Duncan McCann: 

Platforms – like Uber, Deliveroo, or TaskRabbit – connect services and products with consumers. With both sides theoretically having control over the interaction, and investing in the platform to reap the rewards, the rapid spread of platforms has the potential to revolutionise capitalism. But increasing concerns over the past few years around tech monopolies and the potential erosion of workers’ rights through the gig economy have raised questions over who really holds control over the platforms, and what impact this has on workers and customers.

Platform co-operatives present a possible alternative to traditional platforms which tend towards monopoly, concentrate power and erode workers’ rights. Drawing on a cooperative lineage which spreads out ownership and control, platform co-operatives could present a brighter future. But there are barriers to the spread of platform co-ops, including challenges of raising capital, finding the right skills within the organisation, competing with Silicon Valley, and harnessing positive network effects.

This is the second of two reports exploring the potential for platform co-ops, drawing on work we undertook with support from NESTA’s ShareLab fund. The previous report, A Better Gig? focused on the concerns of both drivers and passengers engaging in the private hire gig economy in West Yorkshire, and suggested that platform co-ops could go some way to remedying these. This paper draws on these lessons to set out the main challenges to setting up platform co-ops, and suggest ways of overcoming them.

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Through our own research, and in particular through observing the development of a new ride-hailing app started by drivers in South Yorkshire, we have identified five areas of challenge for platform co-operatives. Firstly, platform co-ops are not attractive to traditional venture capitalists and tech investors. Platform co-ops can utilise other sources of capital (crowdfunding, co-operative banks and credit unions, or blockchain and alternative currencies) but will still never be able to match the billions raised in Silicon Valley. Secondly, co-operatives must commit long-term operational and financial commitment to building and maintaining their technology. Thirdly, coops need technology which can enable it to recruit drivers and passengers in parallel, and to distribute the profits of the business. Fourth, platform co-ops must find a way of subsidising their early entry into the market in order to build a profile for themselves. And fifth, platform co-ops must find a way to harness the virtuous cycle of positive network effects.

These challenges are difficult for platform co-operatives to overcome. In the ridehailing sector, we posit that co-operatives can be most successful in either focusing on a large city-scale project, or creating a network of federated co-ops to overcome some of the challenges. In other sectors, like cleaning and social care, the less complex tech demands mean that platform co-ops can make more of an impact. As well as developing alternative market interventions, we need to tackle the dominance of existing platforms.

We are at a crossroads. Traditional platforms seemed invincible until very recently, but regulatory battles and consumer action are changing the platform landscape. Platform cooperatives can be part of building a more equitable vision of the future. But small businesses cannot do it alone.

1. We provide a series of recommendations to make platform co-operatives viable.
2. We need new funding structures that can provide alternatives to the venture capital funding model.
3. New platform co-ops must collaborate with each other and, where appropriate, form federated structures.
4. Workers should be provided with the necessary skills training and support to establish their own co-operatives.
5. Locally-focused commissioning from the public sector could provide a vital revenue stream to platform co-operatives.
6. Government must enforce existing regulation robustly to ensure a level playing field for new platform co-ops.
7. Users and consumers need to understand the impact of spending their time and money on established platforms, and be given opportunities to spend their money on ethical alternatives.

The structural challenges outlined in this report offer some of the answers as to why we have not seen more platform co-ops emerge and flourish. Platform co-ops offer us hope that we can harness the benefits of digital platforms without the harms that many of the current ones create. But their creation will require both continued experimentation and the support of policy makers both to enforce existing regulations on platforms, and create new support structures. Only by working together can we hope to create a digital economy that truly works for everyone.

Photo by the meanMRmustard

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Climate change is fuelling record temperatures and sweeping fires, but the progressive response is lacking.

David Powell, Head of Environment & Green Transition: The newspapers read like something from a dystopian sci-fi film about a world ravaged by climate breakdown. But it’s today, and it’s real.

Heat records are being smashed. Deadly wildfires are sweeping across Greece and far beyond; there are even some in the Arctic Circle — the Arctic, for heaven’s sake. We had our own taste, on Saddleworth Moor. The three hottest months of June ever have all come in the past four years. It’s a season in the sun for climate scientists, who are saying: this is what we expected, get used to it. A new report from Parliament’s green watchdog agrees. This stuff kills people.

We should be freaking out. But we’re not, are we? Not in our guts. Not properly. Not even, really, at all.

It’s easy enough to have pops at the Government’s increasingly Janus-faced cognitive dissonance – with ministers slipping between trying to badge the UK as world leaders on climate change while merrily giving the green light to fracking.

But where’s the UK left, right now, on climate change?

It’s not a question of knowledge. Progressives get it – intellectually speaking. You’d have to be a bit of a doofus not to. Climate change is clearly a problem. A great big, era-defining, ecology-changing, civilisation-disrupting Problem. And it makes logical sense for us as a matter of justice. We know it will make life tougher for people and places where life is already tough, and that those that who do the least to cause the problem are left on the sharp end: more likely to be displaced, or starved, or flooded, or dead.

