Kevin Stark: The Great Lakes Commons is a regional grassroots initiative advocating for the freshwater chain of lakes in the upper Midwest and Mideast parts of the U.S. and Canada. As part of that mission, the group has released a new toolkit designed to help communities and residents protect the lakes, which its members view as a public, natural resource. The kit is a mix of traditional advocacy tools, policy statements, historical documents, and educational resources. It’s organized around Indigenous, commons and modern environmentalist ideas.

The group’s mission is to establish the Great Lakes as a commons that is protected by its people. The toolkit was inspired by the Commons Charter, a 500-word affirmation of how the group relates to the Great Lakes and a collaborative process of how to articulate that vision.

Paul Baines, the group’s education and outreach coordinator, says the toolkit was a product of a collaboration among advocates, Indigenous people, water policy experts, researchers, and others. “It was a way to thread the various social movements around water quality, policy, ethics,” he says. The toolkit includes:

• Primers on Great Lakes and Indigenous water governance. The former serves as an overview of how the lakes are managed now. The latter is an introduction to the ideas of the region’s Indigenous people.

• An ethics document that the group calls a “Compass of Care.” It is a classroom exercise that was originally developed in a school in Ontario, Canada, and is intended to serve as a guide.

• Community organizing instructions. Many of the initiative’s members have a background in popular education and advocacy.

• The “Plastics Action Kit,” which explores the connection between the health of the lakes and its people.

• The toolkit also includes charter translations for five native and non-native Great Lakes languages. Baines says including all — especially the two indigenous languages, Anishinaabemowin and Mohawk — was important to the group. “We were thinking about who is this for and who lives in the Great Lakes region,” Baines says. “It was important to highlight and celebrate these languages.”

The Great Lakes Commons is an advocacy group that engages directly with the residents of the region. “We don’t really interface with government,” Baines says. “We are not petitioning corporations or governments to do the right thing — we are reaching out to the people of the Great Lakes.”

The initiative was created from On The Commons, a commons movement strategy center based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is comprised of individuals and groups from the U.S., Canada, and First Nations — including the Council of Canadians, Blue Mountain Center, Detroit People’s Water Board, and others. The “Commons Currency Project” is another initiative of the Great Lakes Commons. It is an alternate currency that imagines that the value of money is tied to the quality and availability of the water of the Great Lakes.

Baines said the concept came from a single question: “If water is a source of life, then wouldn’t protecting water be the most important and scarce resource that we have? And if we want to put value on something, shouldn’t it be that?”

Header image is a screenshot from the The Great Lakes Commons’ toolkit

The post A Toolkit for Establishing a Great Lakes Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Kevin Stark: SMart is a social enterprise founded in 1998 in Belgium. The project’s aim is to simplify the careers of freelancers in cities across Europe where SMart operates. These days, there are many freelancer services — cooperatives, coworking spaces, unions — but at the time of its inception, SMart officials were focused on one subsection of this workforce: artists. “That’s how we started,” says Lieza Dessein, a project and community manager for SMart. “What we realize is that a lot of artists have the same kind of issues when they are working. For example, a band would make up a contract. The band would actually pay the musicians with that single contract. And they had very irregular revenues.”

Dessein said the original idea was to take all the bookkeeping and other administrative tasks off of the artist. “The solution that they came up with was, OK we will just make up a company,” she said. “So instead of every artist needing to develop its own legal entity to be able to work, we will just share a company with the artists.”

Today, setting-up a coworking platform is not uncommon, but at the time it was a bold idea. Over the years, SMart expanded to provide services for many other types of freelancers, and changed with the evolving nature of work. Dessein spoke with us about the evolution of the project.

Kevin Stark, Shareable: I’m a freelancer in Chicago, and to my knowledge, we don’t have an organization that is as comprehensive as SMart. If I were moving to Brussels, how would you pitch me on the program? 

Lieza Dessein, SMart EU: We are a shared company. It’s quite important for us. We have over 90,000 members here in Belgium alone. And active members on a yearly basis, we are around 20,000. Active members are members who log in between one and three times a year. All of that together in 2016, they billed to our company in Belgium 136 million euros. We’re operating in nine European countries.

The development of the project in European countries is quite different from country to country. They’re not all that far developed as Belgium. Belgium is the mother house. For 20 years, we’ve had a full range of services. Our business model is a patient one. We grow steadily and smoothly and build up the community inside each country. We make sure that everything we are doing is under a legal frame that exists in that country, and we need also to adapt it to the culture in each country and in the communities. I would say, we haven’t changed all that much but we have shifted with the realization that the work environment has changed.

I love the lifestyle associated with freelancing and the freedom to work on a wide range of projects. The only rub for me is the stability and the lack of community. What’s different about SMart?  

We have a whole range of services, and the most important one is that people who work with us to guarantee that they will be paid in seven days after the end of a contract — even if the client hasn’t paid yet. We have a mutualized salary guarantee fund, and we take care of the debt collection for the freelancers as well. We share the company with our freelancers. We become the employer of all our freelancers and take on the responsibility linked to the employer status. The reason why we decided to become the employer of the freelancers is that for the moment it’s very difficult for freelancers to access social protection and the best social protection you can get is linked to the employment contract. And, if we manage to put everybody on the employment contract they have easier access to social protection as well.

