TFL announced today (22 September) it will not be renewing Uber’s licence with the ride-hailing app ‘not fit and proper’ to operate in London. The decision has raised questions over the future of the city’s transport options, however Taxiapp London offers a new, sustainable model run solely by a group of taxi drivers.

Sean Paul Day, Taxiapp London founding member, said: “Today’s decision proves that our laws have to be respected and that London’s private hire industry should not dominated by multinational companies. This a crucial time for tech starts-up like Taxiapp, who continue to prove more self-sufficient, having been able to survey the horizon and grow in a more sustainable way that puts both drivers and passengers at the forefront.”

Taxiapp is completely owned by London black cab drivers. It allows passengers to book and pay like they would through Uber, but rather than a fixed price that can be subject to huge surges, the fare is always decided by the meter. Unlike Uber, it is built on transparency and promotes fair economic growth and will be relaunched in October with a new feature to protect the ritual of hailing a cab.

Ed Mayo, Secretary general of Co-operatives UK, said: “TFL’s decision not to renew Uber London’s operating license suggests the current trajectory of app-based taxi services needs to change. Platform businesses are not going anywhere but they are going to evolve. We need a new wave of successful platforms with the same great user experience, but built on trust, transparency and economic fairness. It looks like TFL agrees. Ethical alternatives like driver-ledxiApp are springing up – through the co-operation of the drivers themselves. A better platform economy is already on its way.”

Taxiapp London utilises a fully licenced and officially metered service endorsed by Transport for London, which means no surge pricing for passengers. Every one of the licenced drivers has passed the world famous ‘Knowledge of London’ test, which has proven to result in shorter journey times and a more efficient service.

The app is non-for-profit owned directly by the drivers themselves developed with the aim of offering an honest, trustworthy service that puts customer and driver welfare at the forefront. By utilising tried and tested technology this small group from one of London’s oldest surviving professions are leading the way in bringing transparency to the London transport. Taxiapp is currently in the process of applying for support through the Hive, the business support programme powered by The Co-operative Bank and delivered by Co-operatives UK.

The post Taxiapp: London’s black cab co-op alternative to Uber appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The network plans to support, educate and trade with each other to create a different kind of work, “where young entrepreneurs’ voices are valued, profits and opportunities are distributed fairly, and there is care about the impact on people and the environment”.

“As well as access to support, skill sharing, funding and a wider network, we expect that our network will be the driving force behind enacting social change and taking the co-operative movement to the young, dynamic entrepreneurs that we know are out there,” said Rhiannon Colvin from AltGen.

“We are here to inspire, facilitate and support.”

This support will be in the form of workshops, events and resources, said Ms Colvin, with different packages of support available depending on what stage the co-operative is on its journey.

“The network is more about a specific attitude to, or approach to co-operation,” she added. “This includes new ways of working to enact democracy and equality.”

Although the network will primarily be focused on young people, and young co-operatives, the network is conscious of the fact that there are plenty of established co-operatives (and co-operators) with experience to share, so there doesn’t have to be a restrictive age bracket.

“There are so many innovative models of using co-operation in an interesting, different way which, even if they are not led by youth, could still be part of the network,” said Ms Colvin.

“But to maintain a youth voice, we have purposely made it so that once they are over five years old, co-operative members of the network become network supporters – staying within the network and providing much-needed support and experience, but not being an active part of the democratic structure.”

The network will be recruiting other ‘young’ co-ops (0-5yrs) over the winter months to join the network and take part in a co-creation hack weekend (date tbc) at a new Young Co-op hub space in London, where the foundations of the organisations will be set-up.”

To find out more about the network, or the co-creation hack weekend, follow @AltGen101 on Twitter or email [email protected].

The post Movement of the Day: Young Cooperators Network – UK appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A new report by Co-operatives UK called “Not Alone:  Trade Union and Co-operative Solutions for Self-Employed Workers” offers a thoughtful, rigorous overview of this neglected sector of the economy.  Although it focuses on the UK, its findings easily apply internationally, particularly for co-operative and union-based solutions.

The author of the report, Pat Conaty, notes that “self-employment is at a record level” in the UK – some 15% of the workforce – and rising.  While some self-employed workers choose this status, a huge number are forced into through layoffs and job restructuring, with all the downward mobility and loss of security implied by them.

Few politicians or economists are honestly addressing the implications.  They assume that technological innovation will simply create a new wave of jobs to replace the ones being eliminated, same as it ever was.

