Description:

“The computerization of the economy—and everyday life—has transformed the division of labor between humans and machines, shifting many people into work that is hidden, poorly compensated, or accepted as part of being a “user” of digital technology. Through our clicks and swipes, logins and profiles, emails and posts, we are, more or less willingly, participating in digital activities that yield economic value to others but little or no return to us. Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological processes through which economic value is extracted from digitally mediated work, the nature of the value created, and what

Arguing that heteromation is a new logic of capital accumulation, Ekbia and Nardi consider different kinds of heteromated labor: communicative labor, seen in user-generated content on social media; cognitive labor, including microwork and self-service; creative labor, from gaming environments to literary productions; emotional labor, often hidden within paid jobs; and organizing labor, made up of collaborative groups such as citizen scientists. Ekbia and Nardi then offer a utopian vision: heteromation refigured to bring end users more fully into the prosperity of capitalism.”

Available at MIT Press

Header Photo by Janrito Karamazov

The post Heteromation as the New Division of Labor Between Machines and Humans appeared first on P2P Foundation.

When tomorrow is just like today, boredom can result. We seek novelty. However, in this phase in human history, tomorrow will certainly not be like today. Indeed, we are in the midst of dramatic social and technological change. This includes:

1. A demographic shift in Africa such that 40% of all children worldwide by 2050 live in Africa[i] and by 2100, 39% of all adults globally will live in Africa.[ii][iii]
2. Under-population [iv]in many Western and East Asian nations,[v] creating labour shortages, and the possibility of steady-state economics.
3. The rise of new technologies such as 3d printing, drones, artificial intelligence, driverless cars dramatically increasing productivity, reducing costs, and among other impacts, recongifuring city design (why parking spaces? or why not cars as mobile homes?).
4. The likely major disruption in the global food industry through cellular agriculture – the new pure meat and pure milk and the end of the animal based food supply chain, the possibility of the narrative shift from slaughter houses to greenhouses and food labs. [vi]
5. The shift from coal based energy to solar and wind (and other alternatives) renewable systems.
6. The beginning of the rise of the peer to peer economy and possibly platform cooperativism, certainly the possibility of the uber-ifcation of energy, that is: AI, plus solar, plus energy sharing. This challenges energy hierarchy, changing consumers into prosumers and foundationally challenging energy producers – are fossil fuels the new stranded assets?[vii]
7. A likely hegemonic shift from an American centric world to a China and Asian-centric century, changing what we value, the global hierarchy of truth, knowledge, and beauty.[viii]
8. On top of that, perhaps the most profound shift is the rise of gender equity – the beginning of true diversity and inclusion

For many these changes are heralded as the beginning of a new era, the end of empire, the end of the patriarchy, the end of the coal-oil era, the end of poverty, the end of man over nature – a transition to a new era, what Sarkar has called, neohumanism. [ix] For others, these are frightening as the assets they have held – physical as in coal mines, psychic as in male domination, cultural as in Empire-first are all under threat. “They vow to make their tribe great again”[x]

For sure, in these times of transition, finding a centre to hold on to can become difficult. We feel powerless, vulnerable, lost. Our normal day way of thinking and being may not be enough. We may need super-powers to stay calm, afloat, strong, focused  during these tsunamis of change, as the futurist James Dator has written.[xi]

In my work in Futures Studies and as a student of the mystic, P.R. Sarkar, I offer the following ideas or super-powers, if you will.[xii] I have used these with dozens of nations, hundreds of international organizations, and hundreds of citizens groups throughout the world. May futurists use some or all of these powers.

We hope they help in avoiding the pitfalls and perils coming, and to create the futures you wish for.[xiii]

First, as everything changes, find a quiet time – meditation is best for this. Breathe in, breathe out. Make this a practice, such that the feeling of quietness carries throughout the day. Meditation, mindfulness, zikr, zen, or other methods that help focus on one thought – the mantra, the sound that transports one to shanti, stillness – even when hundreds of thoughts race.

Second, see the future as an asset, part of a learning and creation journey. Instead of being worried about what will happen, use the future to start to create realities you would like to see happen (within your zone of control). Insights about the changing world, what you can do, what your organization can do, to help one chart their way forward. Instead of being lost in the day to day, the litany of events, we find that by challenging one’s assumptions about reality  or double loop learning, the future is easier to create since one is watching for weak signals, watching for what works and what does not. Indeed, misleading assumptions are considered one of the leading causes of strategy failure. Often, we double down, argue even more belligerently for our view even as the data suggests otherwise, as in climate change.

Or we rush to create a list of things to do. But double loop learning is questioning our assumptions. Is the future created or given to us? Do I believe the future is bright or bleak? One large organization paid its managers to conduct a review on the changing external world – the environmental scan – and paid experts to comment on this review. However, it had no intent, as evidenced in board meetings, to change their strategy. They merely wished to inform regulators that they had done due diligence on the emerging future. They did not wish their assumptions challenged.

Third, find the used future. The used future is a practice we engage in that no longer works. For example, many institutions wish to be part of the knowledge revolution but they still engage in clock in and clock out behavior. They remain focused on the assembly line, instead of creating metrics where it is out come not time spent that truly matters. As institutions remain mired in the 19th century, workers experience fatigue, tired of surveillance, and feeling what makes them special is not being counted.

Fourth, understand which disruptions or technologies, cultural mind-set shifts, demographic changes will impact them. And, this is crucial, discern the first and second order implications of these changes. Many argue which will be the correct impact. They seek certainty in a world where the future keeps on changing. Wiser is to ascertain the alternatives. For example, with the rise of cellular agriculture, is it wiser to (1) move towards regenerative agriculture, where farmers are stewards of the land, (2) shift toward pure meat and make the land that was used for animal farming for other purposes, or (3) become a niche organic meat seller, or (4) all the above, or (5) to do nothing in the hope the new technology does not disrupt you and your industry? Instead of being focused on the right answer, the future is full of possibilities. However, without going through the implications, we often resort to defensive postures. One farming federation when presented with the possible future of lab meat becoming prevalent suggested that they needed to eliminate vegetarians and scientists. While this was done in humor, the challenge to move from “there is nothing we can do” to alternative strategies became apparent to all participants.