How has the project evolved over time?

Smart means Societe Mutuelle pour ARTistes (mutualized company for artists). It was a company that aimed to take over the administrative burden linked to artistic entrepreneurship. Little by little we developed a tool that could cover a wider range of professions and we opened up to all freelancers. It’s an evolution that little by little you realize that you have a tool that can serve a whole new community that you weren’t planning to serve. There was this shift to make in the mind. We were saying, “Is it actually possible?” Because it’s a little bit frightening to say. I’m focused on musician, artist people in the theater. And it’s like you can have a grasp of that reality, and suddenly you get people working in the care service — everything that’s related to massage, yoga. We have I.T. consultants, and you get all those different professions. For the advisors, it could be overwhelming. We really rationalized: What are the needs of that community as a whole? What are the needs? They are the same as the freelancers. Along with shifting our mindset, we also strengthened our team with advisors coming from a wide range of different professions to make sure we have people who have a good grasp on particular professions.

What were some of those needs?

Our members have an irregular income, multiple clients, being an employee and then becoming an employer, develop different skills and jobs. We have a very fractured job environment where they will work a lot during the year and then not always in the summer. If you really take the whole community and say what are the needs? Instead of focusing on the differences — they need this, and they need that. At one point to say, where are the similarities? If you look at not from the perspective of differences but on a perspective of similarities. We needed to open up our services. Because freelancers — and artists — are evolving in complex legal issues, are confronted to a lot of administration and the risks involved in individual entrepreneurship are high.

SMart was evolving with the changing nature of work?

The workforce is more and more scattered and individualized. And you have all those individual entrepreneurs and the old school way of doing things is to say: I’m an individual entrepreneur,so I will set up my own legal entity. I will go for my own little office somewhere lost in city.

If you scale that model you can see that you are facing very isolated society where every individual is on their own and facing the same kind of difficulties. How do I set-up a company? How do I make myself known? How do I meet fellow people that are working in the same field? How do I find clients? Suddenly if we say, let us take over the administration, and then if you need training we have training sessions. And for the moment we are also investing in work spaces. We are really looking into different ways of bringing back [collectivism] among that scattered workforce. How do you reinvent solidarity amongst individual entrepreneurs? How do you make people create a community that eases their entrepreneurship? How do we reinvent the social protection for all workers?

Images: SMart’s website

The post How the European Social Enterprise SMart is Creating a Safety Net for Freelancers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Kevin Stark: It’s easy to group all enterprises that promote “sharing” into a single category. New technology has made it much easier for people to share almost everything — cars, houses, work spaces, just to name a few. There’s really no shortage of ways that people can pool resources. But there’s a huge difference in the goals between for-profit sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb and nonprofit groups like tool libraries, time banks, and makerspaces. Juliet Schor, professor at the sociology department at Boston College, explores this tension between for-profit and nonprofit sharing groups. Schor has carefully outlined her findings in her prolific writings on the subject.

In one paper, she interviewed dozens of young people that were using for-profit sharing companies to determine their motivations for using the service. For starters, she argues that for-profit companies like Uber and Airbnb are contributing to inequality in America (also a subject that Schor has written about). But what else is different? Are users motivated by different things? Class or demographic distinctions? How has the economy shaped modern sharing organizations and vice versa? Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Kevin Stark: One argument for the for-profit sharing companies like Uber is that they provide a frictionless way for people to find work.

Juliet Schor: The on ramp to earn on one of these platforms is easy compared to other kinds of jobs. Our interviewees report that they can get on these platforms even if they have criminal records, which bar them from other types of employment. The other side of it, however, is that just being accepted to earn on these platforms, doesn’t mean that you will get work. TaskRabbit has a very high hourly rate; we have people earning $100-$150 an hour, but you may not be able to get work.

We don’t have the data from the company, but my sense is it is operating like a winner-take-all model. Certain people on the platform are doing well, they have great ratings and they’ve done lots of tasks. They get hired a lot. On Airbnb, you can list your place but we find that your race and education level are related to whether you can get people to book it. People who live in areas with higher rates of non-whites, for examples, are less likely to get bookings. They get lower reviews and lower prices.

You argue that Uber et-al are contributing toward inequality. Who is being crowded out?

This conclusion is not the product of a full economic analysis. It’s from our research which looks at the dynamics at the individual level and extrapolates to what might be happening at the full economy level. In the past, many people would not have been taking up the type of work that they are on platforms. The platforms were originally marketed as cool, technologically advanced, ecologically helpful — they had a discourse of common good.

Many were launched during the recession and attracted a young, highly-educated, white group of people as customers, and more importantly, as earners. What I’ve argued happened is that the platform de-stigmatized blue collar and pink collar work for these people. We are finding people with graduate degrees who are cleaning houses on TaskRabbit or students who are bicycle couriers. They are doing … work that traditionally has been done by people who didn’t have college degrees. Some of them talk about these status questions. This is a very highly educated, relatively privileged group of people, in comparison to the labor force that has done this type of work in the past.