The sad truth is that investors and companies benefit greatly from degrading full-time jobs into piecemeal, task-based projects tackled by a growing pool of precarious workers.  This situation is only going to become more desperate as artificial intelligence, automation, driverless vehicles and platform economics offshore and de-skill conventional jobs if they don’t permanently destroy them.

The “Not Alone” report does not tackle this larger mega-challenge, but it does fill an enormous void by addressing how the precariat might begin to fight back.  In many respects, the challenge is about basic survival for the Uber drivers and temp workers, agency staff and solo creatives, who are now forced to fend for themselves.  Conaty describes the basic problem:

The self-employed precariat do not enjoy employment rights and protections at work, or any of the implicit services associated with being an employee, such as payroll or workplace insurance – let alone pension or sick pay.  In addition, their potential income is indirectly eroded by other costs such as agency fees.  They face additional challenges related to being paid on time and the right to a contract.  To compound all of this, many self-employed are among the lowest paid workers in the UK.

Not only are many self-employed workers among the lowest paid, they often have careers based on “zero hours contracts” (no guaranteed work or income), part-time work and “portfolios” (multiple temporary or part-time jobs drawing on the same set of skills).  All of these developments may serve the interests of capital and companies, but do they really represent “progress” for most solo practitioners?

The report calls for the “cousins of the labor movement” – co-operatives, trade unions and mutual organizations – to come together, as they did in another era of history, to help form new institutions to help the precariat.

In the US, one such advocate for the self-employed is the Freelancers Union, which seeks to “connect freelancers to group-rate benefits, resources, community, and political action to improve their lives – and their bottom lines.”  The Freelancers Union is not a trade union or co-operative, but it does provide health, dental and other benefits to its 280,000 members.

In Belgium, a co-operative known as SMart provides invoicing and debt collection services for its 60,000 members who work in commercial art and design.  SMart functions as a kind of modern-day guild, helping members avoid the burden of setting up a company and providing small loans, training services, legal advice and shared workspaces.

General trade unions in the Netherlands and Spain represent self-employed workers and provide services.  In India, there is a Self-Employed Women’s Association that acts as a service co-operative for its 1.7 million members, providing “micro-insurance” and advocating for workers’ rights.

One of the more innovative mutual aid models is the “bread fund.”  It’s a new type of organization first developed in the Netherlands that provides sick pay to the self-employed.  Each bread fund has between 20 and 50 self-employed members who put aside money every month into their individual bread fund account. The money remains theirs, but is used to support them and other members if they become sick.  No bread fund may have more than 50 members. In the Netherlands, there are currently 170 bread funds in 88 towns and cities, with more than 7,000 participating members.

The report describes a large array of other self-help, co-operative solutions. They include mutual guarantee societies (co-operative societies of small businesses that guarantee each other’s loans), credit unions for the self-employed, and co-operative money and credit.

The report also discusses ways in which the government can help legally protect marginal survival activities – often known as the “informal economy” – and integrate them into the mainstream economy.  An entire section of the report deals with co-operatives in digital sectors, “social care” and the “solidarity economy.”

As far as general strategies for helping the self-employed, Conaty recommends four priority goals (my paraphrasing here):

1) Recognize this growing workforce by developing organizing strategies for them;

2) Focus on providing mutualized services to workers in creative industries, care services and the green economy;

3) Represent the interests of self-employed workers in national policymaking; and

4) Help develop regulatory solutions to enable collaboration among self-employed workers with respect to mutual guarantee societies and worker benefits.

There is much to digest in “Not Alone,” and many creative challenges to be met. This report illuminates this poorly understood landscape with insightful analyses, useful detail and lessons from the history of co-operatives and mutual aid.

Cross-posted from Bollier.org

The post Mutualized Solutions for the Precariat appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Self employment levels used to be a measure of how underdeveloped an economy was. Now, in the form of the ‘gig economy’, it has become something that is celebrated across developed countries.

In the US, new figures suggest that all net employment growth since 2005 is down to alternative work arrangements such as self employment. The reality is that we are seeing a new system of work evolve, enabled in part by new technology platforms, with its own political economy of risk and reward and just as previous eras saw the emergence of trade unions and co-operatives as a self-organising response, so the same is needed again today.

Here in the UK we are starting a new tax year. Fresh evidence shows that more than a quarter of the UK workforce is self-employed, and this figure is set to increase. This ongoing rise in the number of freelancers signals a fundamental shift in the nature of work.

