Slashdot Mirror
"Micro-Gig" Sites Undermining Workers Rights?
Mystakaphoros writes "An article in The Atlantic examines the effects sites like TaskRabbit, Fiverr, and Rev.com are having on employment and freelancing. (I would add Amazon's Mechanical Turk to the list as well.) As the article mentions, 'Work is being stripped down to the bone. It's as if we're eliminating the 'extraneous' parts of a worker's day — like lunch or bathroom breaks — and paying only for the minutes someone is actually in front of the computer or engaged in a task.' How many Slashdotters have used these sites, either to hire or work? What's been your experience?"
I don't always post anonymously, but when I do, its because I'm talking about something wrong that I see go on everyday where I work.
Dice is listing thousands of jobs which are open to the "right person" but not to everyone with the listed qualifications. In many cases, the companies posting these positions reject everyone that applies for them in order to justify hiring someone who needs a visa. A lack of qualified candidates for all the "open positions" in my department is used as a management excuse to extend work hours out beyond 50.
A headhunter I used to get temp-to-hire work through once told me that in many cases ads were an attempt to entice specific individuals to leave their position with a competitor, or a signal to said individual that they should quit their position and begin waiting for their no-compete to run out.
Point being, there are lots of reasons to advertise a job opening in the technical fields that have nothing to do with a position actually being open to all qualified comers.