Can startups fight unemployment? Introducing Work for America | Hacker News Reader

Can startups fight unemployment? Introducing Work for America

blog.mobileworks.com

47 pointsanandkulkarni35 comments

You might also say that startups fight unemployment already, by creating a cadre of jobs. They do, but most of that impact is felt in the neighborhoods of the startups -- Silicon Valley runs an unemployment rate of as low as 4% vs. 7.8% nationally.

Sending work to job training programs in the rest of the country lets us share the love a bit.

Silicon Valley runs an unemployment rate of as low as 4% vs. 7.8% nationally.

~4% [1] is inline with the overall unemployment rate of college graduates nationally.

[1]http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2012/...

> Silicon Valley runs an unemployment rate of as low as 4% vs. 7.8% nationally.

Where did that stat come from? According to this story, Silicon Valley had a higher than average unemployment rate as of last summer:

http://news.yahoo.com/selfish-silicon-valley-higher-average-...

Temp work is bad in the long term. Employers do not have to provide benefits for temporary employees, and they also have access to less privileges from the government. This approach is a race to the bottom IMO.

I agree, but temp work is better than no work and it'll allow newbies te get some experience.

I might agree with you about traditional temping. However, this isn't temping! Work for America is the practical component of a job training program that concludes with transitioning workers into full-time jobs.

Many individuals have difficulty in traditional job training in finding full-time work without practical work experience, so this resolves that problem.

"Temp work is bad in the long term."

I'm not trying to be an anus, but temp stands for temporary which is not long term. It looks like they are looking to improve individual skills that are in demand in order to progress to a full-time job. Once they have relevant actual experience with companies it will be much easier to find a long term employment situation.

I mean, in storybook land this is how things should work.

But in the recent past, the most recent decade especially, companies have infamously been using temp jobs as a means to get around paying full-time salaries and benefits perpetually. Same with internships. For lower level white-collar workers, the progression isn't from temp job to permanent job but temp job to temp job to temp job to early underfunded retirement.

Not that I see an easy way out of this--companies of all sorts are driven to this behavior inexorably by the market--but people genuinely interested in transitioning to a better economy for everyone have to look at this fact head on.

In real life land, people are responsible for their own careers. Temp jobs are an option if a worker so chooses and not a cure all. If a temp job to get a temp paycheck to get temp experience does not help fulfill their goals then they should not choose it.

Many forces shaping employment options are considerably larger than any one individual's choices about their own career, so I think it's fair (and important) to look at systemic trends, and what effect they have. Of course, in the short term, each person also has to make their own decisions with the systemic factors as they currently exist, so I don't entirely disagree.

I agree with you that there are many forces that shape options, but my original point was that temp work is an option. My original reply was to someone that threw out a blanket statement that all temp work was bad in the long term. Surely there are some temp workers that can benefit in the long term from the skills that they will learn and the additional income.

Is this anything more than a clever rhetorical move to put the onus on lower level workers who are struggling to deal with systemic changes?

My statement is purely descriptive, which I note you don't controvert. White collar temp jobs have substantially increased their share of the economy relative to the mid-20th century. And the structure over time of career progression is also substantially changed as a result of that.

Saying, "well, they chose to do it" sidesteps analyzing the systemic issues. No more than saying "well, black people choose to work for less pay than white people" analyzes anything meaningful.

When temp jobs and underemployment become your only option, a company has created a de facto way to avoid providing benefits that would normally be considered standard to any other kind of employee. The growth of temp jobs and unpaid internships shows that companies will exploit the demand for any kind of employment this way and it is hugely unethical.

This problem has a simple legal fix: trigger benefits requirements when the job has full time work, not full time employees.

The partnership is centered around the job training programs, not a partnership with temp agencies. The goal is exactly the opposite of a race to the bottom, it's providing skills and real world training, something that will then be marketable at the conclusion of the program.

It sounds like the real-world skills are writing for a content farm or stuff a half-step above mechanical turk. Do they translate into real-world jobs anyone would want?

Good question!

Software testing, online research, and high-quality writing correspond directly to marketable technology and professional skills development.

It's important to remember that these individuals often come from a low-technology background, and are training to develop foundational technology skills -- not highly-specialized skills.

I agree high-quality writing is a solid skill, but I worry whether content-farm writing is a particularly plausible inroads into that. I suppose it can help improve writing skills from completely nonexistent up to the level of being able to string words together, but I'm not sure writing articles along the lines of what you find on eHow is going to help you land a more solid writing job, like technical documentation. In the worst case, it could count as worse than no experience to mention on your CV, since that kind of writing has a poor reputation.