But brains and hearts are different things. For some on the left, environmental justice remains as important to their DNA as any other type of justice: their heart always has been, and still is, firmly in it. But more generally, some things still feel a bit… lacking.

Things like this:

1. A modern, compelling narrative on why climate change really matters for the left in the year 2018.

An new progressive story on climate change in the UK is needed urgently. One that feels urgent, authentic and contemporary. One about how climate breakdown is intimately connected to the things that we worry about and the values that we hold. One about people, not systems; principles, not lines on graphs. Not a vague aspiration for jobs in clean energy, but one about work, and home, and international solidarity, and justice, and fairness.

It is, after all, fundamentally a story about the same old issues. How do economies work? Who holds power, and who doesn’t want to change? Who owns things and who doesn’t? Who lives? Who dies? Who decides?

2. Big ideas to bring climate action right into the heart of a radical policy platform. 

The fossil fuel age must end. We need to leave most oil, coal and gas undug and unburned. And we need to adapt to the climate change we’re already on the hook for, reshaping how our buildings, towns, cities and landscapes work so that the poorest don’t bear the brunt.

Too much has been left to markets for too long and this has played a huge role in getting us into this mess in the first place. So tinkering won’t do it. We need to see ambitious and responsible climate action as a fundamental purpose of economic policy. Massive changes are needed to the types of investment — in people, places and kit — we unleash. It means actively intervening in what we tax, spend, support, don’t support, and how major establishment institutions like the Treasury understand their role.

We need to see ambitious and responsible climate action as a fundamental purpose of economic policy.

And all of that has to be done in a way that closes the gap between rich and poor, and takes power and ownership out of the hands of polluters. It’s no small challenge: it will take not just big ideas but the verve to sell them as part of a bigger suite of transformative economic reform. NEF’s work on greening the Bank of England, major new taxes on polluters, and frequent flyer levies are just three such proposals.

3. Getting real about the ​‘just transition’.

There is far too much tiptoeing around the unpleasant reality that ending the fossil fuel age means many people will have to change jobs, and not necessarily on a timescale of their choosing. The increasing intensity of climate will ultimately force changes in policy; technology is already weakening the business case for fossil fuels.

There’s a right and a wrong way to transition industries. It mustn’t be a tale of desecration and abandonment, as it was with the coal mines in the 1980s. But it must happen, so let’s do it in a democratic and empowering way. Trade unions have an important leadership role here, as they grapple with how to respond ambitiously to climate change while representing members who have jobs (and often good jobs) in climate unfriendly industries.

Most importantly, those with the most to lose from the transition should be in the driving seat of designing, then demanding, a national plan for the skills, investment and opportunities they need. As a start, progressive politicians could establish a grassroots just transition commission in which those in, for example, oil jobs in Aberdeen or smelting steel in Port Talbot get to initiate a transition plan, working with businesses and local leaders.

NEF will focus on all three of these areas over the coming years, as part of our mission to help build an economy that works for people and the environment. There really are, after all, no jobs on a dead planet.

Photo by arbyreed

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The latest phase of research from the New Economics Foundation proposes a new framework of ideas that are all premised on the need for a more equal and sharing society, one that “serves the interests of people and the planet, not the other way around”.

A major new report was launched this week by the New Economics Foundation that sets out their vision for a ‘new social settlement’ for the United Kingdom. The working paper is the culmination of a series of discussions and publications on this theme by the London-based think tank from the past two years, and is intended to contribute to broader debates about the future of the welfare system and a new economics.

Although the scope of the report is limited to the UK and a predominantly Western European perspective of social policy, there is much to draw and learn from its framing on what it calls ‘sustainable social justice’. In simple language, the introduction and first section explains the three main goals of a new social settlement that needs to deliver social justice, environmental sustainability, and a more equal distribution of power. All three of these themes are framed in terms of the principle of sharing either directly or indirectly, and they form the outline of a new narrative that challenges conventional economic assumptions about the role of governments and market forces in shaping society.

For example, the concept of social justice is explicated in terms of both the need for wellbeing and equality, which requires a systemic approach that can tackle the fundamental causes of economic inequality (i.e. disparities in income, wealth and access to resources). Drawing on NEF’s extensive research into the self-evident desirability of pursuing greater equality, they outline why government policies need to tackle the major drivers of poverty and inequality at root. This is particularly because economic inequality is self-perpetuating, as the political influence of wealthy elites mitigates against the equitable sharing of a society’s wealth and resources through redistributive measures.

The second goal of a new social settlement – environmental sustainability – goes far beyond the challenges addressed by the post-war welfare state in 1940s Britain, and is premised on the need to share resources more equally within safe environmental limits. In no uncertain terms, the report asserts that the twin goals of social justice and environmental sustainability cannot be achieved through market mechanisms or individual action alone, and depends on pooling resources, recognising shared interests and acting together. Civil society, it states, has “no inherent mechanisms for achieving equality”, which therefore calls for strong action from the state to regulate, tax, invest and redistribute in order to curb and reverse trends towards environmental catastrophe.