Do you think that that’s derived from the incentive for the companies to make money or how they are designed, or a reflection of our society and access?

The larger context is the economy. The growth of inequality in this country started as more of an 80 percent and 20 percent phenomenon. My story is about inequality within the bottom 80 percent. What’s happening is that when you have problems of wage stagnation or high debt for young people, education debt, lack of economic opportunity, lack of good full time jobs with upper mobility, then these college educated young people, are facing less opportunity relative to comparable people in the past. That puts them in a situation where they are trying to get more opportunity, to better their situation.

The companies come along and offer them something that makes sense to them, that’s not too at odds with their status identities. So, to answer your question, it’s really both. I do think the larger economic trend of the shrinking middle class, declining mobility, wage stagnation, growing under and unemployment, all those well-known trends are important for understanding how these platforms came into the market. They came in during the depths of the recession. It is very favorable for companies that want to hire people. They will get more highly qualified people without having to pay the extra money. It is a cascade affect in bad economic times. Everyone gets pushed down, but it is like a ladder. The ones at the bottom get slammed. It goes in the other direction. When things improve and the labor market gets tight, people can move up.

There are the for-profits that we’ve talked about, but also the nonprofits — seed banks, time-banks, makerspaces. What’s the distinction?

In our research, we started by studying nonprofit sharing initiatives, such as a time bank, a maker space, a food swap, and what we call open-learning, free online educational resources. The nonprofits generally start with an idea about creating an alternative kind of exchange or market or set of social practices. We found that people participate or sign up for these spaces because they are ideologically aligned with them.

With the time bank, for example, they think it’s a great idea that everyone’s time is valued equally and that, they can barter services. But many of the people don’t need bartered services, so they treat the time bank like it’s volunteering. They give stuff to people, but they don’t necessarily cash in their balance. In practice, they don’t like the idea that what they are offering is only worth as much as other people. Some of them are solo practitioners of massage therapy or yoga teachers or whatever. The time bank has a $10-15 an hour economy for generally available skills like driving or walking a dog. But a yoga teacher or a massage teacher is more likely to charge $75 or $80. The time bank didn’t work out so well because there were divergent valuations and the idea that everyone’s time being equal is such a big jump from the market where there’s a large inequality in how people’s time is valued. There was also class prejudice, where people would reject those with poor grammar or a bad website. On the one hand, people know they are going to an amateur market, but on the other they want something more professional.

One of your organizing lines seems to be built around the idea of public benefit, and you write that sharing platforms can also function in the “public good.” What about at the scale of Uber or Airbnb?

A lot of the nonprofits, the scale wouldn’t work. They are designed to be local. Some are for face-to-face services, like a time bank. On the other hand, there could be an app that just gives you local options, as, on Uber it just gives you all the cars around you. You could do something like that with a timebank. But you would have to allow for local conditions. Here’s another point about nonprofit efforts that have been made for general labor service platforms, like Loconomics, which aims to be a general labor platform or a pilot program in the U.K. where a municipality launched a labor services platform.

The idea was that people who needed stuff done could hire people with spare time — a kind of nonprofit TaskRabbit. There are two issues: If you have imbalance in the market — which we do, with a weak labor market, it will be hard for the platform to work. TaskRabbit can do it because they have an algorithm that privileges certain people. But a nonprofit doesn’t want to function that way. You don’t want an algorithm where a few people get tasks. The other thing is that with general labor service platform you can’t tailor to the specific needs of types of labor. The one-size-fits all market does not work very well.

Your critique of Andrew Yarrow’s “Thrift” — that he didn’t dig deep enough to understand what the thrift movement meant to its participants. What’s motivating users of Uber and Airbnb, and is that different from, say, a tool lending library user?

With the nonprofits, people are motivated by several common good claims. One is ecological. People think that these are lower-footprint way of doing things. The second is social, either to have social connection or in cases like a time bank, a critique of inequality. That’s important to people. Then there is the critique of the big impersonal corporation, and a preference for the local and the face-to-face and the personalized. There’s almost an aesthetic dimension to that. That’s been important for a lot of people in both types of platforms. You also see this on some of the for-profit platforms, for example, with choosing Airbnb rather than a hotel chain.

That’s a major motivation we’ve found. With the food swap, there is a critique of the industrial food system. With the for-profits, the number one motive is money, although, these other things also come into play. On Airbnb people think that it is reducing eco-footprints because fewer hotels are being built (they don’t think about how people are traveling more because of Airbnb). And there’s another aspect for the people who are earners on the platforms, which is that they don’t want nine-to-five jobs and want a certain amount of autonomy or flexibility. Maybe they have other careers or obligations. They aren’t nine-to-five people. This is another set of motives around autonomy and flexibility.

Header photo by Yoel J Gonzalez via Unsplash

The post Juliet Schor on the Striking Differences Between Nonprofit and For-profit Sharing Enterprises appeared first on P2P Foundation.