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.

The post Race and Intersectionality in the New Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Steven Tufts: The so-called gig-economy is celebrated, maligned, fetishized, and qualified by analysts. Whether it is called the collaborative, platform, crowd-sourcing, or sharing-economy, the rise of peer-to-peer exchanges does raise important questions for workers. Do emerging ‘sharing-economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb mark a significant shift in production and distribution systems? Are they emancipatory or exploitive? How can they be regulated across multiple jurisdictions and multiple platforms (e.g., Airbnb, Homestay, Uber, Lyft)? These and other questions have been raised by those emphasizing the platforms as a growing source of employment for contingent workers and their power to transform waged work into different relationships such as dependent contracts.¹ Kim Moody recently offered that these platforms are simply advanced ways for workers to ‘moonlight’ in an age characterized by depressed wage growth and the majority of new employment being in low wage, precarious jobs.² Despite the success of these services with consumers, there are contradictions for the future of work and implications for organized labour that unions are only starting to address – albeit in contradictory ways.

In mid-July 2016, the interim report on Ontario’s Changing Workplaces Review was released. The 300 plus page report said very little specifically about the gig-economy with the exception of a few sparse mentions on the role technology plays in changing employment relations.³ The Review is interested in how to extend workplace protection to workers using platforms such as Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb to supplement their incomes.⁴ Indeed, much of the report focusses on the general challenges of misclassification of workers as contractors.⁵ Here, the options presented to deal with gig-economy work are to either: maintain the status quo and exclude many of these workers as independent contractors; recognize these workers as ‘dependent contractors’⁶ (e.g. Uber drivers) and extend employment standards to them; or develop new regulations and standards that are specific to dependent contractors with exemptions for some sectors and workers.

Gaps and Exemptions

The narrow framing of the options misses some important points. First, regulation of ‘dependent contractors’ in the gig-economy will be subject to exemptions for specific sectors and workers just as other sectors managed to be exempt from the Employment Standards Act (ESA) in the past. Exemptions in the present ESA have been documented, such as the exclusion of a disproportionate numbers of women, young people, and racialized workers in sectors such as agriculture and hospitality.⁷ Second, there is an ‘enforcement gap’ that persists even when innovative and appropriate standards are established and applied to broad sectors.⁸If employers in small workplaces cannot be held accountable to the ESA, then how can the state ever enforce standards in a hyper-fissured gig-economy with private platforms organizing thousands of contractors? There are legal challenges to classifications, but the courts are inefficient in finding timely resolutions through litigation over classification and enforcement.⁹ Third, and perhaps most important, is the fact that new platforms continue to erode traditional employment relationships and threaten unionized jobs in existing sectors. Taxi drivers are replaced by Uber drivers and unionized hotel labour is replaced by Airbnb hosts and subcontracted cleaners. The platforms effectively download risk and investment to individuals as personal assets (i.e., cars and homes) are more deeply integrated into processes of accumulation. Workers earning substandard income in precarious employment are trapped in a vicious circle where they are forced to moonlight using Uber or rent out their homes via Airbnb to make ends meet.

At same time, capital is also able to use the platforms to create new types of operations. For example, property owners with multiple housing units can now rent out their properties on a short term basis at a daily rate much higher than longer term rentals with minimal transaction costs. These economic activities, mistakenly all lumped together as ‘home-sharing’, undermine unionized jobs and employment in sectors such as accommodation and have wide ranging impacts on rental housing markets.

The Rise of Airbnb

While the social costs of Uber were the first to be discussed at length,¹⁰ there is also the case of Airbnb and smaller short-term rental platforms. The rapid expansion of the Airbnb platform in Toronto is astounding. There are currently over 12,000 listings for Toronto on the Airbnb platform as the number of listings doubled in 2016 from 2015.¹¹ Airbnb’s recruitment and marketing image as an opportunity for individual ‘hosts’ to share their rooms or their homes to earn money for vacations and holidays is challenged by the data.¹² First, a majority of rentals and revenues are ‘entire homes’ not extra room rentals or shared accommodations. Second, over 50 per cent of revenues from Airbnb are generated by ‘multi-unit hosts’. These are professional operations holding multiple units – sometimes in the same condo facility – using the platform to enter the short-term rental accommodation sector.¹³

The result is the rise of ‘ghost hotels’, buildings or properties in close proximity with one another owned by a single operator renting out multiple units as short-term rentals on platforms such as Airbnb. The impact on the hotel sector is not insignificant. Airbnb has grown from almost nothing in 2010 to over 12,000 listings in the Greater Toronto Area and it is estimated to have already captured over 5% of the market share in Toronto and Vancouver. With over 1,000 rooms booked through Airbnb each night in Toronto, it is the equivalent of Toronto’s Chelsea hotel, the largest hotel in Canada, being rented to almost full capacity. There have been relatively few new net rooms added to the city’s hotel room supply over the last 15 years. Development has largely been restricted to smaller co-developments which include hotels and condos. At the same time, the owners of the Chelsea and other hotels are seeking to convert their properties to condominiums, further removing significant hotel room supply from the market. Conversions not only threaten unionized hotel jobs, but also diminish the city’s capacity to attract and host large conventions and events.

Even more significant than the employment effects is the removal of units from the rental housing stock. The shift of entire units from long term to short rentals has implications for Toronto’s housing supply. Research from David Wachsmuth and colleagues at McGill University has found that Airbnb alone removed 13,700 units from the housings stocks of Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.¹⁴ The bulk of these listings are in high demand neighbourhoods. The expanding short-term rental units do not pay commercial property taxes (which are double that of residential property taxes) or any special hotel taxes, reducing the municipal revenues that are needed to pay for public housing and tourism promotion.

Other impacts have also been reported in the media. The disruption of Toronto neighbourhoods by ‘party Airbnbs’ where multiple unit hosts operate are a concern.¹⁵ Even more disruptive and contentious is the explosion of Airbnb rental units in condominiums, some of which have bylaws prohibiting short-term rentals. In a recent twist, Airbnb is now partnering with condo developments, engaging in one-on-one agreements with condo boards over issues such as security and complaints and agreeing to revenue sharing with the boards themselves.¹⁶ This privatized regulation allows the Airbnb platform sole access to condos that might otherwise pass bylaws to restrict ghost-hotels in the property or allow competing platforms to operate. Airbnb is also used by hosts to secure mortgages for homes they might not get financing for without the additional short-term rental revenue stream. It is hardly surprising that Airbnb has even floated the idea of building its own brick and mortar properties.

Airbnb is currently valued at $31-billion and growing rapidly in major urban areas. The company aggressively lobbies municipalities seeking to regulate its operations and does not hesitate to litigate.¹⁷Currently, there are multiple battles to regulate short-term rentals and Airbnb as the largest platform. There are a number of issues at play, ranging from restricting short-term rentals to in-home units, forbidding multiple listings by ghost hotel owners, and platform accountability. Unions have engaged with the rise of short-term rental platforms in different ways, with UNITEHERE taking the lead in Canada with the formation of the Fairbnb.ca coalition to fight against Airbnb’s unregulated expansion in Canada’s largest urban markets.

Union Response to Airbnb

Fairbnb.ca is a coalition founded by UNITEHERE Local 75 in July 2016. The coalition includes some tenants’ rights organizations, neighborhood groups, condo owners’ associations, hotel ownership groups, and sympathetic academics (including the author). It is best described as what Amanda Tattersall and David Reynolds term a ‘support’ coalition.¹⁸ Such coalitions are initiated by a union and largely resourced and administered by a single organization with some input from supporters. The coalition can operate at multiple scales, but in this case focuses on municipal bylaws. Fairbnb.ca is organizationally driven by UNITEHERE Local 75 representing 7,000 hospitality workers in Toronto. The coalition is entirely union-financed with in-kind contributions from coalition partners. The motivations for supporters range from primary concerns with lack of affordable housing in the city, to neighbourhood disruption, to the loss of hotel jobs. Further, there is a cross-class component to the coalition with the union partnering with some hotel employers fearing the loss of market share to short-term rentals.

