End Data Slavery

Although huge investments have been made in human capital management in the last decade, nothing has moved the needle and created real change. The root cause is data slavery between employers and employees. 

Consider that workers trade their human capital for benefits like a salary or hourly wage and in doing so they generate data related to work history, skills, credentials, experience, and performance. When data that workers generate is used for a benefit that isn't controlled, at least in part, by them, then, likely, they are not sharing in that benefit under terms they would agree to if they had enough control over it. When that is the case, they are a data slave. Let me explain more below.

When data that a worker generates is exchanged, the transaction can leave the worker disadvantaged if they do not have enough control over it. For example, if they are not compensated or even made aware of the transaction, others, including data markets, can cause a worker undue harm and therefore worse off. Bottom line, the ownership and control of data that workers, individually, generate impacts how workers may improve an individual pursuit of well-being.

So, as workers trade their individual human capital for benefits, each worker needs a data account, a legally owned personal asset or property (a "container" for assets) with ownership and control rights capable of accepting, reusing, and re-sharing data to improve their individual pursuit of well-being. 

In terms of accepting data from a data source, it is clear that full excludability rights must be retained by workers, individually, but not by the data source. Thankfully, data deposits into a person-controlled data account from data sources can be considered as "data subject access" in countries where privacy and data regulation exist. This means that retrieved data is owned by workers, individually, as co-producers of that same data. That means workers, as individuals, have the right to re-use and re-share data as “data subject” and as co-producer of that same data. 

Bottom line, data accounts return value to the workers who create it. This makes data transactable and in control by workers thus freeing them from data slavery such that they may improve an individual pursuit of well-being.