Fifth, we focus on scenarios, a number of possible stories about the future, instead of the right answer. These scenarios become alternative worlds that you, the organization, and the nation can inhabit. From these scenarios, options can emerge, choices can be created, and conflicts resolved since alternative  futures are now clarified. They can help develop national strategy, for example, as with the recent scenarios below of the Malaysian Ministry of Education.

(Source: https://www.nst.com.my/education/2018/04/361452/way-forward-higher-education-4ir-era.)

Sixth, the future strategy needs an enabling metaphor. Every person or organization has a narrative that underlies how they interact with the changing world. More often than not, when the external world changes, the story is left behind, and individuals live a metaphor that no longer creates the desired vision. Instead, suffering results. One global organization was looking to the future but their metaphor was an old crippled elephant. They needed to find a better story and then en-act from that story, the new future they wished for. In this case, they imagined themselves to be an octopus – intelligent, flexible, and swift to react. Individuals as well carry stories that do not work.

One CEO found that his core skills he had learned over 40 plus years were no longer useful. He described this as coming to play a game of tennis at a grass court only to find out that he was now playing on a clay court. His new narrative became someone who could play on multiple courts. For that, he needed to expand his life skills to include spiritual and emotional intelligence. However, in the long run, he realized, it was not winning (or losing) that mattered but the rally, the love of the game. Thus, a better narrative for him was that of the coach, teaching children how to play.

Seventh, and finally, and perhaps the most important superpower of all is to link the story to the system, to strategy, otherwise, the story is empty, mere words that lead to nothing.[xiv] If, for example, the octopus is the new story, then power needs to be decentralized to the tentacles, to the field. If the octopus is the new story, then there needs to be funding for emerging threats and possibilities. In the elephant story, the organization is unable to  see the future  as the organization has no systematic ways to scan for trends and weak signals. If the octopus is the new metaphor, then the organization needs to focus on outcomes, to actually become flexible. Systemic change also means that the new measurements of success are needed so that the story is not just valued but is the anchor to the desired future. Often organizations wish to move from crisis management (ambulance at the bottom of the hill) to prevention (fence at the top of the hill), however, when they do so, their budgets decline and accolades are not passed  out since they have solved problems before they occurred.  New measures of prevention are required, as for example, with the work of former deputy commissioner of Toronto Police, Peter Sloly. Elected representatives as well are hesitant since they need to be seen cutting the ribbon on new projects. Thus, new measures are required that ensure the vision – prevention, for example – is measured and rewarded.

With this final superpower, the subjective worlds of narrative and vision align with the objective worlds of systems and measurements. The future becomes real: the real becomes the future.

                      Scenarios on Adelaide Park Lands linking strategy with metaphor. David Chick.

To conclude, in times of dramatic change, we don’t simply need better maps of the changing world, we need special powers or super powers to avoid the futures we don’t want and create the futures we do. We need the super power of:

(1) Being able to stay calm and focused through meditation;

(2) We need the power to learn and reflect instead of acting from unchallenged assumptions and past behavior.

(3) We need the superpower to challenge the used future – what we have been doing but no longer works.

(4) We need the ability to understand how the world is changing, and the impacts of these disruptions on our day to day life and strategy.

(5) We need the superpower to understand and create alternative futures instead of being fixated on one view: one future. This means letting go of the train-track worldview.

(6) We need the super-power of narrative, of telling a different story about our lives. And, finally,

(7) We need to link story to systemic change, creating a virtuous cycle of change, ensuring that what we value, we count.

References

[i] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28757054. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[ii] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28757054. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[iii] See Sohail Inayatullah, “The Youth Bulge,” Journal of Futures Studies (Vol. 21, No. 2, December, 2016), 21-24.

[iv] See Sohail Inayatullah, “Ageing Futures: From Overpopulation to World Underpopulation,” The Australian Business Network Report (Vol. 7, No. 8, 1999), 6–10.

[v] https://theconversation.com/japan-is-not-the-only-country-worrying-about-population-decline-get-used-to-a-two-speed-world-56106. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[vi] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-israel-trade-deal-lab-grown-meat-veganism-vegetarianism-a7950901.html. Accessed 16 2 2019

[vii] I am indebted to the World Bank executive Richard MacGeorge for alerting me to this approach. He moves the discourse away from political interests to sunken psychic costs.

[viii] See, for example, Sohail Inayatullah, Asia 2038: ten disruptions that change everything. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2018.

[ix] See, for example, Sid Jordan, “Era of Neohumanism,” https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-38/era-of-neohumanism/.Accessed 17 2 2019. Also see, Sohail Inayatullah, Marcus Bussey, and Ivana Milojevic, eds., Neohumanisteducational futures. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2006.

[x] See special issue on Donald Trump and the future, , the Journal of Futures Studies. (Vol. 21, No.3,  March, 2017),

[xi] James Dator, “Surfing the tsunamis of change, ” http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/publications/futures-visions/SurfingTsunamisMexico1994.pdf. Accessed 16 2 2019. Also see: Christopher Jones, “Surfing the tsunamis of change,” Journal of Futures Studies .Vol. 8, No. 2, 2013, 115-122. http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/18-2/S04.pdf. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[xii] See Sohail Inayatullah, Understanding Sarkar: the Indian episteme, macrohistory and transformative knowledge. Leiden, Brill,2002.

[xiii] These are drawn from, Sohail Inayatullah, What works – case studies in the practice of foresight. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2015.

[xiv] This approach is developed in a series of books, the latest being Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic, eds.  CLA 2.0: Transformative research in theory and practice. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2015.

About Sohail Inayatullah

Professor Sohail Inayatullah /sə’heɪl ɪnaɪʌ’tʊla/, a political scientist, is Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies); Associate, Mt. Eliza Executive Education, Melbourne Business School, and Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Faculty of Social Sciences and the Arts).

In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies. In 2010, he was awarded the Laurel award for all-time best futurist by the Shaping Tomorrow Foresight Network. In March 2011, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. He received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii in 1990. Inayatullah has lived in Islamabad, Pakistan; Bloomington, Indiana; Flushing, New York; Geneva, Switzerland; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Brisbane and Mooloolaba, Australia.

