Nevertheless we often had trouble persuading housecleaners and other domestic workers to come to interviews, even though we paid $25 per hour, which was higher than their regular hourly rate. They didn’t know us and it looked too good to be true.
You could pay $25/hour for some product interviews, but how long does that last? Say someone does 4 interviews with you for a total of $200. Housecleaning for a new client might pay less per hour, but it also has the potential to be a steady gig which might yield a few thousand a year in additional income whereas this app probably won't. One also has to factor in the non-negligible time cost of getting to and from the interview. It's not really enough for someone to get excited about unless they have nothing else going on; people who work hard place a high value on their limited leisure time, and giving product design interviews sounds more like a way for the interviewer to pad a resume than anything that will deliver a long-term benefit to the interviewee.
As someone who spent quite a lot of time at the bottom of the economic pyramid, doing similarly casual labor, there's probably not a lot of value that an app cobbled together in a few months can deliver. The most useful things you can do with a smartphone are:
1. receive calls, email and text messages
2. Maps app and public transit scheduling to get you to your gigs on time
3. web browsing to check Craigslist
Those three things deliver a lot of value because they save a lot of time. It's unlikely that a shallow app is going to deliver anything like as much utility, and the utility it does add has to be weighed against the time it takes to use.
After that your income comes down to knowing whatever job it is that you do and being able to set prices and stick to them. The latter is quite important; some people are a pleasure to do business with, others will try and beat you down or trick you out of money. I've had people that owed $150 for furniture removal lie about the rate they negotiated and try to pay only $100, and when called out on it they shrugged and said 'no harm in trying.' That's a lot harder to deal with for someone who doesn't have English as a first language or the confidence to call someone's bluff.
The best way to empower a poor person is to teach them something that allows them to charge more money, which is typically a different skill as low-paid laborers tend to be price takers more than price makers and competition is friendly but intense. Short of a new work skill, the other thing a lot of poor people could benefit from is a basic course in microeconomics from a labor perspective - not so they can quote Adam Smith but so they have a consistent way to model things like opportunity cost and production possibilities and make decisions in less time instead of puzzling over things and wondering if they could have made a better deal.
Not everyone can do this, but basic micro does not involve a lot of math and gives people a systematic way to think about the economic problems that they already face on a regular basis. Developing a course based on the practical problems like deciding which of two mutually exclusive jobs to take or how to maximize profit would have enormous value. For a housecleaner, say, you could figure out that offering 'natural cleaning products' might have a cost in both consumables and additional cleaning time amounting to $4/hour, but clients who care about that may be willing to pay an extra $5/hour (or more), yielding greater profits.
It really bothers me when people take advantage of workers who do manual labor for what we privileged would consider "little."
Talking with an acquaintance, she was "calling the maid to cancel tomorrow." I said, "but it's too late." Response: "Oh, not, she can come back next week." My answer: "sure, but this week she will be short $100 to make the rent."
She looked at me like I was a Martian. I don't think I made a dent in her understanding.
A great example. People in low-wage jobs who face situations like that usually lack two things the know-how to set business terms and conditions like cancellation fees, and the leverage to enforce them (when losing a client could be financially very painful). People who are poorly educated, illegal aliens, parolees and others often have difficulty learning about or asserting rights they might have under city, state or federal labor laws.
Now, I know that the original goal here was to find better ways to empower poor people with technology, not to set up an additional social service. I thought the example in the article of an app that helped people submit an application for food stamps (saving many hours of standing in line at an office) was right on point.
One idea that occurred to me since I wrote the grandparent comment last night (and forgot to post before I went to bed) was to flip an existing concept on its head. The article mentioned a tool for people in Mexico who were outside the regular financial system to establish some sort of credit profile that would allow them access to lower-cost cellphone plans. Maybe a useful thing for poor people in the US with smartphones would be a parallel 'client credit report' that would let casual and informal workers alert each other about problem clients who attempt to evade payment or behave abusively, as well as hooking them up with other resources, eg there are probably people with paralegal experience who would be happy to draft a demand letter for a small fixed fee. Think LinkedIn for low-income people as a way to vet potential clients and avoid persistent troublemakers. The best thing about NeatStreak (the author's app) was not the housecleaning-specific stuff (although that's helpful) but automating the booking/billing process, which is something that a lot of casual/informal workers need.
