How crypto payroll can improve the plight of temporary workers

Devcon 3 · 26 Nov 2017 · 6:22

Gregg Dourgarian argues that crypto payroll can ease the plight of temporary workers in the United States, who often pay steep fees to cash checks and send money to families in Latin America. The talk makes the case that moving pay and remittances over blockchain rails would save both money and the days lost to slow transfers.

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From Devcon 3, hosted by Ethereum Foundation.

Transcript

Claudia Martinez is a young woman from Guatemala she works in a pickle processing plant in Pittsburgh and she's a temporary worker and for most of the day she does this can any of you guess what someone who does this on a pickle plants assembly line he's doing yeah she's she's a brine displacer she removes a certain amount of brine from the jars so that they can screw the cap on and move it on its way sounds pretty bad or a pretty pretty unpleasant type of job

well it gets worse Claudia works Monday through Friday usually 40 hours a week and she doesn't get paid til the following Thursday that following Thursday she gets a paper check and after work she drives down to a check cashing place and she pays a fee takes her about a half an hour to get fiat currency and then she drives again to go to a wire service place something like Western Union to send some of that money back home to her mom and three sisters in Guatemala again more time more fees usually ten dollars to say send a hundred dollars back home pretty

bad right right if the Fiat system gets worse than that though because claudia has waited so much time unfortunately she's organized she doesn't have to resort to this but they're 10 to 25 million temporary workers living similarly in the United States alone and many of them can't wait to get that money they can't wait all that time so they take recourse to something called a payday loan have any you familiar with payday loan yeah we probably know it's a very expensive unpleasant thing because a lot of time these people never get out of the hole they're constantly paying more and more interest it's a real sad

situation the current Fiat system Jamie Dimon and his band of crypto capitalists and their Fiat system is screwing these workers and we need to fix it in crypto thank you so a little bit of on me I'm Greg - Gary and I'm a founder of temp works software it's a software system that my dad and I wrote in the early 70s and I've been evolving from the early microcomputers and now my oldest children run the company were based in Minneapolis but it's very simple on a mature payroll system to simply add an adjustment that would go to a crypto pay

card of course we have a number of challenges in this system right now first of all these pay cards aren't universally available we need them to work not just in London or New York but also in a remote village in Guatemala we're talking about tens of millions of transactions a day that we would need to be able to process for people to really take advantage of so I have a lot a lot a lot of challenges ahead of us whether we can get a show of hands how many people have worked a temporary job in their life Wow well it's almost everyone I was thinking okay these people only worked per hour coding something but so

you know what a tough job is like sometimes I feel my toughest job ever was to get life on aetherium to work on my Macintosh so anyway temp works we've developed two different products on the etherion platform one is if you're familiar with DocuSign or hellosign it basically allows you to create a contract I have different parties sign it post it to the blockchain we put a note up on the etherium reddit about that if you want to check it out the other is the script or payroll system and basically it's it's wired together right now I got into this in 2015 because I was employing a large number of Filipino

Filipino virtual assistants who were setting up sales appointments and and every Friday it was me who was going to coinbase and paying fifty hundred dollars seventy-five dollars and these people were perfectly happy to accept crypto it coinbase users here how many like the interface yeah no no hands that I see it's pretty hard to do that using most most client software for sending crypto so the idea here would simply be that our our system as it evolves will simply be pay check just like any other paycheck with an adjustment that instead of going to your retirement account would also go to your crypto account

it's something that we need to do we need to do this for Humanity we need to do it for all these temporary workers we need to make it so that we're living in a world where instead of Klaudia spending all of our extra money and time driving around dealing with the fiat system instead she's studying Python and aetherium and it's going to develop the next generation of our crypto solutions I'd like to thank the etherium foundation Mexican government all these wonderful workers who've made a conference so nice I'm just blown away by the quality of the other presentations I feel real honored to be up here but I think I think I'm really eager to hear from any of you can help

me advance the solution and make it become a reality faster thank you very much [Music]