Job Maximization, Not Profit
By Saahil Parekh, 16th April 2015
This is the age of freelancers and entrepreneurs, heavily reliant on the Internet, who believe in creating employment for themselves by seeking profits in very niche segments hitherto unexplored. This often involves providing solutions to automate processes and reduce the need to spend on human capital. This has a direct negative effect on the employment of the economy. However, not all capitalism is bad; like the kind that makes profit by providing jobs.
“Job entrepreneurs” rely on maximizing the number of people they employ to make profit. By hiring a specific set of people with unique talents and employing that workforce to tasks which require those talents, they are able to capitalise on the increase in efficiency. These are not your regular ‘job placement’ organizations that help people find jobs in other companies. The job entrepreneurs put these people on their own payroll.
One such venture is AutonomyWorks, a for-profit business model that turns what others see as a deficit into a source of competitive advantage.
(AutonomyWorks employs) “people with Autism Spectrum Disorders, enables and empowers them to provide turnkey solutions to their clients. There are more than 1 million potential workers with Autism Spectrum Disorders whose skills match perfectly for ‘process execution tasks’.”
People with autism have an eye for detail and many possess extraordinary gifts in working and interpreting facts and figures. They are ideally suited for process-execution tasks which are often repetitive, labour-intensive and where attention to detail is paramount, like website maintenance, data entry and software testing.
Autism is the fastest-growing disability in US; it has increased 600% over the past two decades. The existing job placement organizations are unable to find roles for people with autism; the employment rate of such people being as low as 20 percent.
Dave Friedman, the creator of AutonomyWorks, currently employees 15 people with autism, and has managed to produce a better quality of work at a lower price. Unlike a not-for-profit organization which relies on grants and funds from elsewhere, Dave Friedman believes in letting the autonomous, free-market principles do their work. After all, a business that generates profit for itself is more sustainable, and fosters discipline and efficiency.
Moreover, they work with the Illinois Department of Human Services, Division of Rehabilitation Services (DRS). The DRS maintains a database of more than 30,000 potential employees that are ready to enter the world of work. AutonomyWorks provides trained counselors to help bring this population into the workforce.
While AutonomyWorks is considerably niche, the way it specifically concentrates on people with autism, this idea of job entrepreneurship holds a lot of merit if it can be scaled. There are other examples of such initiatives.
A few years from now, such organizations creating better and more efficient employment across the entire spectrum and not just special cases like autism is not entirely unthinkable. Over the last decade, we have successfully created a new economic sector in which social entrepreneurs maximise purpose over profit. Now, this new wave of entrepreneurs might just manage to take it to the next level.
However, what is really needed to bring scale to such initiatives is government support. Kevin Spacey’s character, Francis Underwood, in the third season of House of Cards, launched AmericaWorks, a program to put an end to unemployment in the US economy. Perhaps if AmericaWorks was real (a semi-unrelated prototype of the same name), it would be based on this idea.
Saahil can be followed on Twitter @saahilparekh.
