Recording Life for Human Rights and workers health in developing economies

This picture, taken by a commentor on my daughters flickr site, caused me to pause and reflect upon the person framed and on his rights and future prospects for support if he becomes ill in the future.

http://flic.kr/s/aHsjvxkFpQ


It struck me that the reason why there is no recourse for this man or hundreds and thousands of workers in developing economies where health and safety laws, sick pay and benefits and pensions and invalidity rights don't exist, is because there is no verifiable history of employment for this person.

NGO's like Greenpeace, Amnesty, Red Cross et al should track these people and log their activities on a personal and current/ongoing basis.  The ideal way is to make available a cloud-based diary (comprising a record of that person), which can be regularly updated.

Key features are that the system should be:


  1. Free; no cost to access the site.  There should be no fee for time spent, or facilities used while updating the persons' record
  2. Intuitive to access and update.  many users are illiterate, so the interface to the log/diary should support multiple methods of use - preferably voice recognition, or the ability to store raw recordings, or to support third party transcription (altho' this does not seem feasible - who, with the appropriate lingual and IT skills, would be willing to spend their time transcribing potentially hundreds of submissions from impoverished workers in third world countries?)
  3. Authoritative.  once uploaded the system should support auditibility and record-management strength access controls, such as can be used to support a future claim by that worker and/or their colleagues.
  4. Long-lived.  The system should not be volatile; records stored here should be reposited securely for multiple generations, requiring planning for obsolescence of hardware, operating systems, file formats, disasters, loss of interest, lack of money, and all the other concerns vexing those of us who are looking to replace paper with electronic equivalents for record-keeping.

Adoption of this idea would have the binary benefits of ensuring the health and happiness of the workers, keeping the employer honest, and levelling the playing field between expensive but compliant developed-world working practices, and developing but often uncaring working environments in developing economies...

Come on - does some NGO not feel the same?

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