistribute jobs
to the lowest bidders around the globe. More than one startup is
already figuring out how to broker web-based piecework so that jobless
people who trained for “good jobs with computers” can compete for the
privilege of getting
paid much, much less than the value they generate.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of this story, I read in
Scobleizer
that Jason Calacanis is taking heat for wanting to pay Digg’s best
diggers to come do for him what they’re now doing for free at Digg.
Jason Calacanis retorts, “You know what the difference between the so-called “elite” and
the top users in the masses are? One group gets paid and one
doesn’t–that’s it.”
You don’t have to be at a conference full of great women to understand
that lots of valuable work in this world is underpaid or unpaid.
But…offering to pay even the top 12 people a tiny fraction of what
they’re worth–what a revolutionary idea!