Projects on Empowering Marginalized Workers and Voters

Equal Pay for Contractors

by Arman Jaffer and James Liu

The tech sector, an industry known for high wages and generous benefits, has accelerated its use of contract workers that have similar responsibilities as full-time employees but who are employed by staffing agencies. While these contractors are employed in core functions such as engineering, they miss out on different forms of compensation and benefits and incur additional costs such as job instability. This pay disparity exacerbates social inequities since contracted workers are more likely to be racial and gender minorities compared to their full-time counterparts. This project proposes a Contract Pay Gap calculator to help companies and workers advocate for a more equitable compensation strategy for these contract workers.

Support for Worker-Led Startups

By Trevor Pels

Many Silicon Valley founders want to create technology companies that remain values-focused over the long-term. Unfortunately, this vision is often compromised due to pressures from institutional finance to return quick profits. This project recommends an alternative structure, where board-level decisions are made democratically by a company’s workers through the formation of a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) to make governance simple, and calls for start-up accelerators to begin targeting a portion of each batch for companies structured in this way.

Voting From Abroad: Reducing Obstacles for Military and Overseas Voters

By Hilary Braseth

Military and overseas voters are one of the most disenfranchised demographics in the country. In the 2020 election, military and overseas voters voted at a 7% rate, ten times less than the domestic average. This project proposes a wizard tool that government agencies can use to help overseas voters register more easily, along with a set of tech best practices that Secretaries of State should utilize to encourage overseas voter registration.