Inayatullah is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Futures Studies and on the editorial boards of Futures, Prout Journal, East West Affairs, World Future Review, and Foresight. He has written more than 350 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and magazine editorials. His articles have been translated into a variety of languages, including Catalan, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Indonesian, Farsi, Arabic, and Mandarin. Inayatullah has also written and co-edited twenty-two books/cdroms, including: What Works: Case Studies in the Practice of Foresight; CLA 2.0: Transformative Research in Theory and Practice (2015); Questioning the Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation (2007); and, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change (1997). His latest (2018) book is Asia 2038: Ten Disruptions That Change Everything.

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Labour market trends that assess who is most impacted by precarious work all show up the same patterns; these folks are black and brown, often women, and often working class. Precarious work includes digital apps such as Uber, abuse of zero-hour contracts, or those most at risk from losing a job due to automation. As this ‘new economy’ thrives, we need to be aware that race inequality will worsen because white supremacy is a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism. This article suggests seven concrete steps that progressives can take towards a genuinely new and transformative economy for all workers. 

Play the race card 

Our economic system inherently disadvantages marginalised groups, and this trend is consistent through history. To better understand why this happens, we need to consciously develop a deeper analysis of the problem we are trying to address. In this case, how are Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) workers impacted by the rise of precarious work practices? 

Research conducted by the Resolution Foundation think tank shows that ‘minority ethnic’ families currently earn nearly £9000 a year less than their white British counterparts. This is supported further by the tuc’s Insecure Work and Ethnicity report that identified one in every 13 BAME workers were in insecure employment, compared to one in 20 for white workers. The same report also identifies that of the 3.1 million BAME workers in the UK, nearly a quarter were in insecure work or were likely to be underemployed. Additionally, the number of BAME workers in insecure jobs rose by 2% in five years, whilst the number of white workers remained the same. 

Wages and earnings aren’t the only issues here. Precarious work is often not a choice, but a result of systemic racism in which BAME workers find it harder to access stable employment. In addition, expecting digital platforms to deliver some utopian democracy ignores the reality of white supremacy. When your customer base is largely white affluent middle class, this plays into the race and class power dynamic, sometimes influencing who gets chosen for work. And as independent contractors, these workers are also at risk of abuse or attacks with very little protection. And in a society where the new norms are xenophobic rhetoric and hate crime, this leaves many unsupported workers vulnerable to discrimination, hurt, and shame. 

If you need any more evidence on the broader systemic failures around employment and work, the Race Disparity Audit commissioned by the government offers a sobering and heartbreaking reality check on the lived experience of the BAME population in the workplace. What is important to take away from this evidence is that marginalisation of communities is active, not passive. There are multiple systems at play that are responsible for race inequality; white supremacy, elitism, and patriarchy to name but a few. 

Decolonise economics 

How is this data shaped by the characteristics of neoliberal capitalism? For this we need to look to the origins of capitalism as an economic model and, as a result, how deep white supremacy is embedded in the functions of our society – even today. 

Many people argue that the modern economy has brought us substantial material benefits, better rights for workers, and flexibility in work practices. Whilst this may be the case, these benefits have, by design, been disproportionately distributed amongst a privileged few. For the global majority (non-white people/people of colour), capitalism is a system that is historically tied to colonialism and racism. Colonialism is a project that led to the demolition of sacred land and cultures, extraction of natural resources, sale of black bodies as property, and sent brown bodies to war for the British Empire. 

The colonial mindset continues to this day and is justified by the pursuit of economic growth that is centred around white superiority. We can connect capitalism with white supremacy, and come to understand racism as the tool by which white European colonisers wielded economic power over large parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Well known critical race theorist F.L. Ansley helps us understand the colonial mindset here:

By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”

500 years of colonial rule and settler colonialism has created an economy so entrenched in systems of oppression that we must connect this to the reality of inequality today. In Britain, a colonial mindset dominates the way institutions control our media, legal system, education, financing and policing, and the way we respond to them. As a result, white supremacy is normalised as an invisible force that is subtle and powerful. The evidence for structural racism is clear, and the only justification that is viable is the lasting legacy of white supremacy. Future alternatives to neoliberalism need to be informed by confronting our economic history of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism. 

How to centre race in the new economy

Neoliberalism is a particularly vicious form of capitalism that has destroyed so much of the fabric of our society, including public services, decent housing, and stable employment. No one should be surprised that BAME workers are the first to be impacted by precarious work. If anything, it is evidence that neoliberal capitalism is functioning as intended: through the exploitation of people of colour. In responding to this, however, we cannot escape the rapid development of technology and the way this is reshaping our work practices. Wage equality and workers rights can only be realised if we centre the BAME community at the heart of our efforts to build alternatives, so that we can truly challenge the foundations of neoliberal capitalism. We can do this in many ways. 

Stronger movements

In the past century, people of colour in Britain have fought for equal rights alongside white-centred movements, be it through the Suffragettes or labour strikes. They’ve done this in the margins, achieving part but not all of the rights that have been afforded to their white British counterparts. By centreing the lived experience of BAME workers in all our actions, be it labour strikes, protests, or workplace organising, we can be sure to attend to those that are feeling the impact of the gig-economy now, not just the fear of it hitting us in the future. Investigate which sectors are predominantly BAME in identity, and understand their concerns, and do this without essentialising or tokenism of any one identity. Use your time to follow groups such as Hotel Workers Branch and Justice for Domestic Workers, and interrogate campaigns that are whitewashed or lack depth and integrity. 

Intersectional analysis

In our work, we need to recognise the overlapping – or intersecting – nature of discrimination that plays a role in our understanding of wage inequality. In this article I’ve concentrated on ‘people of colour’ as one group without doing the necessary work of breaking this down into gender, ability, class, sexuality, migration status and the many other social factors that influence how society influences the workplace. Uncovering this evidence will open our eyes to the reality of inequality, and a deeper understanding of the structure of the economy. Be mindful that using intersectionality as a tool to better understand different lived experiences does not absolve us of our privilege and the work we need to do on ourselves. 

Challenging narratives

An intersectional analysis also allows us to challenge ideas that are designed to divide us. An example of this is the widespread use of the term ‘white working-class’, which routinely excludes the reality of black, brown and Asian working class communities in Britain. Evidence consistently shows that a higher percentage of the BAME community are working class when compared to the white British population. Let’s also challenge the narrative of ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’ that comes from a Eurocentric view of our globalised world. Whilst I have embraced this terminology in this article, a vision for a new economy should use terms such as people of global majority, people from formerly colonised nations, or people of colour in order to free us from our colonial mindset. 