Of course an approach like this turns up some interesting legal questions, because reversing the usual top-down direction of economic influence is politically loaded and would upset some people. But I think sooner or later there will be demand for such functionality; the 'sharing economy' we are moving into matches buyers to sellers effectively for many casual services, but the firms that establish such new markets are typically also seeking to be monopolistic brokers and their economic interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the people who actually provide the services; to the extent that the latter are organized, it could disenfranchise the job brokers. I think it's only a matter of time before established players attempt to capitalize on that, so that the SEIU attempts to organize Taskrabbit workers or the Teamsters try to sign up Uber and Lyft drivers, and I'm not so enthused about that because I think unions can often end up as rent-seeking organizations themselves. Perhaps technology has the potential to provide low-income workers with more practical organizational benefits by automating the information-brokerage function of trade unions without the administrative overhead.
Empirically -- and I'm not giving too many details because certain HN users are assholes so I don't make my account identifiable -- good english makes you worth $10-$15 / hour more. What is the difference between the $20 and the $35 to $45 / hour handyman? How well the latter understands your instructions and hence how much supervision he or she needs. This is complicated by the fact, and I'm not sure if it's cultural or just the people I've worked with, but certain people will just say "yes" on the phone even though they didn't actually understand what you wanted done. When what you wanted doesn't happen, it makes you frustrated and unlikely to employ that person again. Simply being able to call your handyman and give him or her instructions over the phone, and being confident that they understood and will do what you wanted, without you having to be physically present the entire time, makes them far more useful and worth a lot more.
So this app, which helps english speaking people purchasing home cleaning communicate with spanish speaking cleaners, may well be quite useful. Part of the value chains give, and for which they keep a big piece of the transaction, is clear communication between english speaking customers and primarily spanish speaking cleaners. Tools like this help cut out the middleman and get the cleaner much more of the $60-$80 customers pay.
source: I help manage an apartment building and hence interact w/ lots of cleaners, handymen, and carpenters.
edit: for example, the guy who cleans the building every week and takes care of light maintenance has terrible english. Saying, eg, "please trim the hedges next to the driveway" simply cannot be reliably communicated without someone being there in person. The other maintenance guy can, eg, be told "something's leaking in the 2nd floor laundry room". He can go there, diagnose -- eg bad drain tubing -- communicate, and be told to go to home depot, buy new tubing, and replace it -- all over txt message. This makes him worth way more money. I think the first guy could also do it, but I would have to be physically present the entire time. The second guy gets paid twice as much.
Good points all. I was a bit harsh in my earlier criticisms because I felt the writer was still missing some key points and the article had an air of poverty tourism despite the underlying good intentions.
You could pay $25/hour for some product interviews, but how long does that last? Say someone does 4 interviews with you for a total of $200. Housecleaning for a new client might pay less per hour, but it also has the potential to be a steady gig which might yield a few thousand a year in additional income whereas this app probably won't. One also has to factor in the non-negligible time cost of getting to and from the interview. It's not really enough for someone to get excited about unless they have nothing else going on; people who work hard place a high value on their limited leisure time, and giving product design interviews sounds more like a way for the interviewer to pad a resume than anything that will deliver a long-term benefit to the interviewee.
As someone who spent quite a lot of time at the bottom of the economic pyramid, doing similarly casual labor, there's probably not a lot of value that an app cobbled together in a few months can deliver. The most useful things you can do with a smartphone are:
1. receive calls, email and text messages
2. Maps app and public transit scheduling to get you to your gigs on time
3. web browsing to check Craigslist
Those three things deliver a lot of value because they save a lot of time. It's unlikely that a shallow app is going to deliver anything like as much utility, and the utility it does add has to be weighed against the time it takes to use.
After that your income comes down to knowing whatever job it is that you do and being able to set prices and stick to them. The latter is quite important; some people are a pleasure to do business with, others will try and beat you down or trick you out of money. I've had people that owed $150 for furniture removal lie about the rate they negotiated and try to pay only $100, and when called out on it they shrugged and said 'no harm in trying.' That's a lot harder to deal with for someone who doesn't have English as a first language or the confidence to call someone's bluff.
The best way to empower a poor person is to teach them something that allows them to charge more money, which is typically a different skill as low-paid laborers tend to be price takers more than price makers and competition is friendly but intense. Short of a new work skill, the other thing a lot of poor people could benefit from is a basic course in microeconomics from a labor perspective - not so they can quote Adam Smith but so they have a consistent way to model things like opportunity cost and production possibilities and make decisions in less time instead of puzzling over things and wondering if they could have made a better deal.
Not everyone can do this, but basic micro does not involve a lot of math and gives people a systematic way to think about the economic problems that they already face on a regular basis. Developing a course based on the practical problems like deciding which of two mutually exclusive jobs to take or how to maximize profit would have enormous value. For a housecleaner, say, you could figure out that offering 'natural cleaning products' might have a cost in both consumables and additional cleaning time amounting to $4/hour, but clients who care about that may be willing to pay an extra $5/hour (or more), yielding greater profits.