Despite the structural limits of support coalitions, Fairbnb.ca has had significant success in raising the issues related to short-term rentals in Canada’s large cities. It has also been successful in getting municipalities to consider the impacts of short-term rentals seriously and regulate online platforms through municipal bylaws. This has been achieved primarily through media campaigns and lobbying efforts countering the superior communications and lobbying resources of Airbnb. In Toronto, proposed legislation will establish a licensing and registration system and restrict ‘multiple listings’ from a single host. Still contentious is the issue of allowing home owners to list ‘secondary suites’ (self-contained units in homes) which can potentially be used as long-term rentals. There also remains a lack of clarity over how accountable platforms such as Airbnb will be in reporting violations and sharing data with the city.¹⁹

Though UNITEHERE has had significant success in engaging Airbnb through its coalition strategy, other unions have chosen a quite different path of engagement with the platform. Unifor in particular has publicly supported Airbnb as ‘progressive’ capital given the company’s support for a higher minimum wage, partnerships with settlement agencies housing refugees, and alleged openness to fair regulation. In a statement submitted to Toronto city council, Unifor President Jerry Dias argues that:

“Airbnb is setting an example for a path forward that couples the potential of the digital economy with the reality of working people across the country, and has demonstrated its willingness to operate in a manner consistent with the goals of broader society. Because of Airbnb’s progressive approach, Unifor is exploring ways to work together with them. We will continue to explore areas of mutual interest to improve the public good, and if possible work toward a national partnership.”²⁰

This ‘partnership’ is indeed politically useful for Airbnb as it conveniently gives the company some progressive legitimacy and provides councillors who wish to side with Airbnb against Fairbnb.ca some political cover. Less clear is what Unifor has to gain through such a social ‘partnership’. In the USA, SEIU did attempt to undermine UNITEHERE with a similar partnership with Airbnb that promised the union access to organizing short-term rental room cleaners. But this deal collapsed after SEIU faced public criticism (and perhaps also recognized how difficult it would be to organize workers in ghost hotels).²¹ Unifor may be seeking a similar arrangement or even an understanding that would allow the union to represent brick and mortar hotels being planned by Airbnb.²² Here, we see echoes of the union’s controversial strategy to form a partnership with Magna with its ‘Framework for Fairness’ agreement a decade ago.²³ Yet short-term rentals employ far less workers than the auto parts sector. In a recent report released by The Hotel Association of Canada, it is estimated that the hotel sector in Canada generates 191,600 full-time equivalent jobs, while Airbnb generates only 1,037.²⁴ At this time, evidence indicates that short-term rentals simply do not generate nearly the same number of jobs as the traditional hotel sector which provides a full range of hospitality services. It is difficult to see how large numbers of new members might be organized through this strategy and whether any partnership with Airbnb will give Unifor any leverage in reaching these precarious workers.

It may be that Unifor’s involvement with Airbnb is more related to recent conflicts among unions. In July 2016, Airbnb made a great deal of fanfare of its hiring of Alex Dagg as its Canadian Policy Lead to head-up its municipal lobbying efforts. Dagg, once heralded as a promising and innovative labour organizer in Toronto was a leader of UNITE when it merged with HERE in the mid-2000s. Following an intense internal fight, the UNITE portion of the UNITEHERE merger left the union to form Workers United and joined SEIU. The relationship between Dagg and what now constitutes UNITEHERE Local 75 might be charitably described as ‘strained’. Dagg soon left SEIU to become Director of Operations for the National Hockey League Players Association. The hiring of Dagg to counter Fairbnb.ca would appear to be more than coincidence and quite strategic on the company’s part. Airbnb in its press release announcing Dagg’s appointment focused – in keeping with its progressive capital image – on Dagg’s career experience ‘championing social justice’ in the union movement.²⁵

Unifor established a presence in the accommodation sector decades ago with its merger with railway workers in the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Transport and General Workers, which also represented the workers employed at the grand railway hotels. UNITEHERE has historically defended itself against raiding from a number of large unions operating in Canada. As part of this experience, it is not unexpected that UNITEHERE endorsed a letter to the CLC from a number of its affiliates harshly criticizing Unifor’s disastrous attempt to take over the Amalgamated Transit Union Local in 2016. In short, the opposing forms of union engagement with Airbnb may be inseparable from patterns of divisive labour movement internal conflicts which the company is trying to exploit to its advantage.

Beyond Cross-Class Coalitions

As a support coalition, Fairbnb.ca is not primarily designed to build a movement for affordable housing or broader regulation of the gig-economy. Fairbnb.ca’s success to date as a specific issue public campaign lies with a single organization setting strategic goals and partners deciding how best they can provide support (e.g., joint-lobbying, deputations). Admittedly, it is an effective structure for this type of campaign. In the case of short-term rentals, it can be argued that UNITEHERE’s and Unifor’s strategic choices engaging the gig-economy are also shaped by the persistent sectarianism that continues to plague the labour movement in Canada.

UNITEHERE, a small union relative to large general unions in Canada, is understandably cautious about working closely with other unions given that it has been targeted for raiding in the past. Also important is the fact that Fairbnb.ca is a cross-class coalition that does include hotel employers. While the few employers formally in Fairbnb.ca do not provide anything beyond in-kind support, the inclusion of capital from the outset structures the aims of the coalition in a very specific manner. The decision to not initially build a larger class-based coalition with multiple unions and a more expansive list of community groups limits Fairbnb.ca primarily to a media campaign and lobbying effort.

Unifor’s opposing strategy of embracing cross-class ‘progressive capital’ is as cynical as it is short-sighted. Partnership with Airbnb is unlikely to yield many new members from ‘ghost hotels’ and it remains unclear how Dias will explain partnership with a company undermining traditional hotels to his members working in the sector. Dias will also have to explain to activist members why their union is supporting a multinational firm that is removing thousands of rental units from the housing stock of large cities. While it is difficult to imagine that Unifor has embraced the partnership deal solely in response to a political difference with a smaller union, this cannot be easily dismissed as a partial explanation.

No single union is able to take on such immense and growing sectors of the economy alone. Central labour bodies and local labour councils do not have the capacities (or the affiliate support) to coordinate sectoral responses and strategies, so new formations are needed. In the case of short-term rentals, a local sector council of unions representing hotel workers may be useful. UNITEHERE represents the majority of unionized hotel workers in Toronto, but there are other large and well-resourced unions representing hotel workers in large cities. A common sectoral strategy and approach is what concern for workers in the sector demands. On this front, UNITEHERE has begun the process of re-establishing relations with the CSN fighting against short-term rentals in Quebec. At the same time, Unifor has participated in informal local sector councils such as the Toronto Airport Workers’ Council (TAWC) as it counters efforts to privatize Pearson International Airport.²⁶

New spaces of solidarity such as local sector councils where local unions representing workers in the same sector can talk to each other about common shop-floor issues are important. Further, local united fronts will more effectively confront large gig-economy firms lobbying against progressive municipal regulation – an increasingly important arena of engagement for labour, capital, and the state.²⁷ While unions require an urban strategy, local sector councils do not need to abandon the arenas of provincial or national regulation or fail to engage with the Changing Workplaces Review and its implications for gig-economy work. Successful local sector councils with an urban focus will have a multi-scalar sensibility as all social movements do. Local level formations can, however, address common concerns free from national and international leadership and start to overcome destructive sectarianism. If organized labour fragmented, workers will continue to suffer in – or be displaced from – regressive gig-economy workplaces. •

