Day 350: The Global Virtual Labor Market

Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash

I ran into a WVU Immigration Law Clinic alum at the American Immigration Lawyers Association Conference this week. I asked the usual catching-up questions.

“How are you? Where are you practicing now? How big is your firm?”

Her D.C.-area firm has three attorneys and a few legal assistants, she told me — two of whom are based in Latin America.

“How is that working out?” I asked.

“Great,” she said. “My legal assistant is terrific; she does everything that any other legal assistant would. We got really lucky in getting her.”

Virtual Latinos

As I walked to the breakfast spread — strategically located just beyond the vendors’ booths — I noticed a booth for Virtual Latinos. Like all effective vendors, they noticed my curiosity and waved me over, so I stopped to chat. I explained that I’m a professor following trends in the future of work.

They’ve been in business for six years, they told me, and provide virtual professionals for many industries. They have the most market penetration in the legal field, where they started.

They provide professionals at three levels of experience and skills, ranging from $8-10 an hour for the most basic and $16+ an hour for very experienced or highly skilled professionals.

Based in Latin America, Virtual Latinos professionals are bilingual. They’re living and working in the same or similar time zones as U.S. firms, eliminating inefficiencies that can result from professionals working many time zones away.

There are no labor restrictions because they’re contractors — Virtual Latinos, based in San Diego, has the main contract, and the professionals are their subcontractors.

I asked about their competition. Many market competitors have sprung up recently, they said. Virtual Latinos’s advantage is their highly competitive pool of professionals, built over the last six years.

“We don’t go out on LinkedIn to look for your professional,” Yener Benaroya, VL’s chief business development officer, told me. Their pool of professionals have gone through extensive screening — language testing, skills testing, psychological testing. “Five percent of applicants are accepted into our pool. One percent of those are placed with clients.”

The Future of Work

Is there any reason for firms not to create global workplaces, as long as firms like Virtual Latinos provide quality connections and quality control? The cost savings speak for themselves.

For people in the United States who object to immigration on the grounds that it takes jobs away from Americans (a debatable proposition), the global workplace presents a quandary. To preserve those jobs for Americans too, Congress would have to try to prohibit companies from hiring contractors with subcontractors overseas — a proposition that would be awfully tough to get past the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce and might violate the due process clause and the contracts clause anyway. Perhaps they could slice the baloney more thinly (limiting what work contractors can do for U.S. firms, for example), but that also seems like tough sledding politically and legally.

As work transforms, immigration to countries like the U.S. may actually decline. Knowledge work like legal can often be handled remotely from any country. If unskilled labor gets increasingly automated by AI and robotics, workers seeking those jobs may migrate to less automated middle income countries (until they, too, automate). But that’s a post for another day.

In fields like law, the virtual labor market is already here, it’s growing, and it’s global. And we haven’t even seen the tip of the virtual iceberg yet.