Relevant alternatives

The progressive ‘new economy’ scene in the UK is full of ideas for alternative practices to neoliberalism when it comes to work and wages. Consider ‘new economy’ projects that build co-operatives or use the gift economy. They are often designed for a lived experience that is so disconnected from those who need it, it renders them inaccessible and irrelevant to the broader goal of economic systems change. The irony here is that many of the alternatives are rooted in a non-European indigenous history, and have been appropriated by those who already have social power. When designing alternatives, take inspiration from some excellent organisations who are decolonising these ideas to make them work for black and brown communities. Explore why Black Lives Matter adopted Universal Basic Income as a central demand in their manifesto, and how one black community in Jackson, Mississippi is using technology and data to reinvent their local economy. 

So, ask yourself now “where is this work happening in the UK, and who knows about it?” We all want to commit to building a new economy that works for everyone. To do so we need to get our analysis clear, and recognise that capitalism will always be one step ahead of us unless we are willing to centre people of colour in the solutions we build.

If we do so, we will have built the foundations for alternatives that are powerful enough to uproot neoliberal capitalism for good. If we don’t then the ‘new economy’ will be little more than the successor to what we already have.

Gurpreet Bola is an organiser, trainer, researcher, and writer. She is committed to political and social systems change. Her economic analysis has supported activists to identify the root cause of social inequalities and oppression.

This is a print first feature published in STIR magazine.

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The Platform Co-op Development Kit is a multi-year project that advances the cooperative digital economy. The Kit is a project by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, homed at The New School in New York City, in collaboration with the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University in Toronto, and platform co-op communities worldwide.

The motivation behind this project is that we are approached, almost daily with the question of how to start a platform co-op. The work of the Kit is two-fold. First, we provide a range of resources that make it easier to start a platform co-op. Second, we will offer tools not simply by building coop technology but technology that will allow the platform co-op ecosystem to grow. We started the co-design process by engaging five pilot platform co-ops in Brazil, Germany, Australia, the United States, and India. The pilot groups:

• 3,000 babysitters in Illinois organized by the Service Workers Union looking for an onboarding, labor, and purchasing platform;

• young urban women in Ahmedabad, India who are part of the SEWA Federation of co-ops bringing beauty services to people’s homes through an app;

• trash pickers currently operating in Sao Paolo and Recife, Brazil, whose work recycling trash makes up more than 90 percent of Brazil’s entire recycling capacity;

• refugee women in Germany, starting in Hamburg with Syrian, Albanian, and Iranian women, who plan to offer a platform co-op for child care services and elder care;

• homecare workers in Australia, the only worker co-op in social care in Australia, that is seeking to build a governance tool for its remote rural members.

All open source tools that we will design with these groups will be customizable for a range of platform co-ops in various sectors and countries.

Initiated with a $1,000,000 grant from Google.org, this project seeks to raise a total of $10,000,000.

By building a broad coalition, our team will engage people around the globe who are seeking to learn about and then build platform co-ops with their communities.

By working with pilot groups in various sectors — from home services, garbage-recycling and beauty services, to child and elder care — we will demonstrate how the cooperative approach plays out in the digital economy. We will work with co-ops, technologists, policy facilitators, researchers, and freelancers to advance the movement for a cooperative digital economy. Watch an video introduction about this work here.

Read the press releases about the Kit from the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, The New School, and OCAD University. Explore how this work connects with Google.org’s “Future of Work” Initiative here. Read media coverage about the project with recent articles from Fast Company (also discussing the question of accepting Google funding), Shareable, and Philanthropy News Digest.

Goals of the Kit

Over the next two years, with the support of the platform co-op community, we will develop open source tools for use worldwide; and provide various resources such as essential legal, intellectual, and entrepreneurial resources that make it easier to start a platform co-op. This work depends on collaborations with cooperators around the world coming together to support one another and advance this movement.

These goals will be met through the following deliverables:

• Creation of open source labor platforms and online governance tools through co-design processes with five pilot groups, tailored to be extensible and customizable for other platform co-ops with similar needs;

• Development of an online wikipedia-style learning commons, activated by informal as well as institutional online learning groups in several countries;

• Development of a curriculum about the cooperative digital economy to be distributed with undergraduate and graduate programs in business schools and law schools as well as acceleratorator programs;

• Creation of a data-rich, interactive map of platform co-ops, and supporting organizations and individuals;

• Development of an international network of lawyers to provide legal resources to assist the launch of (platform) co-ops;

• Development of a global narrative co-written by co-op workers, researchers, unionistas, technologists, and policymakers.

• Ongoing reports and analysis about work in progress made available to the public online, and regular calls for community engagement and input

Strategy for Achieving Goals

The design and development of the tools will be guided by the platform co-op communities themselves. Full cycles of co-design, prototyping, implementation & evaluation will ensure that the tools fulfill the needs of the community. Additionally, by working with diverse pilot organizations and populations, our team will provide essential assistance to platform coops of all stripes, and to workers with many socioeconomic backgrounds. This reverses the dominant pattern of platform development which typically excludes marginalized groups, contributing to greater economic and social inequities. The project places vulnerable and marginalized workers at the center.

Creating a supporting infrastructure for platform co-ops through a learning commons, interactive map, cooperative curriculum development, and legal resources will launch simultaneously with pilot group work. Website development will be lead by the IDRC team, and we continue to engage with a number of collaborators to generate the various components that will eventually make up the online ecosystem. To achieve both goals, time and resources will be split over the next two years, with 70% of efforts going towards the pilot groups, and 30% towards the projects’s online learning components.

Finally, the project will run as an open and transparent community. All resources and updates will be available online to any prospective or existing co-op, and all interested persons. Explore recent updates, for example, from the IDRC on the Kit and our work with the pilot groups thus far. And review our blog updates documenting recent visits with our Hamburg and SEWA pilot groups.