Endnotes

1. Ursula Huws is a leading voice of critical gig-economy analysis in this respect. See: “Platform labour: Sharing Economy or Virtual Wild West?,” Journal for a Progressive Economy, January, 2016, 24-27.
2. C. Brooks, “Interview with Kim Moody: Busting the Myths of a Workerless Future,” Labor Notes, July 26, 2016.
3. C.M. Mitchell and J.C. Murray, Changing Workplaces Review – Special Advisors’ Interim Report. Prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Labour to support the Changing Workplaces Review, 2016. The review does briefly mention the gig economy on p. 146.
4. The Changing Workplaces Review comments: “The growth of ‘the sharing economy’ continues to challenge business, lawmakers and regulators,” p. 19.
5. The Changing Workplaces Review acknowledges that for labour advocates:“Their concern about misclassification was not limited to one business or sector, but was expressed as likely more prevalent in certain segments of the economy including: the “gig” or “sharing” economy, cleaning, trucking, food delivery and information technology – to name but a few.” p. 146.
6. “Dependent Contractor” is the ‘common law compromise between standard employment relationship and independent contractor. See also G. White, “When will labour laws catch up with the gig economy?,” The Atlantic, December 9, 2015; D. Doorey, The Law of Work: Common Law and the Regulation of Work. Emond Publishing, Toronto, 2016.
7. L. Vosko, A.M. Noack, M.P. Thomas, How Far Does the Employment Standards Act, 2000 Extend and What Are the Gaps in Coverage, Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Labour, (Submission prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Labour to support the Changing Workplaces Review) 2015.
8. L. Vosko and M. Thomas, ‘Confronting the employment standards enforcement gap: Exploring the potential for union engagement with employment law in Ontario, Canada’ Journal of Industrial Relations 56 (5), 2014, 631-652.
9. M.A. Cherry, ‘Beyond Misclassification: The Digital Transformation of Work’, Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 37(3), 2016, 544-577.
10. See for example B. Rogers, “The Social Costs of Uber,” University of Chicago Law Review Dialogue, 82(1), 2015, 85-102.
11. For a thorough report on the impact of Airbnb on Toronto’s housing market see T. Wieditz, Squeezed Out: Airbnb’s Commercialization of Home-Sharing in Toronto. Toronto: Fairbnb.ca, 2017. The report and other data can be found at fairbnb.ca
12. M. Lecuyer, M. Tucker, and A. Chaintreau, “Improving the Transparency of the Sharing Economy.” International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2), April 3–7, 2017, Perth, Australia published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License WWW 2017 Companion, 2017.
13. Recent data has found that 84% of Airbnb revenues in the GTA come from entire home rentals and 57% of revenues from multi-unit hosts. See HLT Advisory, AirBnB… & the Impact on the Canadian Hotel Industry, Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto. June, 2016.
14. D. Wachsmuth, D. Kerrigan, D. Chaney, and A. Shillolo Short-term cities: Airbnb’s impact on Canadian housing markets. A report from the Urban Politics and Governance research group School of Urban Planning McGill University. McGill University, Montreal, August 10, 2017.
15. Bleecker Street in Cabbagetown is one such case. T. Kalinkowski, “Bleecker St. residents say ‘ghost hotels’ ruining neighbourhood,” Toronto Star, August 5, 2016.
16. L. Xing, “Toronto condo signs on to 1st agreement in Canada to regulate Airbnb rentals,” CBC News, October 25, 2017.
17. In 2016, Airbnb sued both New York and San Francisco over its regulations of short-term rentals. K. Benner, “Airbnb in Disputes with New York and San Francisco,” New York Times, June 28, 2016.
18. A. Tattersall, and D. Reynolds, ‘The Shifting Power of labor-community coalitions: identifying common elements of powerful coalitions in Australia and the US’, WorkingUSA, 10, 2007, 77–102.
19. Toronto City Council is scheduled to vote of AirBnB bylaws in early December 2017.
20. J. Dias, Letter to Mayor John Tory and the Executive Committee EX26.3.29, June 16, 2017. A similar letter was submitted to Vancouver’s Mayor and City Council on October 24, 2017 as the city debates a short-term rental policy.
21. S. Levin, “Airbnb’s controversial deal with labor union falls apart after intense backlash,” The Guardian, April 21, 2016.
22. The company is hesitant to call these ‘hotels’ and prefers ‘branded home-sharing units’ or ‘community centres’.
23. On the Magna deal see S. Gindin, “The CAW and Magna: What if Magna Builds an Assembly Plant?,” The Bullet, Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 71, November 3, 2007.
24. CBRE, An Overview of the AirBnB and the Hotel Sector in Canada, Hotel Association of Canada, Ottawa, 2017.
25. Airbnb, ‘Airbnb names new Canadian Executive’, Press release posted on CNW, July 25, 2016.
26. See T. Heffernan, “Mobilizing Workers at the Toronto Airport: Interview with Sean Smith,” The Bullet, Socialist Project E-Bulletin No. 1260, May 24, 2016.
27. On this point see the recent books: I. MacDonald (ed), Unions and the City: Negotiating Urban Change. ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2017; M. Greenberg and P. Lewis (eds). The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2017.

Steven Tufts is an Associate Professor in Geography at York University.

The post Unions and the Gig-Economy: The Case of AirBnB appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For authors of business how-to books, it makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t want to brag that Google is taking their business advice? For me, it was a little different. Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus was about the inequity embedded in the digital economy: how the growth of digital startups was draining the real economy and making it harder for people to participate in creating value, make any money, or keep up with rising rents.

I took the gig. I figured it was my chance to let my audience know, in no uncertain terms, that Uber was among the worst offenders, destroying the existing taxi market not through creative destruction but via destructive destruction. They were using the power of their capital to undercut everyone, extract everything, and establish a scorched-earth monopoly. I went on quite a tirade.

To my surprise, the audience seemed to share my concerns. They’re not idiots, and the negative effects of their operations were visible everywhere they looked. Then an employee piped up with a surprising question: “What about UBI?”

Wait a minute, I thought. That’s my line.

Up until that moment, I had been an ardent supporter of universal basic income (UBI), that is, government cash payments to people whose employment would no longer be required in a digital economy. Contrary to expectations, UBI doesn’t make people lazy. Study after study shows that the added security actually enables people to take greater risks, become more entrepreneurial, or dedicate more time and energy to improving their communities.

So what’s not to like?

Shouldn’t we applaud the developers at Uber — as well as other prominent Silicon Valley titans like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, bond investor Bill Gross, and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman — for coming to their senses and proposing we provide money for the masses to spend? Maybe not. Because to them, UBI is really just a way for them to keep doing business as usual.

Uber’s business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating.

When it’s looked at the way a software developer would, it’s clear that UBI is really little more than a patch to a program that’s fundamentally flawed.

The real purpose of digital capitalism is to extract value from the economy and deliver it to those at the top. If consumers find a way to retain some of that value for themselves, the thinking goes, you’re doing something wrong or “leaving money on the table.”

Back in the 1500s, residents of various colonized islands developed a good business making rope and selling it to visiting ships owned by the Dutch East India Company. Sensing an opportunity, the executives of what was then the most powerful corporation the world had ever seen obtained a charter from the king to be the exclusive manufacturer of rope on the islands. Then they hired the displaced workers to do the job they’d done before. The company still spent money on rope — paying wages now instead of purchasing the rope outright — but it also controlled the trade, the means of production, and the market itself.

Walmart perfected the softer version of this model in the 20th century. Move into a town, undercut the local merchants by selling items below cost, and put everyone else out of business. Then, as sole retailer and sole employer, set the prices and wages you want. So what if your workers have to go on welfare and food stamps.

Now, digital companies are accomplishing the same thing, only faster and more completely. Instead of merely rewriting the law like colonial corporations did or utilizing the power of capital like retail conglomerates do, digital companies are using code. Amazon’s control over the retail market and increasingly the production of the goods it sells, has created an automated wealth-extraction platform that the slave drivers who ran the Dutch East India Company couldn’t have even imagined.

Of course, it all comes at a price: Digital monopolists drain all their markets at once and more completely than their analog predecessors. Soon, consumers simply can’t consume enough to keep the revenues flowing in. Even the prospect of stockpiling everyone’s data, like Facebook or Google do, begins to lose its allure if none of the people behind the data have any money to spend.