Hopefully I'm wrong, but I think there are a lot of entry-level jobs that are sort of dead-end and don't really develop into a skill ladder, which is something to watch out for.

I agree. Someone should magically conjure full-time work instead.

Folks are free to look for full-time gigs. But such short-term projects can provide invaluable experience that can help people get actually accepted to full-time jobs. Arguably, past experience is the most important factor in job hunting. When one applies to even some low-level white collar job, there's a huge difference between having no relevant experience (flipped 'em burgers for the past 2 years), and having 2-3 temporary data entry positions over the past year.

This seems like the sort of endeavor that healthcare reform would ostensibly serve for- by providing a broad solution that an enterprising organization or effort like this can stick on to provide insurance for those who sign up.

These jobs are all things I would outsource to Amazon MTurk for cheap. (and you can specify US ONLY too)

Yet no one claims using the MTURK API helps others "develop employable job skills"... website testing, cheap content writing and data entry aren't exactly the types of skills employers are unable to find when hiring.

How does this compare price-wise to MTurk, out of curiosity?

In unmanaged marketplaces like Mechanical Turk, some new entrant will always try do the work no matter how low you price it, and they'll usually do it wrong.

This means you end up running it repeatedly to get the right results, engineering safeguards against malicious or underpaid workers, and more.

Because MobileWorks is managed and not a marketplace, you pay a fixed price with no engineering cost.

The workers we are working with are not just located in the US, they are in job training programs with local municipalities. That means they have support behind them, someone that they can ask questions of and specific skills that they are being trained on to build. While the projects offered may seem trivial to some, they may not be to someone that doesn't have the same access to resources as us. We're trying to provide the fish as they learn how to fish for themselves.

These projects are the work experience component of a curriculum being presented to trainees in job training programs.

As mentioned in other comments, most trainees are working on basic technology skills rather than specialized job training. This is a place where even simple work like data entry, web research, and software testing can provide a useful opportunity to practice skills.

How about creating a temp firm/staffing agency branded for ethical treatment, real benefits, focus on keeping people in longer-term roles. Then if tech companies used them first, even if they cost a bit more, they could feel good. Tax law should perhaps incentivize contractors receiving benefits.

MobileWorks actually does this explicitly, as a crowdsourcing company, rather than a temp agency. We find that it leads to better outcomes for workers and customers alike.

Most of our workforce consists of long-term participants working under real names in exchange for a fair wage guarantee.

It'd be great to see something equivalent emerge in the temping sector.

Ingeresting thanks, I'll check you guys out. Do you provide medical insurance? Anyway I do think you can do a lot more with people working in person with you but then again the worls gets smaller all the time. If folks can do in depth training and quality control in a distributed fashion, more power to em!

I mean, I started job-buddy.com to help the unemployed. That's something...

This looks pretty cool. Tell me more about it. email in my profile.

I thought it was pretty self explanatory, actually... What did you want to know?

"Data entry" is "Job Training"? Seriously?

Couldn't this result in bad publicity? "Hot startup XYZ said they'd train me to get a job in tech and all I did was data entry for 3 months and I still can't get a job"

Nope! But data entry can be meaningful work experience for someone new to the working world. [thanks to _dps for the clarification!]

This is the practical work component of a larger curriculum carried out by civic job training programs. These programs conclude with job placement, so the startups involved simply donate work and forget about it.

FWIW, I personally don't think you need to dodge the "data entry as job training" angle.

It's easy for us on HN to feel uncomfortable about this because we see data entry as among the lowest jobs one could have in the IT ecosystem. But I'd ask the audience to consider this from the point of view of someone down-and-out in the job market (I'm sure you yourself have already entertained similar thoughts). I'll share a personal anecdote on this point: a good friend of mine once suffered from a medical condition that prevented him from pursuing a traditional career for a period of several years, and the availability of 2-3 month data entry gigs was the difference between complete professional inactivity and:

1) proving to someone that despite his condition he could show up on time to a job with bounded time commitments and execute his job

2) having an income at all, and the self respect that goes with that

3) having a professional network, unsophisticated though it might be, that can say "Yes, Person X can handle taking your paper legal documents and getting the relevant fields mapped into an Access database".

My friend found a leg up through such a job and overcame some of the unemployment adversity imposed by a personal medical problem. I imagine others could find a leg up to overcome poor family circumstances, lack of educational opportunity, or other impediments to establishing one's career.

I personally think there's nothing wrong with providing opportunities near the bottom of the ladder and calling them job training, because an important portion of job training at that level is the meta-skill of showing up, doing what you promised, and establishing credibility with people who can vouch for you down the line.

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