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Comment by jrumbut | Hacker News Reader

Could be labor organizing. I've had a job for years and never even been solicited about it.

The incumbent players are ignoring massive swaths of the addressable market at a time when, judging by my social media feed, there is renewed interest in labor issues.

A big reason for this is their reliance on a high-touch, manual onboarding process and slow, high overhead contract negotiation techniques. Prime for marketing automation, SaaS tools, chatbots, etc.

Additionally, for purely historical reasons, they have segmented the market by trade. There's no particular reason for you to follow this path, may as well help everyone get a better deal from their employer (and a cut for yourself!).

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I don't know much about contract negotiation, but for organizing "high touch" doesn't begin to describe it! The labor organizer's job is to convince the worker, who likely and often rightly fears for her job if she actively and publicly supports the union, that it's still the right thing to do. Not only convince intellectually, but psychologically prepare the worker to stick with the union effort in the face of a concerted effort from the employer to defeat it. To do that the organizer needs to ask the right questions, listen carefully, build trust, and finally push, and potentially do this repeatedly with the same person. It is psychologically demanding and not everyone can do it; I tried and I couldn't. A chatbot cannot convince a factory worker with kids to feed that he needs to stick up for his coworkers who in turn will stick up for him. All that said I think there is room in the process for profitable automation, but it's auxiliary to the main work.

If you're interested Jane McAlevey's book Raising Expectations and Raising Hell is a good introduction to union organizing.

That's interesting. I never would have thought about this area. If you can shoot me an email (in my profile) I would love to ask a few more questions about this, if you have the time.

this is tangential to the problem https://www.ganaz.com/ is solving I believe. Labor for industries like cruise ships (~400k), cargo ships (1.1M), dairy etc is still organized and managed very manually. You could foresee an opportunity to build a Gusto or Salesforce for these industries with a decent TAM.

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