Through collaboration with pilot groups and by engaging individuals committed to the movement, the toolkit grows from small successes. As our work progresses, we will engage other cooperative ventures, organizations, and individuals who can contribute different resources and services to advance this critical project. Stay up to date on our work so that now or in the near future, we can draw on the expertise of the community and find ways of collaborating.

How We Will Measure Success

Grant activities started on July 1, 2018 and will conclude with Google on July 2020. Iterations of the deliverables and prototypes will be freely available and open to critique and input as our work advances. A broader measurement of the project’s impact, however, will not be available until completion.

We will consider the project a success if the Kit was implemented by low income workers in at least three pilot groups & successfully transferred to at least one other labor market. Success would be based on the evidence of higher wages, better working conditions, democratic governance within the enterprise, & potential for scaling this work to more workers. Due to the nature of this work, these metrics can only be measured upon the completion of the project. In the same way a highway’s efficacy cannot be measured while it is still under construction, so too can the pilot groups’ effects not be known until full completion and implementation.

During the project, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium will provide qualitative research investigations and progress reports on the pilot groups. Written reports will provide big-picture analysis, and highlight successes, failures, best practices, and other findings from the pilot groups. These reports will also discuss the feasibility of these models applying to other industries or regions, and when applicable, offer policy recommendations.

For strengthening the platform co-op economic movement and building an online infrastructure of support, we will fulfill these objectives:

• Engage a variety of unique platform co-ops in distinct countries to facilitate the scaling of our labor platform and distributed governance tools

•Establish active learning groups engaged with our content online in at various countries

• Deliver high profile talks and media publications about Kit work

• Create a global narrative co-written by stakeholders and make it available for translation in different languages.

• Create and distribute a curriculum to shared with business schools, law schools, undergraduate or graduate programs at universities.

• Develop policy briefs and engage different political parties to consider

• Develop and share platform co-op worker testimonials to be hosted online

• Generate traffic to the platform.coop website with blogs and a new site design

We will also use non-parametric methodologies of measurement so that we do not impose a particular notion of success onto groups that are marginalized and have already suffered from the effects of traditional “successful” interventions.

The outcomes of the Kit will be diverse and variable, but collectively the change will be significant. We hope to reach the most marginalized of platform workers and build our work from their perspective. To achieve this we need to look beyond predetermined measures of success. If we only concern ourselves with measuring success through quantitative metrics, then we would be forced to develop quick interventions that scale quickly. We would be merely recreating the platforms of the past that have contributed to existing economic and social inequities and further marginalization. That is a strategy of the exploitative, extractive companies we hope not to emulate.

Instead, the project will demonstrate that we have only scratched the surface of imagining the possibilities for the cooperative digital economy. While our work over the next two years can begin to address the urgent needs for more organized research and infrastructure to support platform co-ops, more importantly, it will lay the foundation for future researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, co-op workers, technologists, and many others to pick-up this work and carry it forward in new directions.

Please consider joining us in this critical work. We need the time and energy of many people for this work to succeed. If you think you can help, please write to us at [email protected] and we can share more on how to get involved.

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Fabian Wallace-Stephens: Innovative initiatives are emerging to improve the quality of work across the globe. The recently launched Future Work Awards aims to recognise and champion them. What are we looking for? What do we expect to find? And how can you get involved?

A good starting point is the burgeoning WorkerTech scene in the UK. A partnership between The Resolution Trust and Bethnal Green Ventures has spawned initiatives such as Organise, the UK’s first workplace digital campaigning platform. Among their successes, Organise can count helping McDonald’s staff get their biggest pay rise in 10 years.

But traditional trade unions are innovating too. Through a partnership with IndyCube, a network of co-working spaces, Community Union are offering a range of services to self-employed people, including affordable invoice factoring. And the TUC has recently launched WorkSmart, an app to support younger workers who could benefit from union membership.

Even businesses such as Tesco are experimenting with technology to offer workers greater control and flexibility over shift scheduling. While Uber are piloting city-based engagement programs for their drivers.

Previous RSA research has highlighted how across Europe and North America, self-employed workers are banding together to address the challenges they face in the labour market. Based in San Francisco, Loconomics is a platform for booking local services (akin to TaskRabbit), which is cooperatively owned and governed by the service professionals that use it. And in Denver, Colorado, Green Taxi Co-operative has licensed an app which enables them to compete with other platforms.

In the Netherlands, self-employed people can join Breadfunds, a mutual sick pay fund, where members also offer each other practical support in times of ill health. While in France and Belgium, Business and Employment Cooperatives (BECs) such as Coopaname act as umbrella organisations for freelancers, enabling them to pool together business administration and other services such as training and workspace.

There is no one future of work

So far, we have only scratched the surface. Our search for the Future Work Awards is global. And our themes are diverse, spanning skills and training, worker voice and economic security (a full list can be found on our website).

However, we expect that in different countries, different innovations will be having the greatest impacts on workers because of the distinct challenges that they face. For example, many good work initiatives in the UK stem from trade union decline or growth in atypical forms of employment. But for parts of the world struggling with high levels of youth unemployment, the priority may be upskilling and/or job creation.

In our previous research we found that differences in economic and legal context can significantly affect the need for initiatives and their attractiveness to users. One of the reasons Breadfunds has over 12,000 members is because income protection insurance is excessively expensive in the Netherlands. But more reasonably priced services may be available in different markets. While BECs are essential in France because of differences in social security. Self-employed people don’t pay into the Government’s unemployment insurance fund but Coopaname enables them to become an ‘employee’ of the co-operative, meaning they are able to access these benefits.

Looking towards the future, trends can also appear more or less distressing in different places. Take the emergence of the gig economy. In the UK, this is often viewed as one whereby businesses are transferring additional risks onto workers. But in parts of the world such as South Asia, where so many are already independent workers, without employment protections to undermine, we should emphasise the opportunities. Economic activity will be better co-ordinated, with algorithms super efficiently matching supply and demand and creating more work in the process. And, as some commentators have pointed out, platforms can offer informal workers a degree of formalisation, by improving access to financial and digital services. Shifting from cash to e-payments, for instance, creates a transactional history that could help when applying for credit in the future.

How you can get involved

Through the awards, we hope to recognise and reward social innovators who are helping to bring about a better world of work. And by showcasing best practice from around the globe we want to encourage others to consider kick starting similar initiatives in their own communities and sectors.

