The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.

This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

WINNER: The 2018 McGannon Center Book Prize and shortlisted for the Goddar Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice 

The New York Times Book Review: “Riveting.”

Naomi Klein: “This book is downright scary.”

Ethan Zuckerman, MIT: “Should be required reading.”

Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: “A must-read.”

Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform: “The single most important book about technology you will read this year.”

Cory Doctorow: “Indispensable.”

Reposted from MacMillan publishers. Click on the link for more reviews and an excerpt.

The post Book of the Day: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor appeared first on P2P Foundation.

About Virginia Eubanks

Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s,and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. She was a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a Fellow at New America. She lives in Troy, NY.

Reposted from the Laura Flanders Show

The post Virginia Eubanks on Automating Inequality appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.

The post Good work across the globe – introducing the future work awards appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Julia Toynbee Lagoutte and Samir Jeraj discuss housing rights in the UK.

The pitter patter of a keyboard hums in the dust-speckled London space. Two tattered sofas in the corner are dwarfed by 70 square metres of open office space. Matthew, a thirtysomething freelance documentary film-maker, is working from home. One floor down, along from an old reception area, is a makeshift kitchen shared with 12 other people. Matthew is a property guardian, one of many thousands living in European cities such as London. Property guardianship started out in the 1990s in the Netherlands as ‘Anti-Kraak’ (anti-squat), a way to counter squatting. The owner of a building would employ a company to manage the building until it was sold, demolished, or redeveloped. That company would find people – often students and artists who needed cheap living and working space – to live in the building for below market rents and very short-notice agreements. The building would remain occupied, and thus secured against squatting. Some of these companies are set up for the sole purpose of property guardianship while for others property guardianship is one option in their portfolio of security measures. These businesses have since spread from the Netherlands to other parts of Europe; industry pioneer Camelot Europe has offices in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, and France.

Whilst initially seen as a marginal and stopgap solution for students or artists, property guardianship in London and elsewhere has become increasingly normalised, formalised, and expensive. Amidst the largely positive press, criticisms from lawyers and guardians themselves have joined those of squatter and housing organisations, pointing out that the legal grey area guardians occupy – as neither security guards nor tenants – opens the door wide open to exploitation of this new class of ‘sub-tenants’. On top on this, this practice represents a symptom of a problem; a symptom that has managed to market itself as a solution.

Where are my rights?

Property guardians in the UK are legally classed as ‘licensees’, not tenants (they pay a ‘license fee’, rather than rent). They are not protected by tenant rights, such as those regarding privacy and tenure. The average contract between a guardian and the property guardianship company would include: the right for the company to visit all areas of the property at any time without warning; no pets or children (even to stay one night); no guests in the building without the guardian present. Some properties are not subject to HMO (houses of multiple occupancy) laws about about how many toilets and showers are needed for a certain number of people, for example*. In one old doctor’s surgery in South London, nine guardians shared one shower and one kitchen. Many properties don’t have internet or phone lines and often guardians are not allowed to install washing machines or ovens – the short notice period means this is often not worth the cost anyway. The deposit guardians have to give to their property guardianship company (up to 800 pounds) is not legally protected, and companies such as Camelot are notoriously bad at returning them. Initially, guardians were given as little as 24 hours to move out but this has increased to 28 days after lawyers highlighted this was not legal. Many contracts also prevent guardians from speaking to the media about their experience.

In order to legally protect themselves from having to provide tenants’ rights, property guardianship companies ensure guardians cannot claim ‘exclusive access to a space’, one of the key conditions of being a tenant. This they do through unannounced visits to the guardians’ rooms whenever they want, often once or twice a month. Mirela, a mental health nurse from Romania, explained, “I don’t feel comfortable with a stranger coming in my room and finding a note when I come back. Someone has been here. I feel like my space is invaded and also because I’m quite tidy I wouldn’t like people to know if I have clothes around. I’m paying, at least give me my privacy.”

