End Data Slavery

Although significant investments have been made in human capital management over the last decade, no tangible progress has been made, and no real change has been created. The root cause is data slavery between employers and employees. 

Consider that workers trade their human capital for benefits such as a salary or hourly wage, and in doing so, they generate data related to their 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 they are likely not sharing in that benefit under terms they would agree to if they had more 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 at a disadvantage if they do not have sufficient control over it. For example, if they are not compensated or even made aware of the transaction, others, including data markets, can cause undue harm to a worker and therefore make them worse off. Bottom line, the ownership and control of data that workers individually generate impact how workers may improve their 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 the retrieved data is owned by workers, individually, as co-producers of that same data. That means workers, as individuals, have the right to reuse and re-share data as data subjects and as co-producers 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, so that they may improve an individual's pursuit of well-being.