The Future Of On-Demand Work

Uber, the disruptive scourge of taxi drivers everywhere, has helped to redefine the modern workplace. Now we face a freelance future full of ‘on-demand’ work.

Of course, some jobs are simply immune. Surgeons, police officers and highly-trained specialists will always find full-time employment because it would cost more to brief a new candidate for each individual job. However, manual labour, simple repairs, basic household chores, data entry and more will soon be farmed out to an army of freelance workers available through a simple app. In truth they often are already, but the on-demand workforce will become a much larger part of the economy in the years ahead.
‘Handy’ offers home repairs and cleaners, ‘SpoonRocket’ delivers restaurant quality food to San Francisco’s doors and ‘the Uber of’ is becoming a mantra in Venture Capital meetings around the world. From almost nothing in 2009 (pre-Uber), investment in on-demand work has risen to $2 billion a year.
Having launched in 2009, Uber has expanded to more than 50 countries around the world and was recently claiming a value of $50 billion, making it the highest value start-up of all time. A legion of Uber-esque apps have followed suit in the hope of replicating their success.
It has been happening for years in some industries. ‘Elance-oDesk’ has matched 10 million freelancers to 4 million companies. ‘Axiom’ does the same with lawyers and ‘Medicast’ even provides doctors on demand.
Even Amazon is getting in on the act with its Mechanical Turk that allows customers to advertise any work that requires some level of human intelligence. Now Amazon Home Services could crush a good number of the startups by connecting customers with builders, plumbers and more.
So what does that mean for the world at large? It could mean a future where cash-rich and time-poor professionals employ the less fortunate by the hour and a wider future where many jobs are simply replaced by casual labour taken on as and when required.
On a more executive level it means troubleshooters and specialists are called in as and when they are needed. Just a few years ago these specialists were difficult to find, but now a carefully tailored search on LinkedIn can bring exactly the right person for a particular set of circumstances, so on-demand could go well beyond basic jobs.
Freelancers Union, a pressure group in the US, suggests that one-third of US workers – that’s 53 million people in the US alone – already do at least some of their work on a freelance basis and Accenture says that up to 33% is exclusively self-employed. This is on the rise and soon we could see more than half of the workforce employed by the hour.
There may be business casualties in the on-demand workplace. Competition will drive some out of existence, while others will find their business model too complex or their standards too high to cope with the vagaries of casual staff. Others still will simply find the margins too low. External businesses will grow to compare and contrast the prices of on-demand labour too – think GoCompare – which will drive prices down further.
On-demand companies are privately concerned that they will face huge retrospective tax bills if their workers, who are almost exclusively self-employed right now, are reclassified as employees. As an emerging business model, on-demand companies may be getting away with contributing less than would be expected in taxes, but The Wild West of on-demand labor will have to clean up its act at some point and follow the basic rules of doing business.
There will be an intense and painful period of readjustment, which will come soon, but it’s naïve to think that on-demand work will do anything but increase.
So it may seem that we face a future wherein we all work for several different companies, focusing on our specialist tasks and cutting every job into bite-sized chunks. Is it a Utopian dream or a nightmare waiting to happen? Only time will tell. Have your say @VPSNET