To the rescue comes UBI. The policy was once thought of as a way of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation, however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people (and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will inevitably flow to them.

Think of it: The government prints more money or perhaps — god forbid — it taxes some corporate profits, then it showers the cash down on the people so they can continue to spend. As a result, more and more capital accumulates at the top. And with that capital comes more power to dictate the terms governing human existence.

Meanwhile, UBI also obviates the need for people to consider true alternatives to living lives as passive consumers. Solutions like platform cooperatives, alternative currencies, favor banks, or employee-owned businesses, which actually threaten the status quo under which extractive monopolies have thrived, will seem unnecessary. Why bother signing up for the revolution if our bellies are full? Or just full enough?

Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.

No, income is nothing but a booby prize. If we’re going to get a handout, we should demand not an allowance but assets. That’s right: an ownership stake.

The wealth gap in the United States has less to do with the difference between people’s salaries than their assets. For instance, African-American families earn a little more than half the salary, on average, that white American families do. But that doesn’t account for the massive wealth gap between whites and blacks. More important to this disparity is the fact that the median wealth of white households in America is 20 times that of African-American households. Even African-Americans with decent income tend to lack the assets required to participate in savings accounts, business investments, or the stock market.

So even if an African-American child who has grown up poor gets free admission to college, they will still likely lag behind due to a lack of assets. After all, those assets are what make it possible for a white classmate to take a “gap” year to gain experience before hitting the job market or take an unpaid internship or have access to a nice apartment in Williamsburg to live in while knocking out that first young adult novel on spec, touring with a band, opening a fair trade coffee bar, or running around to hackathons. No amount of short-term entitlements substitute for real assets because once the money is spent, it’s gone — straight to the very people who already enjoy an excessive asset advantage.

Had Andrew Johnson not overturned the original reconstruction proposal for freed slaves to be given 40 acres and a mule as reparation, instead of simply allowing them to earn wage labor on former slaveowners’ lands, we might be looking at a vastly less divided America today.

Likewise, if Silicon Valley’s UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future’s Marina Gorbis. As she points out, in Denmark — where people have public access to a great portion of the nation’s resources — a person born into a poor family is just as likely to end up as wealthy as peers born into a wealthier household.

To venture capitalists seeking to guarantee their fortunes for generations, such economic equality sounds like a nightmare and unending, unnerving disruption. Why create a monopoly just to give others the opportunity to break it or, worse, turn all these painstakingly privatized assets back into a public commons?

The answer, perhaps counterintuitively, is because all those assets are actually of diminishing value to the few ultra-wealthy capitalists who have accumulated them. Return on assets for American corporations has been steadily declining for the last 75 years. It’s like a form of corporate obesity.The rich have been great at taking all the assets off the table but really bad at deploying them. They’re so bad at investing or building or doing anything that puts money back into the system that they are asking governments to do this for them — even though the corporations are the ones holding all the real assets.

Like any programmer, the people running our digital companies embrace any hack or kluge capable of keeping the program running. They don’t see the economic operating system beneath their programs, and so they are not in a position to challenge its embedded biases much less rewrite that code.

As appealing as it may sound, UBI is nothing more than a way for corporations to increase their power over us, all under the pretense of putting us on the payroll. It’s the candy that a creep offers a kid to get into the car or the raise a sleazy employer gives a staff member who they’ve sexually harassed. It’s hush money.

If the good folks of Uber or any other extractive digital enterprise really want to reprogram the economy to everyone’s advantage and guarantee a sustainable supply of wealthy customers for themselves, they should start by tweaking their own operating systems. Instead of asking the government to make up the difference for unlivable wages, what about making one’s workers the owners of the company? Instead of kicking over additional, say, 10% in tax for a government UBI fund, how about offering a 10% stake in the company to the people who supply the labor? Or another 10% to the towns and cities who supply the roads and traffic signals? Not just a kickback or tax but a stake.

Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not the patch we need. A weekly handout doesn’t promote economic equality — much less empowerment. The only meaningful change we can make to the economic operating system is to distribute ownership, control, and governance of the real world to the people who live in it.

Photo by tokyoform

The post I Used to Argue for UBI. Then I gave a talk at Uber. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Stop Chasing Unicorns

Lieza Dessein and Chiara Faini: There is a fundamental flaw in the narrative of the startup culture: everyone is chasing Unicorns i.e. private companies valued at one billion dollars or more. Instead of aspiring to this elusive goal, should we not pause and wonder if it is really worth it? Rather, we should ask ourselves: is it really worth it? How much does society benefit from these companies when one does not merely consider their financial value? This focus on monetary valorization results in forgiving much of the negative impact they may have on their environment: the working conditions they provide, their general social impact and the redistribution of their value.

Collectively, we got lost in the rush for innovation. In the era of digitalization where solutions are only a few clicks away, we are looking for instant gratification. We subcontract daily tasks, decision-making and management to softwares that indicate the most efficient solutions. This process creates an ultra-competitive society where it is difficult to find space for human involvement nature, its diversity, its inherent complexities and our well-being. Instead, we trust simplistic binary solutions provided by digital platforms that often help us solve minor inconveniences, whilst creating ethical loopholes.

Lieza Dessein and Chiara Faini

Platform Co-op: a Disruptive Narrative

Entrepreneurship within specific social territories is a complex matter. In order to create a company that truly makes a positive impact, there is a need for a complex balance between all stakeholders and their environment. Businesses driven by values rather than mere profit do exist. These social enterprises have proven to be sustainable, even if they do not always seek global dominance. Legally, they are often constituted under the cooperative entity or coops.

What if digital platforms were also structured as coops? What would happen if platforms allowed members to vote on the use of their personal data? Or how the value that the platform generates is redistributed? What if users had their say in the strategies implemented to ensure a sustainable development?

Luckily, these questions are not just hypothetical. Numerous companies are attempting ethical digital ventures. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider have developed an impressive corpus of publications over the past three years. Their work provides the framework for a strong narrative that highlights the existence of this sector under the label Platform Cooperativism.

The term gained rapid traction as existing companies recognize their values in this specific narrative. Ethical digital start ups flocked to this specific labeling because it embodies what they are trying to achieve.

. Zebras have two advantages: they are real and, since they strongly believe in cooperation, they move in herds.

The strength of the PlatformCoop Movement is that it creates an alternative narrative for digital entrepreneurship by highlighting existing initiatives as well as the challenges ahead. The diversity of the actors involved in the movement creates a slow but consistent progress in the growth of this sector of the digital economy.

The way our current business models are structured and financed is intimately linked to the dominant neoliberal narrative. It is structurally more difficult for a platform co-op to emerge as there still is too little formalized know-how available. Moreover, the existing financing models are not always adequate. While new Zebras are struggling to emerge, they are also fighting an unfair battle with wannabe Unicorns. These opponents are able to move faster due to suitable financing models, and the lack of regulation and ethics. A shift in this economic paradigm will require time and patience.

There is still a long way to go to make a structural change. If we want to succeed we will need to continue to organize the movement by strengthening our emerging networks and its narrative. Additionally, we will need to embrace patience and appreciate the complexity of what we are trying to achieve.

Nurturing the Narrative by Actions

Shifting the economic paradigm is not an easy task and sometimes it is good to take the time to appreciate the progress that has been made.

The Platform Co-op Movement is colliding with existing and emerging initiatives.

These include but are not limited to groups such as “Open Co-op”: an organization in the UK “building a world-wide community of individuals and organizations committed to the creation of a collaborative, sustainable economy”. The “Zebras Unite Movement” was started in Portland, and calls for a more ethical and inclusive movement to counter existing start-up and venture capital culture. In Paris, “Plateformes en Communs” is organizing recurrent meet-ups for Zebra startups. “Supermarkt” a platform for digital culture, collaborative economies and new forms of work in Berlin is also trying to structure the local PlatformCoop Movement. Another relevant?example relates to the sale of Twitter in 2016, Nathan Schneider suggested to transform it into a co-op. This idea got enough attention to be seriously discussed during the annual stakeholder meeting in May 2017.