Guardians are not protected from sudden rent hikes: one morning Matthew received an email informing him his monthly ‘fee’ would increase from 350 to 550 pounds the following month. Guardians have no idea whether they will stay 28 days or three years in a place. Alice, an archaeology graduate working in tourism, was given notice to leave within two weeks of moving into a new place, shouldering time and financial burdens that she could ill afford. The lack of security built into being a guardian affects their homemaking; they tend to make less effort or have less furniture and a more makeshift and temporary feeling leads to many never really feeling at home, even after years of inhabiting a place (especially knowing a stranger could enter at any moment). This is particularly visible in larger properties – such as ex-care homes or old office buildings – with locks on cupboards, new guardians coming and going without input from other residents, and the anonymous feel of a hostel.

Many guardians report feeling anxious about the possibility of having to move on and uncomfortable with the lack of privacy and rights. Alice remarked of living in a property guardianship that “I didn’t feel secure, I never felt stable.”

Pop-up people

Looking at the characteristics required of a guardian, we can begin to see how property guardianship represents an extension of deeper contemporary socio-economic trends into the area of housing. For the characteristics required of them – reliable, flexible, disposable – are also those of the growing group of people who make up what economist Guy Standing has dubbed the ‘precariat’. For this ‘class-in-the-making’, work is increasingly precarious, short-term, and flexible. The rise of zero-hour contracts exemplifies this: in the UK today there are 1.7 million zero-hour contracts, making up 6 per cent of all employment contracts. This is four times higher than in 2000.

This shift towards temporary jobs and being ‘independent contractors’ underpins what many have called the ‘sharing economy’ but in reality is better described by the term the ‘access economy’. This includes platforms that enable people to monetise temporary access to their assets – such as their property (Airbnb) or their cars (Uber and Lyft) – and platforms that just connect service users with service providers, such as Deliveroo. Property guardianship as a platform linking service users with service providers to extract money from the use of temporarily empty properties, and the provision of this service by people on insecure and right-less contracts, is the epitome of these processes. It is a new manifestation of these under-the-surface dynamics that foster ever more imaginative efforts to bring new areas into the market and extract profit from them; bringing it to a level at which even the spaces in between the owner’s usage – when assets are apparently unused – can be used to extract money. In a new twist, guardians also pay for the privilege of providing the service of guarding properties.

The rights of the ‘pop-up people’ who maintain these new structures have been watered down if not dissolved. Just as guardians don’t have tenants’ rights, Uber drivers or Deliveroo couriers as independent contractors shoulder the financial investments and risks of their trade and don’t have rights such as sick pay or insurance. Just as Uber doesn’t have the responsibilities towards its drivers that taxi companies do towards theirs, property guardianship companies do not have the same obligations towards their guardians as a landlady towards her tenants.

What this represents in the broader picture is the creation of new structures of work and living which appear the same as before, but lack the same rights and protection and require a huge level of flexibility and insecurity of the person providing the service. Property guardianship represents the creeping of these processes of flexibilisation, precarity, and decreased rights into the new area of housing. In this scheme, which seems more emblematic of neoliberal logics the more one learns about it, housing becomes a by-product of providing a service, not a right. These pop-up people are also commodified as products as well as service users: guardians’ bodies are effectively replacing infrastructure (security companies would previously have boarded up the buildings and installed CCTV). Guardians like Matthew, Alice, and Mirela are also products marketed to property owners; “we provide reliable and trustworthy guardians”, as Ad Hoc Property Guardians company boasts. Guardians often have to provide references and, in some cases, proof of a social conscience and willingness to invest in the local community (such as with Dotdotdot Property Guardians).

Whose city?

More than most cities in Europe, London shows us how extreme the housing crisis can get. Private renters there spend around 70 per cent of their income on rent, sterile luxury developments are being built in areas once known for being affordable and vibrant, and social housing is being demolished and neglected, and replaced with private housing – with young professionals displacing working-class people who are pushed further and further out. Property guardianship plays a role in facilitating this.

Research by Green London Assembly Member Sian Berry found that 24 out of London’s 32 local governments were using property guardians in their empty properties, with over 1,000 people in over 200 publicly-owned buildings in 2016. East London’s iconic social housing building, Balfron Tower, was recently transferred to a housing association. Since its social residents were moved out in 2014 for so-called ‘refurbishments’ guardians have lived there, and the housing association has now announced it will be renovating the flats with a property developer and selling them on the private market. By preventing neglect and squatting for years, property guardians unwittingly – for they are victims of these same processes – played a role in facilitating its passing from public to private hands, easing the process by allowing the housing association to sit on it without doing anything for several years.