If you run a good work initiative or know of one that deserves attention, you can submit a nomination through a short online form or find out more from our Future Work Awards site.

Nominations are open until mid-September, after which a panel of global judges will review the entries and announce the winners in November.

The Awards are hosted by the RSA Future of Work Centre and sponsored by Barclays. The RSA’s partners in the venture include the Canadian impact investor Social Capital Partners and systems design agency Alt Now Projects.

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Virtuous rent: a rudder that can transform our economy.

Peter Barnes: The London Underground abounds with warnings to “mind the gap,” referring to the space between station platforms and train doors. In our larger society similar warnings could be issued for the gaps between rich and poor and between humans and nature. These gaps must not only be minded, they must also be narrowed. The persistent question is how to do this, and I con­tend that a form of rent may be the best possible tool. But before we get to that, we must first become familiar with rent.

The term was first used by classical economists, including Adam Smith, to describe money paid to landowners. It was one of three income streams in the early years of capitalism, the others being wages paid to labor and interest paid to capital.

In Smith’s view, landlords benefited from land’s unique ability to enrich its owners “independent of any plan or project of their own.” This ability arises from the fact that the supply of good land is limited, while the demand for it steadily rises. The effect of landowners’ collection of rent, he concluded, isn’t to increase society’s wealth but to take money away from labor and capital. In other words, land rent is an extractor of wealth rather than a contributor to it.

A century later, a widely-read American economist named Henry George (his magnum opus, Progress and Poverty, sold over two million copies) enlarged Smith’s insight substantially. At a time when Karl Marx was blaming capital­ists for expropriating surplus value from workers, George blamed landlords for expropriating rent from everyone. Such ­rent­ extraction operated like “an immense wedge being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.” George’s proposed remedy was a steep tax on land that would recapture for society most of landowners’ parasitic gains.

More recently, the concept of rent was expanded to include mono­poly pro­fits, the extra income a company reaps by quashing com­pe­tition and raising prices. Smith had written about this form of wealth extraction too, though he didn’t call it rent. “The interest of any particular branch of trade or manufac­tures is always to widen the market and to narrow the competition…To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can only serve to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens.”

It’s important to recognize that the tax Smith spoke of isn’t the kind we pay to government; rather, it’s the kind we pay, much less visibly, to businesses with power. That’s because prices in capitalism are driven by four factors: supply, demand, market power and politi­cal power. The first two, which are omnipresent in economics texts, deter­mine what might be called fair market value; the last two, which are prevalent in the real world, determine rent. Actual prices charged are the sum of fair market value and rent. Another way to say this is that rent is the extra money people pay above what they’d pay in truly com­pe­titive markets.

More recently, the term has been further extended to include income from privileges granted by government—import quotas, mining rights, subsidies, tax loop­holes and so on. Many econo­mists use the term “rent-seeking” to describe the multiple ways special interests use govern­ment to enrich them­selves at the expense of others. If you’re wondering why Washington, D.C. and its envi­rons have grown so prosperous in recent decades, it’s not because govern­ment itself has become gargantuan, it’s because rent-seeking has.

In short, traditional rent is income received not because of anything a person or business produces, but because of rights or power a person or business possesses. It con­sists of takings from the larger whole rather than additions to it. It redis­tributes wealth within an econ­omy but doesn’t add any. As British economist John Kay put it in the Financial Times, “When the appropriation of the wealth of others is illegal, it’s called theft or fraud. When it’s legal, it’s called rent.”

Because rent isn’t listed separately on any price tag or corpor­ate in­come statement, we don’t know exactly how much of it there is, but it’s likely there’s quite a lot. Consider, for example, health care in America, about one-sixth of our economy. There are many reasons the U.S. spends 80 percent more per capita on health care than does Canada, while achieving no better results, but one of the biggest is that Canada has wrung huge amounts of rent out of its health care system and we haven’t. Every Canadian is covered by non-profit rather than profit-maximizing health insurance, and pharmaceuti­cal prices are tightly controlled. By contrast, in the U.S., drug companies overcharge because of patents, Medicare is barred from bargaining for lower drug prices, and private insurers add many costs and inefficiencies.

Or consider our financial sector. Commercial banks, the kind that take depo­sits and make loans, receive an immensely valuable gift from the federal gov­ernment: the right to create money. They’re allowed to do this through what’s called fractional reserve bank­ing, which lets them lend, with interest, about ten times more than they have on deposit. This gift alone is worth billions.

Then there are commercial banks’ cousins, investment banks, which are in the business of trading securities. They can’t mint money the way commercial banks do, but they have tricks of their own. For one, they charge hefty fees for taking private companies public, thus seizing part of the liquidity pre­mium public trading creates. For another, they make lofty sums by creat­ing, and then manipulating, hyper-complex financial “products” that are, in effect, bets on bets. This pumps up the casino economy and extracts capital that could otherwise benefit the real economy.

We could wander through other major industries—energy, tele­com­muni­ca­tions, broadcasting, agriculture—and find similar ex­tractions of rent. What percentage of our economy, then, consists of rent? This is a question you’d think economists would explore, but few do. To my knowledge, the only prominent economist who has even raised it is Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate at Columbia University, and he hasn’t answered it quantitatively.

The amount of rent in the U.S. economy, Stiglitz says, is “hard to quantify (but) clearly enormous.” Moreover, “to a significant degree,” it “redistributes money from those at the bottom to those at the top.” Further, it not only adds no value to the economy, it “distorts resource allocation and makes the econ­omy weaker.” 

So far I’ve described rent as a negative force in our economy. Now I want to introduce the concept of virtuous rent, a form of rent that would have distinctly positive effects.

A perfect example of virtuous rent is the money paid to Alaskans by the Alaska Permanent Fund. Since 1980, the Permanent Fund has distributed equal yearly divi­­dends to every person who resides in Alaska for one year or more. The divi­dends—which have ranged from $1,000 to $3,269 per person —come from a giant mutual fund whose beneficiaries are all the people of Alas­­ka, present and future. The fund is capitalized by earnings from Alaska’s oil, a commonly owned resource. Given the steady flow of cash to its entire pop­u­la­tion, it’s not surprising that Alaska has the highest median income and one of the lowest pover­ty rates of any state in the nation.