Trebor Scholz got an important grant from the Google Foundation to support the economic development of cooperatives in the digital economy. Professor and author Jack Linchuan Qiu is strongly invested in gathering the existing PlatformCoop network in Hong Kong for their annual meet-up in an effort to get the asian coop sector and digital entrepreneurs on board.

The interest for the co-op model is also visible in the interest of academic institutions for the field. The VUB (Free University of Brussels) has started to study the benefits of the co-op model. The idea of platform cooperativism received enough traction to catch the attention of the Region of Brussels. The Region is currently funding a consortium of local experts in order to facilitate and encourage the emergence of platform co-ops. The consortium is composed of 3 organisations combining theoretical and practical skills; “Febecoop” is promoting and developing the cooperative model; “SAW B” a non profit enterprise is advocating for social entrepreneurship and “SMart” a shared enterprise of freelancers operating in 9 european countries that managed to scale its business model by developing a digital platform. The consortium is working hand in hand with “Coopcity” an incubator for social and cooperative entrepreneurship in an effort to create an appropriate environment to start a platform coop. Looking beyond the ambition of the Region of Brussels, the consortium will gather data on best practices from Berlin and Barcelona in an effort to strengthen and broaden existing networks.

The process initiated by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider will be slow but as long as we collectively continue to engage we will make change happen. It is important to encourage and nurture the existing mobilisation of policy makers, unions, entrepreneurs, academics, investors and consumers.

Embrace Patience and Appreciate Complexity

The challenges we are facing today are thrilling. We have at hand incredible technologies, brilliant thinkers and entrepreneurs which could enable us to shift our current world dynamic. This shift would contribute greatly to solving crucial global issues such as the urgent need to reverse the growth of social injustices. Collectively, we have an exceptional opportunity to work towards cultural change. We could move from an individualistic system that aims for personal profit, to a state of mind of solidarity.

To make these things happen, we hold an abounding ecosystem of social enterprises which can give insight on their know-how. Cooperatives have years of experience in managing distributed governance and social impact. We can also tremendously benefit from the unfortunate misconceptions of the current platform-economy as a handbook, which logs a full set of guidelines explaining what not to do and why.

Incorporating these positive and negative experiences can ensure that the tools we develop ensure the well-being of all the actors of the networks we create and bring about a positive impact on the environment in which they operate. In this way, we will be able to create the tools of tomorrow which central values will be social justice and genuine sharing.

Photo by belgianchocolate

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The idea of a rising ‘sharing economy’ is currently a hot topic in an international debate that builds on the emergence of peer-to-peer network exchanges that rely more on access than on property, on relations more than an appropriation,to call into question the sociological understanding of the relationship between the society and the market that goes back to authors such as Polanyi, Marx and Sombart.

The aim of this monograph is therefore to bring together a selection of contributions that will help identify the analytical categories and indicators needed to interpret this phenomenon from a sociological perspective on a global scale. Through a collection of original empirical research on this topic, from Western and non-Western contexts, by both established and junior scholars and experts, this monograph will make a pivotal contribution to the study of what themes, methods and issues characterise the rise of ‘sharing’ as a socio-economic model and a new frontier of sociological research. In particular, this monograph aims to answer the following questions: what do we mean with ‘sharing economy’? What kind of positive innovations or possible criticalities might this socio-economic model bring? Does ‘sharing’ really represent an alternative to capitalism, or an example of its transformation? In which areas, and how, is the way of doing business in society changing as a result of the diffusion of ‘sharing economies’?

Photo by Burns Library, Boston College

The post Essay of the Day: Unboxing the Sharing Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A new feudalism is on the rise. From the internet to service and care, more and more industries expect people to live gig to gig, while monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich. But as Nathan Schneider shows through years of in-depth reporting, there is an alternative to the robber-baron economy hiding in plain sight; we just need to know where to look.

Cooperatives are jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, grocery stores, healthcare, and utilities they depend on. Co-ops have helped to set the rules, and raise the bar, for the wider society.

Since the financial crash of 2008, the cooperative movement has been coming back with renewed vigor. Everything for Everyone chronicles this economic and social revolution—from taxi cooperatives that are keeping Uber and Lyft at bay, to an outspoken mayor transforming his city in the Deep South, to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin, to the rural electric co-op members who are propelling an aging system into the future. As these pioneers show, cooperative enterprise is poised to help us reclaim faith in our capacity for creative, powerful democracy.

Endorsements

“Everything for Everyone lives up to its title. As Nathan Schneider documents, cooperative movements are everywhere—from Barcelona to Bologna, Nairobi to New York, Jackson, Oakland, Boulder, Detroit, and points in between. And they are struggling to bring everything in common—electricity, healthcare, tech, transportation, banks, land, food, knowledge, even whole cities. Spoiler alert: this is no paean to the neoliberal ‘gig economy’ but rather an historical and contemporary tour of the radical potential of cooperative economics to disrupt capitalism as we know it. It is a book for everyone and a book for our times: read it, share it, but don’t just talk about it. Commons for all!”

—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“People have always fought to forge economies based on cooperation and creativity, rather than domination and exclusion. But that work has never looked so urgent as it does today. Charting a wealth of renewable ideas, tools, and commitments that are poised to reinvent democracy, Schneider tackles an immense subject with precision and grace.”

—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything

“The time has never been better for cooperative enterprise to change how we do business. This is a guide to how a new generation is starting to make that promise into a reality.”

—Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Zero Marginal Cost Society and lecturer at the Wharton School

“Everything for Everyone proves how our vested interests are best served by addressing our common ones. In Schneider’s compelling take on the origins and future of cooperativism, working together isn’t just something we do in hard times, but the key to a future characterized by abundance and distributed prosperity. We owe ourselves, and one another, this practical wisdom.”

—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, professor at Queens College

“Nathan Schneider is one of our era’s foremost chroniclers of social movements. Always engaging and analytically insightful, there’s simply no one I’d trust more to guide me through the latest iteration of the longstanding, international, and utterly urgent struggle to build a more cooperative world and reclaim our common wealth.”

—Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform

“A gifted writer, chronicling the world he and his compatriots are helping to make—spiritual, technological, and communal.”

—Krista Tippett, host of On Being

Photo by HeatherKaiser

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Robert Raymond: The state of precarity inherent to most forms of digital labor and the unchecked exploitation of workers on many gig economy platforms is a largely under covered issue. Although there are some conversations around regulating companies that perpertrate such practices, issues of ownership and governance as they relate to questionable practices of various digital platforms are rarely given much consideration. But this is beginning to change with the rise in what is known as the platform cooperative movement, a broad network of individuals and organizations pushing to bring the values of cooperative ownership, governance, and management, into the digital labor landscape.

Trebor Scholz is an associate professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City, New York, and chair of the conference series “The Politics of Digital Culture.” He’s been an advocate of the platform cooperativism movement for many years and launched the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (Shareable is part of the Consortium), which was awarded a $1 million dollar grant from Google.org, this week. The grant “focuses specifically on creating a critical analysis of the digital economy, and designing open source tools that will support platform co-ops working in sectors such as child care, elder care, home services, and recycling​ in the United States, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and India,” according to a press release by The New School. “This grant is a big win for the cooperative movement and for platform co-op pioneers all over the world,” Scholz said in a statement. “This Kit will make it easier to start and run platform co-ops. It will also provide an interactive map of the co-op ecosystem and essential community-edited resources.” We talked to Scholz as he was working on the project about the potential of platform cooperatives in addressing many of the challenges in the digital world today.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: You are in the process of launching an ambitious project around strengthening and spreading the platform cooperative movement. The project consists of many different elements and is structured as a kind of development kit for platform co-ops. I’ll let you tell us all about it in just a second, but first, can you explain what a platform cooperative is, and what problem or challenge they are addressing?

Trebor Scholz, associate professor of culture and media at The New School: Platform co-ops are really about the broad-based ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms. So, imagine that Uber is owned by its drivers, or something like TaskRabbit is owned and operated by the workers. Or, in Europe, that Deliveroo is operated by the couriers and owned by the couriers. What this model leads to is a fair pay and a higher quality of work,so there is a dignity that you will not get in the extractive sharing economy. Also, the research on worker cooperatives shows that they are actually more productive than traditional businesses.

There are all sorts of economic and tax advantages as well. So think about something like AirBnb. You might be staying at an AirBnb in Amsterdam, or Barcelona, and much of the money spent at that Airbnb is taken out of the community, and the revenue doesn’t go through taxes into your local community, but is transferred instead right to Silicon Valley. On top of that there are all of the illegal operations of platforms like Uber and Lyft. It’s been proven, with the recent study from MIT, that these businesses contribute to a congestion of cities.

So, what the platform cooperativism movement is pushing back against is what I would sum up as a broken social contract. There are unsustainably low wages, compromised data and privacy, edge populations that aren’t considered in the design — so it’s a sort of big ego design, a waterfall design of Silicon Valley that pushes software onto people instead of co-designing it. There’s a shift away from direct employment which means a loss of worker voice and rights and benefits and of course centralized data ownership. The intellectual North Star for the alternative of the platform co-op model is really democratic governance, broad-based platform ownership.

So, tell us a bit about the Development Kit project.

The first part of the project is just to explain what is actually the problem with a business model like Lyft and many of these other companies, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo — what’s actually the problem? So that’s part of it, because I think it’s very important to actually change people’s mindsets about that.

Once they are convinced and are interested in actually changing it, they can see this whole ecosystem that already exists. So we are building a map that will have a lot of information about all of these cooperative platform businesses, some 240, that already exist, and then we will invite people to participate themselves. We are working at the Harvard Business Law School on a platform co-op legal clinic that is starting to get at the legal issues that exist in starting platform co-ops specifically, not just co-ops but platform co-ops,and trying to get these legal issues out of the way.

My initial idea was to somehow perhaps automate this, so that you can click and create a platform co-op, almost like a click-through legal contract. But that seems to be quite unlikely to happen because there are just way too many different co-op laws in the United States. But you know, why is it that you can’t just do something similar to what corporations do in Delaware, for example? You know, the vast majority of corporations in the U.S. actually incorporate in the state of Delaware. It’s an example of how one model in one state can work for all corporations. A centralized model. Why wouldn’t that be possible for cooperatives as well — just to make it simple?

The second thing is that we are starting an international network of lawyers through the Harvard network so that you could basically have lawyers in many countries where platform co-ops emerge that could help them to get the legal issues out of the way.

Another thing is that we are trying to address issues of governance. We’re trying to co-create and co-design, in direct collaboration with the co-ops themselves, a model where co-op members can use the platform to have a voice in the co-op itself. We are working with a group in India, for example, where the women are really dispersed all over the state of Gujarat. And so they have a hard time actually being meaningful members of the co-op, and so we tried to change that.

The third thing is an open source labor platform. So, basically something that can be customized for various users. So anyone trying to build one only needs a small amount of money to be able to start a platform like that. And yeah, so these are just some of the many things we are working on co-designing as part of this project.

And so it sounds like the idea of co-designing, of co-creating this toolkit, in a collaborative and participatory way plays a central role in this project?

That’s right. This needs to be opened up to the whole community — like to really activate the community around it and really do this with the community and not just for the community.That’s the idea. I’d like to really activate groups and really work with people, alongside people, and do it with them. I think that’s the way to go. And yeah, the project starts in July and will run for two years. After which, of course, we hope to get more funding and also try to engage other foundations to build on this. We are laying the technical foundations now, and there will be all of this infrastructure that will exist, that will be built, and the hope is that now others can come in and say, “Can you do this in Georgia, can you do this in Ohio?” You name it.

Can you describe some of the projects, some of the communities that you are working with or hoping to work with?

There are babysitters in Illinois, for example, that were organized by the union, and now we are coming in and adding an onboarding tool for them and maybe helping with a labor platform. And then there are these women in Ahmedabad, India, that I mentioned earlier, who we are working with to bring beauty services to people’s houses — like a platform service for doing hair and makeup, you know. So they are training twenty-seven women right now and in the fall it will be seventy-five, and then it will grow from there. And they are already all organized in a co-op and they will basically bring this sort of service to urban, young professionals.

There are many other projects. We talked to these 2,000 Uber drivers in Cape Town who wanted to drop out and start a platform co-op, we talked with trash pickers in the informal economy in Cairo, Egypt. There is no trash collection there and so through the Coptic Church these people get organized and want to start a platform where people can order trash pick-ups from them, and they would get paid for them. All these very, very diverse applications.

What is your ultimate dream for this project?

Well the project itself is much bigger than what we have right now. So, the goal is really to go into what we call “pull markets” — so markets where you don’t need so much marketing. For example, social care. There you see basically what we are doing, what we’re addressing, and then also what is not funded, you know? The dream is basically like a full-cycle implementation of this model in various territories. So we have projects that we could do in Brazil, and Colombia with refugees, in Germany, and you know all over the place. It’s very exciting.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header illustration by Susie Cagle

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The current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism.

A blockchain is essentially a distributed database. The technology first appeared in 2009 as the basis of the Bitcoin digital currency system, but it has potential for doing much, much more—including aiding in the development of platform cooperatives.

Traditionally, institutions use centralized databases. For example, when you transfer money using a bank account your bank updates its ledger to credit and debit accounts accordingly. In this example, there is one central database and the bank is a trusted intermediary who manages it. With a blockchain, this record is shared among all participants in the network. To send bitcoin, for example, an owner publicly broadcasts a transaction to all participants in the network. Participants collectively verify that the transaction indeed took place and update the database accordingly. This record is public, shared by all, and it cannot be amended.

This distributed database can be used for applications other than monetary transactions. With the rise of what some are calling “blockchain 2.0,” the accounting technology underpinning Bitcoin is now taking on non-monetary applications as diverse as electronic voting, file tracking, property title management, and the organization of worker cooperatives. Very quickly, it seems, distributed ledger technologies have made their way into any project broadly related to social or political transformation for the left—“put a blockchain on it!”— until its mention, sooner or later, looks like the basis for a dangerous drinking game. On the other side of things, poking fun at blockchain evangelism is now a nerdy pastime, more enjoyable even than ridiculing handlebar moustaches and fixie bicycles.

So let me show my hand. I’m interested in the blockchain (or blockchain-based technologies) as one tool that, in a very pragmatic way, could assist with cooperative activities—helping us to share resources, to arbitrate, adjudicate, disambiguate, and make collective decisions. Some fledgling examples are La’Zooz, an alternative ridesharing app; Swarm, a fundraising app; and proposals for the use of distributed ledgers to manage land ownership or critical infrastructures like water and energy. Many of these activities are difficult outside of local communities or in the absence of some trusted intermediary. However, I also think that much of the current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism, and points to the assumptions these projects fall into time and again. It’s worth addressing these here.

ASSUMPTION #1: WE CAN REPLACE MESSY AND TIME-CONSUMING SOCIAL PROCESSES WITH ELEGANT TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

Fostering and scaling cooperation is really difficult. This is why we have institutions, norms, laws, and markets. We might not like them, but these mechanisms allow us to cooperate with others even when we don’t know and trust them. They help us to make decisions and to divvy up tasks and to reach consensus. When we take these things away—when we break them down—it can be very difficult to cooperate. Indeed, this is one of the big problems with alternative forms of organization outside of the state and the market—those that are not structured by typical modes of governance such as rules, norms, or pricing. These kinds of structureless collaboration generally only work at very local kin-communal scales where everybody already knows and trusts everyone else. In Ireland, for example, there were several long-term bank strikes in the 1970s. The economy didn’t grind to a halt. Instead, local publicans stepped in and extended credit to their customers; the debtors were well-known to the publicans, who were in a good position to make an assessment on their credit worthiness. Community trust replaced a trustless monetary system. This kind of local arrangement wouldn’t work in a larger or more atomized community. It probably wouldn’t work in today’s Ireland because community ties are weaker.

Bitcoin caused excitement when it proposed a technical solution to a problem that previously required a trusted intermediary—money, or, more specifically, the problem of guaranteeing and controlling money supply and monitoring the repartition of funds on a global scale. It did this by developing a distributed database that is cryptographically verified by an entire network of peers and by linking the production of new money with the individual incentive to maintain this public repository. More recently this cryptographic database has also been used to manage laws, contracts, and property. While some of the more evolved applications involve verifying precious stones and supporting interbank loans, the proposal is that this database could also be used to support alternative worker platforms, allowing systems where people can organize, share, or sell their labor without the need of a central entity controlling activities and trimming a generous margin off the top.

The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative.

Here the blockchain replaces a trusted third party such as the state or a platform with cryptographic proof. This is why hardcore libertarians and anarcho-communists both favor it. But let’s be clear here—it doesn’t replace all of the functions of an institution, just the function that allows us to trust in our interactions with others because we trust in certain judicial and bureaucratic processes. It doesn’t stand in for all the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and human processes that go into building cooperation, and it never will.

The blockchain is what we call a “trustless” architecture. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust, in other words—something that is quite different from fostering or building trust. As the founding Bitcoin document details, proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence and judgment in favor of an algorithmic regulation. With a blockchain, it maybe doesn’t matter so much whether I believe in or trust my fellow peers just so long as I trust in the technical efficiency of the protocol. The claim being made is not that we can engineer greater levels of cooperation or trust in friends, institutions, or governments, but that we might dispense with social institutions altogether in favor of an elegant technical solution.

This assumption is naïve, it’s true, but it also betrays a worrying politics—or rather a drive to replace politics (as debate and dispute and things that produce connection and difference) with economics. This is not just a problem with blockchain evangelism—it’s a core problem with the ideology of digital activism generally. The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative. Seen in this light, the call for blockchains forms part of a line of informational and administrative technologies such as punch cards, electronic ledgers, and automated record keeping systems that work to administrate populations and to make politics disappear.

ASSUMPTION #2: THE TECHNICAL CAN INSTANTIATE NEW SOCIAL OR POLITICAL PROCESSES

Like a lot of peer-to-peer networks, blockchain applications conflate a technical architecture with a social or political mode of organization. We can see this kind of ideology at work when the CEO of Bitcoin Indonesia argues, “In its purest form, blockchain is democracy.” From this perspective, what makes Uber Uber and La’Zooz La’Zooz comes down to technical differences at the level of topology and protocol. If only we can design the right technical system, in other words, the right kind of society is not too far behind.

The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically. This is not only because it is technologically determinist to assume so, or because networks involve layers that exhibit contradictory affordances, but also because there’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness continue to pose any kind of threat to capitalism. In fact, horizontality and decentralization—the very characteristics that peer production prizes so highly—have emerged as an ideal solution to many of the impasses of liberal economics.

There’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness pose any kind of threat to capitalism.

Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the left—anarchism, mobility, and cooperation—even limited forms of welfare. This can create the sense that technical fixes like the blockchain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collaboration with tech startups—applications to build private blockchains for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more efficiently.

While technical tools such as the blockchain might form part of a broader artillery for , we also need to have a little perspective. We need to find ways to embrace not only technical solutions, but also people who have experience in community organizing and methods that foster trust, negotiate hierarchies, and embrace difference. Because there is no magic app for platform cooperativism. And there never will be.

Rachel O’Dwyer | An essay originally anthologized in Ours To Hack and To Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet | OR Books | August 2017| 6 minutes (1,600 words)

Originally published in Longreads.com

Photo by Ars Electronica

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For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet has brought new competitors—especially venture-backed startups that love nothing more than to disrupt the kinds of intermediary roles in value chains where co-ops have held niches for decades. And many co-ops seem stuck playing catch-up. They buy the latest software and hire expensive consultants, but it’s never quite enough. The disruptions keep coming.

Playing catch-up is never the role co-ops are best suited for, anyway. They’re at their best when they’re doing another kind of business—when they’re finding value that investors don’t see, when they’re meeting needs that Wall Street doesn’t bother figuring out how to meet.

This is what a new generation of cooperative entrepreneurs is doing. I’d like to introduce you to some of them, and to some of the ways that they’re doing better than catching up to the internet of venture capitalists and aspiring monopolists. They’re letting co-op values and principles guide them to a vision for a different kind of internet economy. As they do, they’re also rediscovering the competitive advantages of cooperation—old strategies, really, that powered this model in generations past but that can be too easily forgotten.

First, take a foray with me into the mind of one of our eminent internet overlords. Consider it a survey of the terrain.

In February 2017, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was still coming to terms with the previous year’s election cycle, he published a post called “Building Global Community,” a manifesto of sorts. “In the last year,” he wrote, “the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community.” Then he admitted, remarkably, that he couldn’t rule a platform shared by billions of human beings out of the wisdom of his own head.

And so he called for something that sounds almost like democracy: “Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in community governance. I hope that we can explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.”

As autocracy and oligarchy run aground, he reluctantly falls back on democracy, then announces it as if it were the latest software update. Should we or should we not tell him that cooperatives have been practicing forms of “collective decision-making at scale” for a long, long time? Perhaps they have something to teach him. Perhaps they can do what Facebook’s investor-owners can’t.

Business model innovation

The designers of the internet didn’t set out to build infrastructure for cat-meme-sharing on social-media monopolies. Paul Baran, who conceived of the “packet switching” system by which the cat memes and all else travel from server to server, was concerned about a Soviet missile attack. In the 1960s, Baran worked for the RAND Corporation, which was helping to build the military communications tool that would later evolve into the civilian internet. The system relied on a complex collaboration among peers to avoid any single, vulnerable point of failure.

Radically centralized systems like Facebook are a departure from the network’s underlying structure. They arose not for technical reasons but economic ones—to deliver the profits that early investors demanded. Centralizing Baran’s distributed scheme has been a gradual, expensive process. Much more akin to the internet’s design are standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium, which balance the needs of diverse stakeholders. The internet, like a co-op, is built for federation.

Over and over, we have seen old, cooperative practices imitated online. Take the wonders of crowdfunding, which enable businesses and products to launch without the need for loans or profit-seeking investors; well, co-ops were the original crowdfunding. When people needed something the market wasn’t furnishing, they pooled their money and built a cooperative to provide it. And they got more than one gets in the usual Kickstarter: real ownership and accountability. Around half of U.S. households have an Amazon Prime membership, which delivers convenience to customers and loyalty to the company—but, again, without shared ownership and accountability to back it up. The internet giants are getting by with a pale imitation of what co-ops have in their bones.

The technology has added something new, however. When we talk about the online economy, we’re not just talking about slapping websites on existing business models. The real disruptions have been bigger than e-commerce; they’re happening through platforms. Platforms are a kind of business model that the internet has supercharged: multi-sided markets that generate value through interactions among users, not just through what the company provides to them. The canonical and over-used examples are platforms like Airbnb, the hotel chain that owns no hotels, and Uber, the taxi company that owns no cars.

Once again, cooperatives got to it first. When rural electric co-ops were forming across the U.S. in the 1940s, they depended on their members’ collaboration and sweat equity to build a shared asset. Marketing co-ops have enabled independent producers to set the terms on which they sell and even compete. For decades, Italian “social co-ops” have maintained balanced markets between care providers and patients who co-own their companies together.

