Crowdsourcing Fast Booming
Most workers (95%) commute to the office for pay and some 5% option to work outside the office for pay - and the ratio is rising in favor of the latter.
Today, nearly 40 million workers or 5% of the aggregate labor force (66.97 million) in Japan choose to work away from the office and the industries are turning to such outside manpower in a variety of jobs. Child-rearing housewives could fill the gap of labor power shortage, they say.
Five major leading crowdsourcing operators including Crowdworks were dealing with approximately 3 million working online at end 2016, according to Nikkei survey. The survey found the figure further rise up by a little short of 30% or three times the figure marked 3 years previously. The crowdsourcing industry predicts the total will grow over 10 million in the year 2020. The situation in the United States is still more conspicuous as 5.5 million are currently working freelance - as many as 35% of the total workforce.
Crowdsourcing is a new jargon with crowd and source combined that entered in the daily vocabulary in the US in mid-2000 and fast spread in Japan.
Today, Panasonic, for instance, turns to crowdsourcingfor photographic processing, exterior design, while Vantec, a logistic leg of Hitachi, commissioned an advance survey prior to its foundation - all online. Mitsubishi UFJ offered 108 thousand yen for a logo design for FinTec.
Crowdsourcing operators are there to link business to workers. Crowdworks, for instance, today deals with 160 thousand or twice as many clients grown in a year's time, including government offices e.g. the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts, and Telecommunications. Services are available around the clock - for over 50 hours a month for 1000 yen per hour for housewives with career background, for instance.
Lancers inaugurated a new company last April to digitalize technical skills of its registered workers with a view to upgrading their income. (Nathan Shiga)
Source: Nikkei