The over 100,000 day laborers across the United States who stand on street corners and in parking lots each day, waiting to be picked up for a day job, are in fact harbingers of the Web 2.0 economy.
Is this statement part of some zany Freakonomics lesson? What could immigrants looking for day jobs possibly have to do with the latest round of multimedia and communications resources on the Web?
Before answering the question, let's first look at what's happening far away from the street corners in the seemingly unrelated world of Web 2.0.
The emerging trend that most of us are familiar with on the New Web, is the ability to cut out the middleman to directly express ourselves and to obtain various goods and services. It started with the likes of music file sharing, blogging, and Ebay. Such Web-based tools enable us to magically exchange copyrighted materials, self-publish, and bypass retailers to buy and sell directly.
There are now also free, collaborative tools, allowing people to create their own Web-based mechanisms for sharing and building off of the work of others. The open source software movement and wikipedia are pure examples of this continuing trend.
Now we have arrived at a cyber-place where the focus is on creating free, anybody-can-do-it services.
For instance, I can start my own T-shirt company on the Web without ever having to produce the T-shirts or handle order processing, shipping, and accounting. All I need to do is supply some designs and set up an online store (all for free) and my eBusiness partner, a service like cafepress.com or goodstorm.com, can handle the rest.
I can self-publish at lulu.com or blurb.com with no money down. I can bypass the bank altogether and get a loan from real people at prosper.com.
At the same time Web services are also being liberated from the desktop and moving to mobile devices, allowing us to collaborate, conduct business, and create on the fly.
You can now use your cell phone to add a post to a blog using services like audioblogger.com, or use text messaging on your mobile device to complete a transaction using Paypal "Text to Buy." Soon we will be able to use our cell phones to pay for milk at the store and to do our banking.
What does all of this have to do with day laborers? Well, the day laborer business model is a perfect real world example of what is happening in the cyber world -- people are bypassing the middleman and hooking up directly to conduct business and exchange services.
Instead of going to a temporary or employment agency, people go to the streets to hire someone for a day job; and why shouldn't they? Why pay a temp agency a 40 percent plus markup to help you find someone when you can save a lot of money and time by doing it yourself? Similarly, Web 2.0 is really just a kind of do-it-yourself toolkit.
Using Web 2.0 we could make the exchange of labor for cash easier still. A virtual job bidding service, accessible via the Web or cell phones, could free the day laborer from standing on the street all day long waiting for a job, and move him more comfortably to an online street corner instead.
On a larger scale the day laborer is also a harbinger of the future of global labor flows that will undoubtedly be facilitated by the Web and Web 2.0 services. The job outsourcing trend is the first step in that direction.
Next, as we begin to treat labor in the same way we treat the free flow of goods and services, Web 2.0 will be there to facilitate on-demand labor in the same way that it is now enabling on-demand services.
Of course there is a lot of politics between here and there, just as there is a lot of politics around the practice of hiring day laborers.
Regardless, there is a clear connection between the growing presence of day laborers and the rise of Web 2.0. Both are part and parcel of the new, do-it-yourself economy. You may not view the day laborer on the street as a foot soldier of Web 2.0 and a changing services ecosystem. But, just as many of us ignore those men standing out on the street, we only see what we want to see.
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