Growth in on-demand services helps customers improve their lives by finding somebody else to clear out the garage, put up the shelves or run errands. But do the people handling your to-do list benefit as well?
TaskRabbit founder and CEO Leah Busque is concerned that the deal may be one-sided. "In the last 12 to 18 months, I believe there has been a slippery slope of new companies that have formed in the name of on-demand services ... that maybe aren't having as much of a focus as they should on the worker," she told The Huffington Post's Jordan Jayson at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Saturday.
TaskRabbit is a website that links customers up with people ready to handle a wide range of small jobs.
"Our whole premise was empowering a new generation of workers to be their own entrepreneurs, to build their own schedules, to set their own prices and accept and decline work," Busque said.
"If you build a services app without taking into consideration the quality of the lives you're creating for those workers, then you're completely missing the point of this whole industry," she added. "I do believe it's a slippery slope. It can become a race to the bottom, and we have a responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen."
Below, live updates from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting: