Digital Economy. Technology as means or as a goal?
Digital Economy/The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by a blurring of the distinctions between physical, digital, and biological spheres, as significant technological advancements are having a profound impact on economies, businesses, and the personal lives of people throughout the world (Schwab, 2016; 2018). Yes, indeed, technology, by definition, is the sum of techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of better solutions.
Why we can call it the 4th industrial revolution?
First, the speed of technology development has become reasonably higher with the help of the internet and other advanced researches done., which means that companies and industries are going to be disrupted. Disrupting an industry is impeding the industry player by coming out first with a better solution to an existing problem. A good example of disruption is what the company Apple did to the music industry. Before announcing the first iPod, the music was distributed via CDs, cassettes, and mp3 players. Apple rethought all the process of listening to the music and having a music library that stay with you on all devices after the purchase. An ability to have all songs on one account forever has blown minds and pockets of those who were complaining about too big CD collection at home.
Nowadays the technological advancement is brought almost to every industry. By substituting people on machines and algorithms, it enables us to work more efficiently and create things that before we could not even imagine.
We could argue whether technology is a means or goal, but we could observe the labor market recent trends that are happening.
Nowadays, the borders between full-time employment and contracting are so much blurred, that we could notice a massive rise of so-called freelancers. Of course, freelancers always existed, but nowadays, the concept of the on-demand workforce is disrupting the whole globe`s labor market. Before, if you do not have a full-time job, you could be considered as unemployed or an entrepreneur. Today, it is entirely okay to work from home for different employers and receiving payments for a done project rather than time spent in the office. I like the concept so far, it enabled me to find designers and coders on-demand when I needed help with website construction. The good thing is that I do not have connections with the person rather than our deal. In terms of small jobs, the outsourcing works great; I have received my design or code, had several iterations, and finally had received what I was looking for at a reasonable price.
Of course, by employing that kind of people for more complex jobs, it might become complicated that a person is from outside, and I believe that the more complex tasks there are left on the market still have to be performed on the employment or long-term partnership basis.
First of all, the freelancers, by definition, do not have a full understanding of what is happening inside the company, and it would take a lot of time to onboard and complete some jobs. Secondly, if freelancers are doing something for the money, most likely they will not over-deliver, which is essential for the employees of start-up companies, for example.
Technology and the internet have enabled the workers to be own bosses, have their own schedules, location and basically gave them enough freedom HOW to work could be done. Every coin has two sides, and in this case, the ugly thing about the new type of work is the relationships of employees and employers, which have to adjust. Recently, Uber has faced misclassification lawsuits in the UK (Aslam et al. v. Uber) and the US (Razak et al. v. Uber Technologies) regarding the minimum wage and other benefits. And in Nigeria, two Uber drivers filed a proposed class action seeking health insurance and pension benefits. Similar misclassification lawsuits have been filed by Uber drivers in France, Canada, and Brazil.
Those cases prove that the upcoming challenge would be to re-define the employer-employee relationships, and it will require some legislation changes.
The main questions to be answered are 1) how wages are formed? 2) what is required from the employer? 3) how to define the working hours? 4)what will be the future workplace?
