The person who has spent the most time
thinking about this specific problem.
Rahkeem Morris has spent his career at the center of the hardest problem in labor technology — not merely as an observer, but as a worker, an operator, a policymaker, and now an inventor.
He held thirteen hourly jobs before and during his education at Cornell University, where he graduated magna cum laude in Applied Economics and Management. At Harvard Business School, he completed his MBA and pursued research on what he termed a high-performance labor market intermediary — a decentralized mechanism for physical labor allocation — conducting 42 semi-structured interviews across scheduling-intensive industries. That research was formally advised by Christopher Stanton, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, whose work sits at the intersection of labor markets, personnel economics, and the future of work. It was conducted within an intellectual environment shaped by leading scholars at the intersection of labor economics and market design at both institutions.
He founded HourWork in 2017 and scaled it to more than 20,000 locations nationwide, creating a market of more than 13 million workers — including hundreds of thousands in the immediate wake of the pandemic when the quick-service restaurant (QSR) industry faced its most severe staffing crisis in a generation. At its peak, HourWork served nearly 10 percent of all Domino's locations and half of all McDonald's locations in the United States, becoming the fastest-growing external application in McDonald's history. Elliott Peranson, a pioneering architect of the National Resident Matching Program, served as an equity holder and advisor to HourWork, and his work on market-clearing design informed the company's thinking on labor allocation.
He was appointed Commissioner for the Future of Work to study the structural impacts of automation, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things on the modern workforce. He has served as a prominent co-panelist alongside the sitting United States Cabinet Secretary of Labor and Cabinet Secretary of Education, as well as multiple former State Secretaries of Labor. He also served as Vice Chair and Trustee at Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology — a leading provider of stackable credentials for physical labor.
What the 2017 paper called a high-performance labor market intermediary is, in the formal language of market design, a clearinghouse. The institution he was describing already existed as a concept — one with deep roots in financial markets, medical matching, and auction theory. What did not exist was the mechanism, the credential architecture, and the network infrastructure to operate it as a scheduled labor market. The POWER Clearinghouse is the direct implementation of the intermediary that paper argued for. Nine years of methodical engineering, simulation, and industry execution separate the initial paper from the deployed protocol — solving the same fundamental coordination breakdowns, expressed first in the language of labor economics and internal labor markets, and now in the mathematics of mechanism design.
Taming Dynamic Workforce Requirements: The Case for Establishing A High-Performance Labor Market Intermediary for Distributed Workforces of Employers (2017)
Written in May 2017 as the culminating research project for eminent labor economist Professor Paul Osterman's graduate seminar on Urban Labor Markets and Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Grounded in 42 semi-structured interviews across five enterprise organizations and approximately 62 hours of primary field research, the paper establishes the foundational case for a high-performance labor market intermediary that bundles scheduling priority directly with transferable skill certification. This work uncovers the core operational and organizational insights that ultimately became the mathematical basis for the POWER protocol.
Read the founding paper →