Desperation Premium

The term in question? Desperation premium.

What, pray you ask, is this new menace? It has several facets - one being known as 'price gouging' in more colloquial terms, but a new head has been added to the techno-hydra: the predatory pricing of human value, to undermine the ability for a hardworking individual to be paid fairly for the services they provide.

Imagine a nurse, severely indebted having decided to train in a particular skill, with the idea that in due course they will be able to pay off the debt, and start to build some security in a job with fairly high, consistent demand. You join an agency, to whom you provide details such as your passport, your national insurance or security number, your previous work placements. Said company then scans your credit history, and gleans you are severely indebted, and as result, more likely to take a lower fee for the same work as someone who is less indebted. So the same work, the same hours, but paid less, because you have a loan, that you took, to train for said work. This is dynamic pricing applied to human labour, aka, the desperation premium.

The word 'premium' here is a misnomer. The worker does not get to charge a premium for the skills, effort, sheer grit it took to get through school, college, university and further training. The premium goes to the orchestrator of the platform; the health service saves on their labour line item; the anonymous algorithm that day and night is laser focused on sifting through the soul of humanity for the cheapest, quickest path to profit.

We need to resolve the question, as Alvin Toffler posed in his second seminal work The Third Wave, "did we come here to cry or to laugh?"

H