Broadly speaking, virtuous rent would be any flow of money that starts by raising the cost of harmful or extractive activity and ends by increasing the incomes of all members of society. Another way to think of it is as rent that we, as collective co-owners, charge for private use of our common assets. Think, for example, of charging polluters for using our common atmosphere and then sharing the proceeds equally.

There are two key differences between traditional and virtuous rent. The first has to do with how the rent is collected, the second with how it’s distributed.

Traditional rent is collected by businesses whose market and/or political power enables them to charge higher-than-competitive prices. It leads to higher prices that serve no economic, social or ecological function. Virtuous rent, by con­trast, would be collected by not-for-profit trusts that represent all mem­bers of a polity equally. It would be generated by charging private busi­nesses for using common assets that most of the time they use for free. Such rent would also lead to higher prices, but for good reasons: to make business­es pay costs they currently shift to society, nature and future genera­tions, and to offset traditional rent.

The second difference is distributional. Traditional rent flows upward to the small minority that owns most of the stock of rent-extracting businesses. Virtuous rent would flow to everyone equally.

When collection and distribution are merged, the effects of traditional rent are doubly negative: it diminishes the efficiency of our economy and the in­comes of all those who pay it but don’t get any. The effects of virtuous rent, by con­trast, are doubly positive: it increases the health and fairness of our economy and the security of our middle class.

At this moment, of course, traditional rent totals trillions of dollars a year, while virtuous rent (out­side of Alaska) is more of a concept than a reality. But virtuous rent can and should grow. To understand how this could hap­pen, it’s necessary to ex­plore two other concepts: common wealth and exter­nalities.

Common wealth has several components. One consists of gifts of nature we inherit together: our atmosphere and oceans, water­sheds and wetlands, forests and fertile plains, and so on. In almost all cases, we overuse these gifts because there’s no cost attached to using them.

Another component is wealth created by our ancestors: sciences and techno­lo­gies, legal and political systems, our financial infra­structure, and much more. These confer enormous benefits on all of us, but a small minority reaps far more financial gain from them than do most of us.

Yet another chunk of common wealth is what might be called “wealth of the whole”—the value added by the scale and syner­gies of our economy itself. The notion of “wealth of the whole” dates back to Adam Smith’s insight two-and-a-half centuries ago that labor specialization and the exchange of goods —pervasive features of a whole system—are what make nations rich. Beyond that, it’s obvious that no business can prosper by itself: all busi­nesses need cus­­tomers, suppliers, distributors, highways, money and a web of comple­men­tary products (cars need fuel, software needs hardware, and so forth). So the economy as a whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, it’s an asset without which the parts would have almost no value at all.

The sum of wealth created by nature, our ancestors and our econ­omy as a whole is what I here call common wealth. Several things can be said about our common wealth. First, it’s the goose that lays almost all the eggs of private wealth. Second, it’s extremely large but also (like the dark matter of the universe) mostly invisible. Third, because it’s not cre­ated by any indivi­dual or business, it belongs to all of us jointly. And fourth, because no one has a greater claim to it than anyone else, it belongs to all of us equally, or as close to equally as we can arrange.

The big, rarely asked question about our current economy is who gets the benefits of common wealth? No one disputes that private wealth creators are entitled to the wealth they create, but who is entitled to the wealth we share is an entirely different question. My contention is that the rich are rich not so much because they create wealth, but because they capture a much larger share of common wealth than they’re entitled to. Another way to say this is that the rich are as rich as they are—and the rest of us are poorer than we should be—because extracted rent far exceeds virtuous rent. If that’s the truth of the matter, the solution is to diminish the first kind of rent and increase the second kind. 

Externalities are a better-known concept than common wealth. They’re the costs businesses impose on others—workers, communities, nature and fu­ture generations—but don’t pay themselves. The classic example is pollution.

Almost all economists accept the need to “internalize externalities,” by which they mean making businesses pay the full costs of their activities. What they don’t often discuss are the cash flows that would arise if we actually did this. If businesses pay more money, how much more, and to whom should the checks be made out?

These aren’t trivial questions. In fact, they’re among the most momentous questions we must address in the twenty-first century. The sums involved can, and indeed should, be very large—after all, to diminish harms to nature and society, we must internalize as many unpaid costs as possible. But how should we collect the money, and whose money is it?

One way to collect the money was proposed nearly a century ago by British economist Arthur Pigou, a colleague of Keynes’ at Cam­bridge. When the price of a piece of nature is too low, Pigou said, government should impose a tax on using it. Such a tax would reduce our usage while raising revenue for government.

In theory Pigou’s idea makes sense; the trouble with it lies in imple­mentation. No western government wants to get into the business of price-setting; that’s a job best left to markets. And even if politicians tried to adjust prices with taxes, there’s little chance they’d get them “right” from nature’s perspective. Far more likely would be tax rates driven by the very corporations that domi­nate government and overuse nature now.

An alternative is to bring some non-governmental entities into play; after all, the reason we have externalities in the first place is that no one represents stakeholders harmed by shifted costs. But if those stakeholders were repre­sent­ed by legally accountable agents, that problem could be fixed. The void into which externalities now flow would be filled by trustees of common wealth. And those trustees would charge rent.

As for whose money it is, it follows from the above that payments for most externalities—and in particular, for costs imposed on living creatures present and future—should flow to all of us together as beneficiaries of common wealth. They certainly shouldn’t flow to the companies that impose the exter­nalities; that would defeat the purpose of internalizing them. But neither should they flow to government, as Pigou suggested.

In my mind, there’s nothing wrong with government taxing our individual shares of common wealth rent, just as it taxes other personal income, but government shouldn’t get first dibs on it. The proper first claimants are we, the people. One could even argue, as economist Dallas Burtraw has, that government capture of this income may be an unconstitutional taking of pri­vate property.

This brings us back to virtuous rent. There are several points that can be made about this sort of rent.

First, paying virtuous rent to ourselves has a very different effect than paying extractive rent to Wall Street, Microsoft or Saudi princes. In addition to dis­couraging overuse of nature, it returns the money we pay in higher prices to where it does our families and economy the most good: our own pockets. From there we can spend it on food, housing or anything else we choose. Such spending not only helps us; it also helps businesses and their employees. It’s like a bottom-up stimulus machine in which the people rather than the government do the spending. This is no trivial virtue at a time when fiscal and monetary policy have both lost their potency.