Shared power and collective action

All of this will be impossible to accomplish without the final goal of a more equal distribution of power, which the report recognises is central to determining “how far social, environmental, economic and political resources are nurtured or exhausted, sequestered or shared”. To achieve this goal, it argues that a new social settlement has to reverse current trends towards deregulating markets and privatising services, and instead ensure collective control of the public over “access to the means of achieving fair shares” of society’s resources. The principles of subsidiarity and equality are cited as pivotal in this regard, where power is exercised at the lowest level possible to achieve defined goals.

This again has definite implications for the role of the state which, unlike charities or businesses, are “deemed to represent the popular will and are subject – in theory if not always in practice – to democratic control”. Where the state is clumsy and overbearing, the report asserts that “the answer is not to roll them back and leave more room for markets, but to reinvigorate the mechanisms of democratic control and safeguard state power in the public interest”.

In accordance with the overarching goal of creating a fair and equitable distribution of resources between people, places, and even generations while at the same respecting planetary boundaries, one of the main objectives of a new social settlement is to “plan for prosperity without relying on economic growth”. Drawing particularly on the work of Professor Tim Jackson to argue that continued growth is incompatible with a socially-just and ecologically-sustainable future, the report sets out its possibly most radical message: that a new social settlement must therefore be designed to function well with little or no additional public funds.

Subsequent broad recommendations are made in line with this objective, namely to shift investment and action upstream (i.e. for governments and civil society to focus on preventative approaches and the systemic causes of social, economic and environmental problems); to nurture the core economy (i.e. tap into uncommodified human and social resources, which is predicated on the need to share time and strengthen relationships outside of the money economy); and also to foster solidarity. The latter objective is said to feature too rarely in contemporary debates about social policy, and yet is foundational in creating a new social settlement that needs to be based – as emphasised earlier in the report – on “people getting together, pooling resources, and acting collectively to support each other”.

In this way, the concept of solidarity as outlined by the NEF is clearly associated with the ethic and practise of sharing in both an interpersonal and collective sense, resting as it does on people expressing sympathy and responsibility for one another, and offering active mutual support in pursuit of a shared purpose. In their view, society needs to nurture a kind of solidarity that is “inclusive, expansive and active, both between groups who are ‘strangers’ to each other, and across present and future generations. The ‘common challenge or adversary’ is not specifically other people, but the systems and structures that shore up inequalities, foster short-term greed, plunder the natural environment, and blight the prospects of future generations”.

A new political narrative

The proposals for change that follow are all measures that can help to strengthen solidarity, which also depends on abandoning a neoliberal ideology that is preventing society from moving in the direction of “shared power and responsibility, and collective action to meet common goals”. This includes measures to narrow inequalities, devolve power, promote co-production, strengthen the core economy, foster collective forms of ownership and control, build an inclusive social security system, and develop state institutions and actions that encourage collaboration between groups and organisations. Their proposals for transforming public services may not be revolutionary in themselves, even though they indeed represent a radical shift away from current policy and practice – acknowledging as they do the substantial dangers of market-led reforms, and the need for greater participation from public and civil society organisations in which relationships must “cease to be driven by competition and profit-seeking”.

At a public event to launch the NEF’s work on the new social settlement, there was a lively and interesting discussion among the panellists and audience about the value of writing reports of this nature, especially when government policies in most countries are generally moving in the opposite direction of the NEF’s vision. Greenpeace’s UK political director, Ruth Davis, argued that what really matters is the “politics of persuasion” as logical arguments and clearly-written policies will never be enough in themselves to challenge the powerful and change society. The NEF report’s author, Anna Coote, responded that the report is intended as a framework with pointers that can be built upon, as we also need a new narrative about what can and can’t be changed. She recognised that stories are useful in convincing and motivating people, but emphasised that we need the politics too.

This is perhaps the major contribution of the NEF’s latest phase of research, as spelled out in a section of the report titled ‘a note on ideology and narrative’. The prevailing political narrative – based as it is on an outmoded view of human nature, false assumptions about public institutions, and a blind adherence to endless economic growth – is so entrenched that it is now considered “common sense, apolitical, and incontrovertible”. We cannot simply graft onto this neoliberal worldview an additional set of ideas that favour social justice, environmental sustainability and a more equal distribution of power. Instead, it is necessary to challenge the old dominant narrative altogether with an entirely new set of economic and political assumptions. And this new framework of ideas that are being proposed by the NEF are all premised on the need for a more equal and sharing society, one that “serves the interests of people and the planet, not the other way around”.

As the report states, it “won’t work if we simply use evidence, moral claims, and reasoned debate to refute the neoliberal story. We need to build a more powerful story, with a new framework. A first step is to bring ideology out and to rehabilitate the notion that policies can be, and usually are, grounded in systems of ideas and ideals”.

Read the full report by the New Economics Foundation: People, planet, power: towards a new social settlement

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