Blockchainification in the 4IR Gig Labor Market
Aristidis G. Anagnostakis, Paraskevi Pappa, Efstratios Kypriotelis · 2021
New ways of getting work done are emerging. “Business as usual” becomes constantly harder to sustain; agility is becoming an attribute of increasing importance in concurrent labor market. Atypical forms of labor are gaining ground: to cope with the intensified volatility and insecurities, the market is shifting towards short-term, atypical labor agreements, imposing an increasing difficulty in monitoring and safeguarding regulations. New models of outsourcing are proliferated, challenging established employment and social protection rights. The definition of work itself, is reconsidered as the Gig economy becomes the new norm; ad-hoc, platform-based labor markets are creating employment forms that are vastly different from the long-established ones. Traditional societal mechanisms are struggling and have no choice but to rapidly adapt. The urgency for novel, global-scale frameworks to bridge the established labor market practices with the Gig economy mandates is profound. Recent advances in the fields of distributed trust, Blockchain and smart contracts, are empowering new ways of societal and administrative structuring and operation, bearing unprecedented clarity, and allowing for universally scaled solutions. In this paper we highlight the major traits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution labor market, and we present a novel labor contract architecture for the Gig economy based on smart contracts. The findings are intriguing and demonstrate in practice that blockchain and smart contracts carry all the features required to deliver robust universal labor market monitoring and control.