The Problem
There are over 85 million workers migrating internationally at any given time, vulnerable to trafficking and other labor abuses. Nearly 300 million Indians migrate within India, alone. An estimated 27 million slaves—more than at any time in human history—lose over $20 billion dollars a year from missed wages alone. That’s $2 billion more than the US gives in foreign aid.
This spectrum of labor abuse reaches into our global supply chains, resulting in suicides, riots, and even murders of managers by their own workers. At $5000 apiece, typical labor rights inspections only cover 10% of the 300 million supply chain workplaces. This confluence of factors points to a labor system unfair for workers and notoriously opaque for corporate supply chain managers. LaborVoices (LV) fundamentally changes this paradigm.
The LaborVoices Solution
We promote transparency in labor markets by crowd-sourcing workplace monitoring to workers, themselves. We allow migrant workers around the world to fact-check prospective employers and employment conditions by accessing the LV mobile phone application via voice or text. We aggregate this data into our information platform, which any migrant worker can access with a basic cell phone.
We serve audio advertisements to our users as they call in to the LV service. We sell early access to labor market intelligence to brands and social auditors, before publishing our intel to the world. We provide a strong value proposition for all three markets we touch:
- More and better information for migrating workers, versus established family-and-friends information networks;
- Highly-targeted opportunities for companies to access individuals near the bottom of the pyramid via audio advertising, versus existing mass-media outlets; and
- Inexpensive, accurate, real-time, ubiquitous labor market intelligence sold to brands and social auditors, versus current expensive, cumbersome, and ineffective social audits.
LaborVoices has an ongoing pilot in Bangalore, India, where we are iterating on the migrant peer-to-peer information sharing model and testing new strategies involving technology, stakeholder engagement, feasible revenue streams, and standard operating procedures. Our roadmap over the next three years builds on the rapid learning curve we are addressing with this first pilot:
- By January 2012: Entry into three additional Tier 1 Indian cities (Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad), Vietnam (Hanoi), and one US location (likely San Francisco). Strong core team built out covering operations, technology, monitoring/evaluation, and business strategy. Market pilot-level products to initial customers.
- By January 2013: Spread to the remaining Tier 1 Indian cities (Delhi, Ahmedabad, Surat, Kolkata), Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang), and US cities (Los Angeles, El Paso). Experimenting with different models tailored to specific contexts of each market, based on core learnings from prior pilots. Integration of SMS technology, and a complete transcription/translation solution for vernacular interfaces. Initiating data-sharing agreements with third-party distributors. Market beta-level products to initial customers.
- By January 2014: Spreading to other countries and cities of commercial interest. Subsidizing randomized control trials to rapidly customize local features. Scale local operations to achieving ‘real-time feedback’ for brands. Begin widespread marketing of data and analysis products.
We are experimenting with user incentives to gather the critical mass of worker-users necessary for building out the two revenue-centers. We will price our advertising services at prevailing market values for similar mobile advertising, to support both market-share gains and near-term revenue. We will price our labor market intelligence to significantly undercut competing inspection-based monitoring approaches, to serve initially as a complementary monitoring service, while gaining market credibility as a primary monitoring solution.
The LaborVoices Technology
LaborVoices is running on a voice platform, using off-the-shelf, open-source interactive voice response (IVR) technology to survey users as well as to gather questions and corresponding answers from users. This model allows LV to establish footprint anywhere with moderate cell phone access. We are also building tagging, transcription, and translation solutions to allow our users’ questions and answers to cross linguistic silos. These solutions will also allow us to better aggregate and analyze our users’ contributions.
As we expand into areas with higher literacy rates and languages that render easily on mobile phones, we are building text messaging (SMS) modes of interaction. Similarly, we envision eventually moving up-market to provide web portals to users with web-enabled-phones and Internet access.
The LaborVoices Team
Our team is well positioned to achieve LV’s objectives. Our founder has thorough experience in technology and social innovation, with deep backgrounds in semiconductor physics, transparency policy, and international labor rights and corporate social responsibility. Our CTO has a long background as a Silicon Valley technology executive, especially in the open-source software sector. Other team members bring skills from labor rights activism and advocacy, mobile technology development/management, sociological research, business strategy development, and grant-writing.