This is actively encouraged by the state – through recent legal changes such as criminalising squatting in residential properties and loosening regulations about changing a building’s use from commercial to residential (to let guardians stay there), as well as the deregulation of the housing market that started under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Almost all properties managed by property guardianship company Ad Hoc are in council-owned estates. Property guardianship also obscures and normalises the fact that there are so many empty houses in cities like London, private as well as council-owned, that have been emptied of residents in order to sell to private developers.

The point here is that property guardianship is not a natural and inevitable consequence of market forces in which people who need housing fit neatly into naturally empty spaces, but is part of a wider process where buildings that are in use are emptied of their residents and turned into vehicles for monumental levels of profit. Its increasing profitability is due to state intervention in some areas – in supporting property owners in extracting more rent from their properties – and the withdrawal of state intervention in others, when it comes to ensuring affordability and protection for tenants.

Whilst some guardians liked the idea of living in large and unusual spaces, most we spoke to were motivated by the high cost of renting. In this situation, renters in London are forced to trade in rights and security by becoming guardians for rents they can afford. And whilst the state is the main engineer of this process, the winners are private actors and companies for whom the London housing market is an increasingly lucrative cash cow – whether by buying up London’s public housing stock and turning it into unaffordable private accommodation or now through property guardianship (Camelot Europe having a yearly turnover of five to six million pounds). This slow takeover of publicly-owned properties and assets by private actors, supported by the state, is a classic feature of neoliberalism and bears out Naomi Klein’s argument that neoliberalism, rather than weakening the state, is highly dependent on it.

Confusing symptom with solution

Property guardianship is a symptom of London’s broken housing market – but its appearance as a win-win solution which both solves the blight of empty properties and provides cheap housing means it is confused by many with the solution. It thus obscures the extent of the problem and provides an excuse for politicians not to act. Owning empty property used to incur costs, but now it is increasingly profitable, and this will surely have an effect on property owners, just as research has shown that Airbnb drives up property prices. Whilst reinforcing the narrative that the ‘invisible hand of the market’ will eventually sort out all problems, property guardianship is actually state-led and it is part of the problem, not the solution – not only that, but it contributes to it, by normalising corporate control of housing, lower tenant rights, and insecurity, by easing the process of gentrification, and masking the extent of the problem. It is a new way of extracting rent from properties, exploiting people like Mirela, Alice, and Matthew’s desperate need for housing in London.

When David Harvey, in his seminal book Rebel Cities, wrote about the city as the factory for a new type of class struggle that would birth real revolutionary movements, he argued that it was against new types of urban rent extraction and human desperation such as property guardianship that these movements would arise. This edition explores how cities foster new forms of political and social experiments – yet these cannot be understood without identifying what they are reacting against. And whilst a key characteristic of the ‘precariat’ – and of guardians – is being fragmented, dispersed, and not rooted anywhere, which makes it harder to organise and demand their rights, groups of urban precariat workers, such as Deliveroo couriers and Uber drivers, are starting to stand up for their rights, as are guardians such as Rex Duis who has published a charter for property guardianship companies.

A recent court case in the British city of Bristol has called into question whether property guardianship will continue in the UK. Regardless of the outcome, this practice has exposed certain processes at play within European cities, such as the tendency to put the needs of corporate actors before even something as basic as the right to decent housing. It raises questions about urban space: how are neoliberal economic processes reshaping and curtailing people’s access to urban space, and how can this access be safeguarded? What will happen to the already feeble political will to solve the deep yet politically resolvable housing crisis of London and other European cities if the expansion of property guardianship is seen as a viable alternative? Instead of being a solution, property guardianship must be a catalyst to examine and respond to the worsening crisis it springs from.

*This article was updated on the 31st January 2018 to reflect new information.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 5th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by diamond geezer

The post Guardians of the Property: Pop-up Housing for Pop-up People appeared first on P2P Foundation.

 To help transform our economy over the last few years, Stir to Action has organised national workshop programmes to support communities. Now, we are now planning to launch a year-long programme of practical workshops, 3-day residentials, mentoring, and live crowdfunding to build a new economy that works for everyone.