Some, driven by the lure of freedom, are choosing to go self-employed; many others are going freelance out of necessity. Changes to the labour market mean that zero hours contracts, part time work and ‘portfolio’ careers are becoming more and more the norm.

Our new report, Not Alone, looks at recent trends in self-employment, both here in the UK and across the world. What we are seeing is more and more freelancers coming together and forming co-operatives in order to create security and cut costs for themselves. The co-ops are allowing people to work for themselves whilst sharing costs with others – whether that’s the cost of marketing products, workspace or back office services.

Take RICOL, a new interpreters’ co-op in London. The service for interpreters in London was shaken up in 2011 when the government moved from a national register of public service interpreters to a contract for all of England and Wales from a single provider, won by Applied Language Solutions, owned by Capita. To deliver on the contract, the firm then offered court interpreters work at what was in effect between 25% and 40% of the established rate.

There was a mass refusal to sign up and a protest group was launched, Interpreters for Justice. Many new interpreters hired by ALS were poorly qualified. Severe delays and chaos in the courts were widely reported in the press.

With help from Co-operatives UK, RICOL was established in November 2012 as a London-based interpreters and translators co-operative. They are now generating new work and contracts with law firms, commercial companies, human rights organisations and media companies.

It is early days for co-ops like these in the UK, but there are inspiring examples from overseas to learn from, such as the Self Employed Women’s Association in India, a trade union and co-operative network giving voice and opportunity to 1.7 million members.

As freelancing grows, we need a more systematic approach to supporting them. Not alone concludes with four recommendations centred on, on the one hand, trade unions and co-ops making a radical shift and working together to support self-employed people and, on the other, developing representation and legislation for self-employed people in government.

Ed Mayo is Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, the network for Britain’s thousands of co-operative businesses. The report can be downloaded from www.uk.coop/notalone.

The post Freelancers: let’s get organised appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Self-employment has become the new yeast in the UK economy dough. 4.6 million today are self-employed (15% of the workforce) and since 2008 they have created two-thirds of new jobs. The record rise of self-employment is unprecedented. By 2018 it is expected that more people will be in self-employment than in public sector jobs.

While a proportion of the self-employed do well financially, they are today the exception. Indeed the stereotype of the self-employed as small businesses is less true than ever before. 83% of the UK self-employed work alone. Average earnings are far too low to employ anyone else. The median annual income of the self-employed plummeted from £15,000 in 2008 to £10,400 in 2013. Low pay however is only part of the picture. An absence of worker rights and support services aggravates hardship and makes matters worse.

Under European Union regulations temporary and agency staff are entitled as ‘workers’ to sickness and holiday pay. This is not the case for self-employed as the Not Alone report highlights. They also have to put in days of work unpaid for bidding, negotiating contracts, tax and national insurance administration, billing, accounts management and debt collection.

How can self-employed workers overcome lop-sided risks, over-bearing costs and additionally secure fair trade terms and conditions? To avoid ‘walking alone’, some freelancers are rediscovering solidarity, co-operation and the logic of mutual aid. Trade unions in the media sector in Germany, Scandinavia and the UK have been demonstrating ways to do this.

The Federation of Entertainment Unions (FEU) is the UK network of trade unions in media. Members include the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), BECTU, Equity and the Musicians Union; all have a high proportion of self-employed members. A common FEU strategy is to secure ‘worker status’ for their freelance members and then to negotiate worker rights.

Co-operatively owned employment agencies can provide the operational means to achieve this outcome and especially if backed by a trade union. For example, faced by rising agency fees, 50 music teachers in Swindon formed a co-op to market their services to schools, to assist with negotiations and to provide other collective services. The Musicians Union and Co-operatives UK  have jointly promoted this strategy and music supply teachers in many other regions have done the same. Likewise Actors Co-ops have steadily expanded to 30 in England and Wales. The co-ops work closely as a network with Equity, the actor’s union.

Co-operatives UK supported RICOL, a co-operative agency for interpreters and translators, that was set up in 2012 after the interpreting service for the law courts was contracted out to Capita who reduced the terms and conditions on offer.

Co-operative innovators in France and Belgium have developed integrated services for self-employed workers in relation to affordable workspace, back office services, debt collection, low-cost insurance and for securing sickness and benefit payments from the state. These Business and Employment Co-operatives (BECs) pioneers include the CAE network in France with 72 local co-operatives and Smart in Belgium – a co-operative with over 60,000 members.