VIRTUOUS RENT

Second, virtuous rent isn’t a set of government policies that can be changed when political winds shift. Rather, it’s a set of pipes within the market that, once in place, will circulate money indefinitely, thereby sustaining a large middle class and a healthier planet even as politicians and their policies come and go.

And third, though virtuous rent requires government action to get started, it has the political virtue of avoiding the bigger/smaller government tug-of-war that paralyzes Washington today. It thus can appeal to voters and politicians in the center, left and right.

A trim tab is a tiny flap on a ship or airplane’s rudder. The designer Buck­minster Fuller often noted that moving a trim tab slightly turns a ship or a plane dramatically. If we think of our economy as a moving vessel, the same metaphor can be applied to rent. Depending on how much of it is collected and whether it flows to a few or to many, rent can steer an economy toward extreme inequality or a large middle class. It can also guide an economy toward excessive use of nature or a safe level of use. In other words, in addi­tion to being a wedge (as Henry George put it), rent can also be a rudder. An economy’s outcomes depend on how we turn the rudder.

Think about the board game Monopoly. The object is to squeeze so much rent out of other players that you wind up with all their money. You do this by acquiring monopolies and building hotels on them. However, there’s another feature of the game that offsets this extracting of rent: all players get a cash payment when they pass Go. This can be thought of as virtuous rent.

As Monopoly is designed, the rent extracted through monopoly power greatly exceeds the virtuous rent players receive when pass­ing Go. The result is that the game always ends the same way: one player gets all the money. But sup­pose we tip the scale the other way. Suppose we decrease the extracted rent and increase the virtuous kind. For example, we could pay players five times as much for passing Go and reduce hotel rents by half. What then happens?

Instead of flowing upward and concentrating in the hands of a single winner, rent flows more evenly. Instead of the game ending when one winner takes all, the game continues with many players remaining.

The point I wish to make is that different rent flows can steer a game—and more importantly, an economy—toward different outcomes. Among the out­comes that can be affected by differing rent flows are the levels of wealth co­n­centration, pollution and real investment as opposed to specu­lation.

Rent, in other words, is a powerful tool. And it’s also something we can fiddle with. Do we want less extracted rent? More virtuous rent? If so, it’s up to us to build the pipes and turn the valves.

Photo by Paul Housberg

The post How to Create a Bottom-Up Stimulus Machine to Fix Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But the fog of this battle seems to reveal only a miasma of viewpoints, which is distracting society to the point of utter confusion. In the US, we see this in the conflict between a fake news vernacular, which is desperately trying to shape itself as the people’s story; and the media ‘mother tongue’, which is desperately trying to represent the interests of a corporate elite. Meanwhile, the actual vernacular of the workers’ common tongue has been lost — besmirched and degraded by low wages and the even lower significance accorded to industrial labor and jobs.

This loss of identity becomes very clear in America’s present power struggle between the poor white nationalists and the rich white globalists, in which all people of color are collateral victims. In the Hegelian solution to this problem, commoners are now rediscovering their roots in agroeconomy, as they volunteer to relocalize and thus revitalize their communities. They are also using digital technology to support these efforts. But in reaching back to their pre-industrial roots in ecology, while using the digital technology created and controlled by corporate monopolies, our commoners have not developed a vision or explanation as to why they are still so disjointed from their vernacular. They have not yet recognized nor claimed their identity as digital workers. They have yet to develop a view of themselves as local people who are building the cooperative sustainability of their commons for present and future generations.

When the smoke of battle lifts, and they fully recognize themselves as embodying the vital force of a new, digitally-supported labor movement dedicated to a sustainable society — seeing themselves as workers wresting their lives and livelihoods from the local ecology through new forms production and provisioning, supported by digital cooperatives — the new vernacular of the commons will appear, and people will recognize, deep down, in the very the cells of their bodies, that they knew this all along. ¡Cómo no! They will reconnect with their ancestors’ dreams for the common good, celebrate the joys of collaborating with their neighbors and build a new social contract of cooperative sustainability for their descendants. The irony of the ‘commons’ is that capitalism has made the commons so invisible and unrecognizable that it has become uncommon — uncommon not as in something wonderfully unique, but rather low-caste and useless. Here, I think, is the key to the vernacular epistemology of the commons: to turn what is uncommonly vital — the evolutionary power of labor in the sustenance of life, knowledge and culture — back into what is common.

Photo by Flocke

The post Emergence of a New Story: Redeveloping a Vernacular for Workers as Commoners appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The authors focus on what has been called ‘commons-based peer production’ but also address the more controversial case of ‘platform capitalism’ (such as Uber or AirBnB). These new forms of production and work pose real challenges for the trade union movement and workers. According to some research, there is evidence of a direct connection between precarious work, new unemployment and these emerging forms of production and work.

The aim of the authors of this brief is to highlight also the opportunities that the emergence of peer production offers for the labour movement and workers in the form of a new wave of cooperative organisations that can create ‘non-subordinate labour’. You can read the full report though the embed below, or browse through the sections and comment on it in the Commons Transition Wiki.

The Emergence of Peer Production Challenges and Opportunities for Labour and Unions by P2P Foundation on Scribd

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In this brilliant overview, “Transient Solidarities: commitment and collective action in post-industrial societies“, that starts with historical forms, he outlines the new forms of solidarity that are born within networked societies.

Photo by TwomasC

The post How do we mobilize today ? Charles Heckscher on Transient Solidarities appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Platform cooperativism has the potential to completely transform the caregiving industry – including childcare and homecare – into dignified jobs where people make a livable wage and have control over their work lives. Because of this potential, the ICA Group has been partnering with multiple divisions of the Service Employees International Union to research, build models, and launch unionized platform coops. For example, The ICA Group has been working with SEIU Public Services Division to develop a childcare platform solution that enables family childcare providers to benefit from shared services, centralized administration, as well as joint marketing services. The coop-network, likely to launch this coming spring, will further act as a bridge between industry, unions and policy-makers who share the goal of improving childcare jobs and quality.”

Photo by havens.michael34

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