For this to be successful — and with your support — we are hoping to raise the £12,500 we need to cover programme costs. Pledges on our campaign over the next five weeks will support subsidised workshop places, local workshop venues, programme design, our mentoring network, and provide the resources to engage new communities with these ideas. This is our first programme at this scale, but we aim for it to be an annual programme!

We’re continuing to build our inspiring mentoring network during the campaign — would you like to join?!
Get in touch via [email protected]

Click here to support our crowdfund

The post Crowdfunding: New Economy Programme appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Yes, computers, smart phones and big screen TVs are getting a lot cheaper. But a lot of much more fundamental stuff is not. “ The prices of textbooks and higher education nearly tripled. Over the past several decades they’ve all been increasing in price at several times the rate of inflation.”

And for a rapidly growing segment of the working class, job security is becoming a thing of the past. The fastest growing sectors of the job market are precarious jobs with “independent contractor” status where there’s little assurance of being employed next year, next month or even next week. And precarity overlaps with financial fragility. As Neal Gabler points out at the Atlantic (May 2016), “Many Middle-Class Americans are Living Paycheck to Paycheck.” Most Americans lack the savings to deal with a car repair or other unexpected expense of even a few hundred dollars.

Precarity includes not just short-term uncertainty about even minimal basic income needs, but growing indebtedness as a way of life. Stagnant working class incomes have worsened capitalism’s already troubling crisis tendencies towards underconsumption and idle capacity, and rising consumer debt has been the system’s way of generating demand.

The things which are most essential to life and basic material security also happen to be the things which capitalists, in alliance with the state, have been most successful at enclosing with artificial property rights and extracting rents from. The landlord monopoly — by which vacant land is engrossed and enclosed and then either held out of use altogether, or opened to use only in exchange for tribute — is the obvious example.

But the healthcare industry is riddled with things like drug patents, licensing monopolies that restrict the number of practitioners, and corporate hospital chains protected by all kinds of government entry barriers and accreditation rackets that drive up overhead with enormously wasteful and irrational capital spending outlays and bloated senior management salaries. The health insurance industry is a racket in its own right. But the main source of cost inflation is on the provision of service side, with all the interlocking monopolies and cartels that make any procedure in America cost several times what it does elsewhere in the world.

College education has become a necessity mainly because of cooperative efforts by the state, employers and the higher education industry itself to inflate credentialing requirements for employment. And given this artificially created necessity, and the willingness of the student loan industry to ensnare new victims, higher education takes advantage of the ever higher tributes flowing in from its captive clientele to pour billions into wasteful building projects and grow the numbers and salaries of administrators at several times those of faculty and support staff. Students, meanwhile, incur a lifetime of debt peonage to pay this inflated tuition, with the likelihood of years of unpaid internships before they can finally get into a bottom-rung paid white collar position.

Even in the case of stuff that really is getting cheaper, of course, the falling price doesn’t dispense with questions of justice. Most of the price of those electronic goods comes not from the actual labor and material inputs required to make them, but from the embedded rents on patent and copyright monopolies. And Internet access on those computers comes through data pipelines controlled by robber baron telecom monopolies that operate fist-in-glove with the state. So the stuff is becoming cheaper — but not nearly as cheap as it should be. And the difference is going into the pockets of parasitic rentiers.

No, Henry VIII could never have obtained an air conditioner or computer. But Henry VIII didn’t spend half his month’s income on rent, or live a single paycheck away from eviction.

It’s time for libertarians to stop putting a positive spin on how wonderful things are under capitalists’ and landlords’ unholy alliance with the state, and start attacking that collusive power relationship. It’s time to abolish all monopolies and artificial property rights that make the necessities of life expensive, and turn the productivity of our collective intellect into a source of rents.

R

The post No, Capitalism Isn’t Making Us All Richer and Richer appeared first on P2P Foundation.

•  Video interview Michel Bauwens, ETUC/ETUI conference ‘Shaping the new world of work’, Brussels, 27-29 June 2016.

The post Finding Common Ground between the ‘precariat’ and the salaried and unionized workers appeared first on P2P Foundation.