One barrier to employment for healthy adult family members living in poor urban neighborhoods is their need to be at home and care for their families. Typically, they have children or disabled members who are in need of constant care. In the instances where the caregivers receive job offers, they are unable to commit to the full time schedule that is required, while others have difficulty commuting, especially from neighborhoods with poor infrastructure and inadequate public transportation. Additional stressors to this is the fact that individuals with varying levels of formal education have limited job opportunities in the mainstream economy.

This paper attempts to provide an option for individuals with limited job opportunities experiencing constraints on their work schedule and commuting options to have more control of their work location and schedule as well as simplifying their ability to discover available work opportunities respective to their skill level. This paper will propose a platform that efficiently decentralizes and distributes specialized tasks typically found in an assembly line of a factory to successfully establish a working economy The platform also tackles several issues related to the informal economy, such as unfair compensation and extortion.

Industry prior to the Industrial Revolution of 1760-1830 was based on the domestic system. Domestic system, also known as the Putting-out System, was a production system widespread in 17th-century western Europe in which merchant-employers “put out” materials to rural producers who usually worked in their home or in workshops or in turn, “put out” work to others. Finished products were then returned to the merchant-employers for payment on a piecework basis since working at home made the monitoring of time impossible.

The domestic system was later replaced by the factory system where labourers worked under one roof and were subject to discipline, supervision combined with technical specialization, coordination and further divided by labor and the application of non-human power. The factory system caused workers to travel away from home and work longer hours.

The factory system spread because scale of economies, mechanization and technological complexities and efficient transportation provided optimum conditions to bring all workers under one roof.

The spread of the factory gave rise to enormous social changes. Workers had to spend much of their life interacting with strangers, subjecting themselves to the hardships of the shop floor and the constraints of being managed by the factory clock. Additionally, the welfare implications include; the social cost in terms of stress and time spent commuting to work everyday. As well, related to, but having a different consequence on welfare is the lack of the leisure-income choice. The domestic system provided employees the choice to work less hours in order to care for a family member. Workers in this system had the flexibility to choose any point on the leisure-income trade-off; this freedom of choice was eliminated once the factory system and factories became popular. In the factory system, part-time employees were rare and absenteeism was considered a cause for fines or dismissal.

The motivation for the following exercise is to encourage an open collaboration on assessing the feasibility of leveraging the ubiquitous mobile network to enable people with minimal resources, education or severe time/schedule constraints to enter the workforce of certain industries based on a version of the almost extinct domestic system. The primary intent is to leverage current technologies in order to overcome the disadvantages that caused the domestic system to be replaced by the factory system since the industrial revolution. The secondary intent is to use the same tools for the introduction of social education such as critical reasoning and conflict resolution to the underprivileged.

The approach of this effort is to tell a story of several fictional unemployed characters living in a poor urban neighborhood involved in the manufacturing of pants from their respective homes. They are all using a fictional phone app “Trask” which enables them to do their job. Trask mentors, coordinates, and monitors all the tasks involved in manufacturing and production of pants. In a generic sense the “Trask” app is a piece of a larger platform which is aimed at the efficient decentralization and distribution of specialized tasks typically found in an assembly line of a factory.

The app also includes financial services to enable payments, provide microloans to purchase required tools and microinsurance to cover material losses due to poor performance or accidents. It also enables secure physical transactions with other participants and provides end to end material tracking and accountability. It “gamifies” quality assurance by providing tutorials, quizzes, scores, levels, penalties, rewards, peer feedback and ratings. A process for dispute resolution that might arise during transactions and scoring is also described. Social education is introduced with the addition of tutorials and quizzes related to conflict resolution and critical reasoning. These are prerequisites for resolving disputes.

The purpose of conveying this story is to discover the current barriers for such a system and to imagine solutions based on current technology. The story describes interactions with as much detail as possible in order to capture as many known barriers as possible.

It is expected that the batch nature of the domestic system cannot compete with the continuous flow of an optimized assembly line in a factory system. The goal is to reduce the gap of economical disadvantages of the domestic system in order to make that system feasible for certain industries and markets.

This story is in no way complete, it is fictional with the purpose to trigger feedback and suggestions from experts with the appropriate background and/or provide ideas for experts who have the positional means and resources to enhance and implement such a system in the most efficient way.