Cyberspace - The New Slave Market

May 22, 2005

The article below is extremely disturbing. A German student has started a Web site where employers can post jobs and then employees bid for the job. The employee who bids the lowest gets the job. This presents a whole new way for those with economic resources to utilize those resources to take advantage of others.

Now the rich can get richer at even greater expense to the poor. If this trend takes off, as it seems to be doing, soon the average person looking for work will have to compete globally on an individual basis. This gives the potential for global employment standards to sink to the lowest common denominator. This could have a massively adverse effect on richer first world countries. As one commentator put it, this could be "the race to the Darwinian, socially, physically, mentally, and spiritually worn down, environmentally desolated bottom -- where ideals, vision, creativity, goals of excellence, and love have no higher aim but profit, power, and personal glory." This will only serve to continue the trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Something must be designed to reverse this trend.

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German student tests the limit of supply, demand
Web site for trades people to bid on jobs upsets unions
 
The Daily Telegraph

Friday, May 20, 2005

BERLIN -- One sleepless night and countless cups of lemon grass tea was all
it took Fabian Low to come up with his idea of a "political statement" which
has been sending shock waves through Germany since its launch.

The 31-year-old student took the most basic of economic concepts -- supply
and demand -- and set up jobdumping.de, a website where Germans can compete
against each other for jobs, and where the winner is the person who is
willing to work for the lowest wage.

Angry politicians and trades union chiefs have called it a "slave market,"
"vulture capitalism" and a "grave threat" to Germany's pampered social
model. Low has been likened to a pimp.

Low is unusual in so much as he has some answers, unlike the politicians,
say the few economists and business leaders who dare to praise him in
public.

"Nobody is being forced to do anything they don't want to," Low said. "The
system depends on people demonstrating flexibility and initiative -- not
something Germans are renowned for, but something which they will have to
learn."

Visitors to the site are advised not to bid less than three euros ($4 Cdn)
an hour. It is not illegal in Germany as there is no statutory minimum wage.

Yet so far more than 1,700 jobs have been brokered, from pet groomers and
Santa Clauses to accountants and babysitters -- even a woman offering to
knit a sweater for 40 euros ($65 Cdn).

Prompted by the alarming unemployment figures of 12 per cent or 5.2 million,
the highest since the Second World War, Low said his venture was a
"deliberate provocation, an invitation to Germans to stop moaning -- the
thing they are best at -- and start working longer hours and for a price
that pays."