In the USA, new Union Co-ops are emerging. Under a joint agreement, the US Steelworkers, the largest union in the USA, and the successful Mondragon Co-operatives from Spain are co-developing the model. Union Co-ops are being set up in a range of industries and cities from Pittsburg to Los Angeles. In Cincinnati, Ohio, there are seven Union Co-ops including a food hub, a railway manufacturer, a ‘green laundry’ and a jewellery manufacturer.

The Freelancers Union in the USA has developed as a mutual to provide insurance and other legal and advocacy services for more than 280,000 members. In the Netherlands and in Spain, general unions for the self-employed have emerged and developed since the 1990s.

To help secure rights for self-employed workers, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the ILO and the International Co-operative Alliance have developed an organisers’ handbook. Solidarity economy strategies are growing but are still fragmented. Bringing together best practice internationally could trigger a new game plan that might snowball by bringing together solidarity solutions. The trade union and co-operative movements need to unite to make this happen.

Photo by blakespot

The post Not Alone – Trade Union and Co-operative Solutions for Self-employed Workers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Working alone can be aspirational, but it can also be lonely and anxious. There is an extraordinary opportunity for new co-operative solutions for self-employed people, giving them the freedom of freelancing with the muscle of mutuality.”

Cooperatives UK have just released an in depth report full of examples of best practices for co-operatives collaborating to meet the needs of a growing class of dispossessed workers – over 70% of whom in the UK are in poverty. We will cover various aspects of the report in the following days and you can also read the full report here.

The new tax year, starting on 6 April (2016) will see record numbers of self?employed workers, according to new data published by Co-operatives UK.

The Not Alone report tracks current levels of self-employment and the ways in which co-ops can help freelancers meet shared needs. Key findings are:

• At 15% of the workforce, government statistics show that 4.6 million people are now self-employed – the highest numbers in the UK since records began
• One in four people (27%) of employees in medium-sized firms in the UK would like to work in self-employment (22% in small firms, 14% in the public sector)
• The number of freelancers is likely to grow further over the next year, reflecting a significant change in the pattern of work in the economy

Ed Mayo, Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, said: “More and more people are turning to self-employment, whether out of choice or necessity. Our data shows this is likely to grow, with a significant number of people who are currently in employment interested in going freelance.

“Self-employment offers freedom and, by coming together in co-ops, freelancers can share the risks and responsibility.”

In line with this growth in self-employment, the report identifies examples of freelancers coming together to form co-operatives for shared services, from back-office support, debt management and contract advice to access to finance and sickness insurance and the shared use of equipment and access to workspace.

There are a number of examples across the UK of co-ops of self-employed workers, from 50 music teachers forming a co-operative to market their services to schools, to interpreters laid off by Capita providing interpretation services in judicial courts through a co-op.

“Working as a private peripatetic music teacher can be a very isolating experience. The Music Co-operative enables our members to feel part of something, and to feel connected to other like-minded professionals.” Janet Hodgson, Swindon Music Co-operative 

But the report also identifies considerable scope for the growth of services in the UK, pointing to well-developed approaches overseas. In the USA, the Freelancers Union provides its 280,000 members with advice and insurance. In Belgium, SMart is a co-op offering invoicing and payments for 60,000 freelancer members. In France, new legislation allows self-employed workers to access the sickness pay and benefits of conventional employees through co-operatives.

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: “This research shows how the world of work is rapidly changing and becoming more precarious.

“While some choose to be self-employed, many people are forced into it.  The lack of stable income and poor job security often associated with self-employment can make it hard for workers to pay their bills and spend quality time with their families.

“That’s why 300,000 self-employed people have joined trade unions in the UK to get better rights at work. Many more could benefit from being part of co-ops and unions, and as a movement we need to reach out to them.”

Pat Conaty, co-author of the report and a freelancer himself, said: “Self?employment is at a record level, but it is not yet at the high water mark. The pressure and the promise that lead people to go freelance will continue to swell the ranks of the self-employed over the coming year.

“Working alone can be aspirational, but it can also be lonely and anxious. There is an extraordinary opportunity for new co-operative solutions for self-employed people, giving them the freedom of freelancing with the muscle of mutuality.”

The Not Alone report has been produced in partnership with Wales Co-operative Centre and Unity Trust Bank. The full report and a summary can be downloaded here.

The post Record numbers of self-employed enter new tax year… and the co-operative model is here to help appeared first on P2P Foundation.