Private outsourcing

So recently I have bumped into the website called oDesk.com. This site has a neat purpose, which is to bring people that have work and people that want to work together, which essentially is outsourcing work. Now this being the internet, the nature of work is really mechanical, there are plenty of IT assignments offshoring, data entry and blog writing. The best function of this outsourcing site is that it lets you see how many people bid for that job and what the average rate is for those bidders. This approach is perfect for economists, because it’s a transparent competition based on wage (price). This would allow for the most economical results for the employer, who decides that outsourcing is appropriate for their function.

I am just curious to see where else can this approach be applied. I understand that KSAs will have to be measured and monetized. This may prove to be difficult to do for most knowledge based jobs, as well as retail environment because the retailers that want to keep costs down usually pay minimum wage already, and hence cannot benefit from this cost cutting approach, and the retailers that pay above the market do so because of the need to be selective and get the best candidates. Similar approach may be already used for contract positions, especially in the business to business setting, but I doubt that it is transparent, which should be beneficial for the sake of perceived justice.

Beyond the employer this may be useful for someone outsourcing their own work. I’ve first read about that concept in the book called 4-hour workweek. It’s an interesting approach to work and it tries to leverage the technology to essentially become an agent that delegates rather than an employee who contributes to the company. I believe that this approach is in the grey area ethics wise for a number of reasons. First of all you are leading your employer to believe that you are working for them when in fact you can be doing other things with  your time, especially since you have more time after offshoring all of your work to someone across the internet.  Other things can include: distracting co-workers, exposing your company’s confidential information to other parties and so on. Moreover, if the company found out about the arrangement, they would likely cut the agent out and in fact outsource this function, which would reduce the number of jobs available to the society overall.