He was unsupervised and had attempted the task because a specialist worker had not turned up for work.

BBC: Young 'so vulnerable' at work

TaskRabbit assigns a worker to the task or lets the user choose one.

WSJ: Practical Perks: Workers Get Credits at Task Outsourcers

Engineers can calculate the most efficient route for a spray-painting robot to take around a car body, work out how quickly parts must be supplied, look for bottlenecks or even tell if a human worker's task is likely to give him backache.

ECONOMIST: Manufacturing technology

One goal of this approach is to eliminate non-value-added activities in Chrysler plants in a thoroughgoing way that the company never has attempted before, down to shaving steps required by an assembly-line operator to complete a given task by asking the worker to redesign the job.

FORBES: Chrysler Is Winning Once Again With Grit, Savvy And Charisma

Workers benefit from more output per worker, not more workers per task.

FORBES: Jobs and Public Policy

The Journal talked to Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who says it can take 23 minutes for a worker to get back to the task at hand after a distraction.

FORBES: How To Overcome Workplace Distraction

Anis Hidayah, executive director of the migrant worker advocacy agency Migrant Care, told CNN that she was pleased with the government's decision to stop sending workers to Saudi Arabia but expressed a need for serious action beyond the creation of task forces given the responsibility of monitoring migrant worker protection overseas.

CNN: Indonesian migrant worker endured years of abuse

Anyone can register as a worker but may need to submit qualifications to the requestor before engaging in the task.

FORBES: Spam Hurts Crowdsourcing But Can't Kill It