With age, however, many co-ops have conformed themselves to the business models of their corporate competitors. They’ve come to focus on the value the co-op can deliver to members, not on the unpredictable interconnections it might facilitate. It’s service more than sharing. The rise of online platforms thus presents itself as a terrifying disruption, when it should be an opportunity for co-ops to take the lead.

The investor-owned platforms have been ambivalent creatures. In come Amazon’s conveniences, and out go the local retailers that co-ops enabled to thrive. In come flexible schedules on gig platforms like TaskRabbit, and out go protections and benefits that workers have fought for centuries to achieve. Inequality and conglomeration accelerate. And there’s no going back; the perks are too irresistible. But what if co-ops could face those disruptions on their own terms, with their own strengths? What if they invested in a new generation of cooperative innovation instead?

Silicon Valley likes to have us believe that innovation is the purview of its investor-driven formula. But when you look at a lot of the most successful companies there, they didn’t begin with a miraculous invention. From the GPS behind Uber to Google’s original search algorithm, the tech often comes from publicly funded research in government and universities. The Silicon Valley magic, more often, lies in spinning up a seamless interface and the means to monetize it.

According to Fred Wilson, a renowned investor at Union Square Ventures, “Business model innovation is more disruptive than technological innovation.” What innovations can the co-op model deliver?

The rise of platform cooperativism

I’ve been dwelling in abstractions so far, and please forgive me for that, because what I’m talking about is not an abstraction at all. I came to notice the potential that cooperative business might have for reinventing the online economy not through theoretical reflection but, as a reporter, by noticing how people were already making it happen.

Starting around 2014, hiding behind the fanfare and controversy surrounding “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb and Uber, I began coming across startups that were trying to build a real sharing economy. This usually meant adopting cooperative models. They were working in isolation, not aware of one another, with little in the way of mentoring or co-op-friendly financing to support them. But there they were. By the end of that year, I was publishing about what I’d found, and one of my sources, the New School media professor Trebor Scholz, put a name to it all: “platform cooperativism.” The following year, we organized the first conference on the subject in New York, and more than a thousand people came. Even The Washington Post called it “a huge success.” Something real was indeed afoot.

At first, we had the idea that we could simply copy the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world, slap a co-op label on, and the world would switch over. But the more I’ve watched this platform co-op ecosystem grow, the more I get excited about how cooperation allows these businesses to do things differently. Cooperative ownership isn’t just some add-on mutation, it’s another sort of genome.

Quality, not monopoly

One of the earliest, most successful platform co-ops is Stocksy United, a Canadian stock photo platform owned by its photographers and employees. Its founders were executives for a much bigger platform who concluded investor-ownership was stiffing the photographers and hurting the quality of their work. The founders realized that if they made their startup accountable to its photographers, they could prioritize quality. After just a few years, the company is thriving in a crowded industry.

Stocksy also breaks a cardinal rule for tech startups. You’re supposed to achieve scale at all costs, but the thousand-or-so photographer-owners have been cautious about accelerating their growth. They don’t want to dilute what they offer. They’re growing, but only at their own pace and far slower than they could. They’re making their own rules.

Control over what’s ours

It has become an implicit social contract of life online that—in exchange for useful services like Gmail and Uber—we give up heaps of data about ourselves to who-knows-who for who-knows-what. But for platform co-ops, this trade-off tends to disappear. Users really can be the owners of their data from start to finish. There’s no more need for all the funny business hidden in the legalese no one reads.

MIDATA, for instance, is a Swiss co-op for personal medical data funded through the voluntary use of that data for medical research. Users get a convenient repository over which they have full control. Savvy Cooperative, based in New York, is a platform where medical researchers and startups can benefit from the data of patient feedback—on the patients’ terms, because the patients are the owners. Farmers are doing something similar through the Grower Information Services Cooperative, which allows them to benefit from the data their ever-more computerized machines produce without relinquishing it to third parties.

Federation not centralization

Social.coop brings that kind of user control to social media. It is a small experiment that operates an open-source alternative to Twitter called Mastodon—a federated system in which people can keep their data with a provider they know and trust, while still interacting with the wider network. Federated social networks like this are great for privacy, and the technology has been around for a while. They’ve just lacked a business model, since investors have so much to gain from highly centralized networks. Co-ops might be uniquely suited to change that.

Social.coop is unusual in other ways. It’s not legally incorporated; instead, it operates through Open Collective, a co-op-friendly platform that enables groups of people anywhere to collect money and distribute it without their own bank account. Accounting on Open Collective is public, for all to see and inspect. Social.coop members make decisions about how to use those resources and more on Loomio, a decision-making platform built by a New Zealand-based worker co-op. Most of them—well, us—have never met each other in person. We’ve built the trust we need to cooperate through transparency.

Trust on a trustless network

When the Bitcoin digital currency system first appeared in 2009, it promised the possibility of “trustless,” pseudonymous transactions over a network that would rely on no central authorities, like Visa or the Federal Reserve. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Walmart are now adopting the underlying “blockchain” technology. So are credit unions. A project called CU Ledger uses blockchain technology to better manage, secure and share data about credit union members’ identities. The credit unions, that is, are applying Bitcoin’s software to purposes nearly opposite from what others have in mind: to build on institutional trust and to better collaborate.

As the blockchain economy grows, co-ops may be poised to play a vital role. RChain, for instance, is built on a supposition that the co-op model can solve some of the technical bottlenecks that Bitcoin and its cousins have faced. In Berlin, Seedbloom puts the co-ownership back into crowdfunding with blockchains. Already, it has aided the development of Resonate, a music-streaming cooperative co-owned, over its own blockchain, by fans and musicians alike. Moeda, starting in Brazil, is a co-op that uses blockchains to help credit unions expand financial inclusion and to finance its own growth.

Venture capital as cooperative bank

For this platform co-op ecosystem to grow, it will have to develop its own means of financing, just as co-op sectors of the past have done. Already we’ve started to see developments like Purpose Ventures, a new fund designed to grow long-term with its startups, not to sell them off for a quick buck. It’s co-op compatible; in some respects it even resembles an old-fashioned cooperative bank.

The old and the new come together. They converge. And they need each other. One of the most important developments in recent years has been to see co-op veterans start to embrace and support this new generation.

This has been done before

The conditions that have given rise to cooperation in the past are appearing in new guises—workers barely getting by on gig platforms, or customers not sure whether they can trust the companies they nonetheless rely on. It’s not enough for co-ops to tack websites on existing business models. We need co-op business models designed in and for a networked world.

I must confess, however: When I’m in a room full of leaders in big, established co-ops, I’m not sure these kinds of innovations will come from them. I bet most of them would agree. But what we need isn’t coming from the small, experimental platform co-ops I’ve mentioned either. They’re not enough. We need both. We need experienced co-op mentors stepping in to support the new, risk-taking co-op entrepreneurs who will help keep this sector vibrant.

How can that happen? First, it needs to be easier for startups to see the co-op model as a viable option—with tech-oriented co-op incubators and seed capital, as well as outreach to existing startup communities. Second, established co-ops can find ways to pool their funds to invest in promising new co-ops, then share dividends back to their members. Finally, we need to identify the financing and policy tools to help existing platforms that should be co-op converts. Too many online platforms we depend on are stuck trying to meet investor demands when they should instead be accountable to their users.

I’m a reporter, so I don’t like to make predictions. But based on the experiments out there, I’ve noticed some patterns that may become more common in the co-ops to come.

They will create value not just with the services they offer to members, but with the connections they enable among members—and the efficiencies members discover together. Their specialty will be in fostering trust on trustless networks, federating local communities across the globe. And they will build on the long cooperative legacy with forms of online governance that are more transparent than both the competition and co-ops past.

Open software and open data could help co-ops cooperative with each other more deeply than ever. Open supply-chains could display, for potential customers to see, their commitment to the highest quality sourcing. If they’re doing their jobs right, greater transparency will only make the cooperative difference more evident. And that difference matters.

I meet more and more people all the time who are warming to the co-op idea—and not because they’ve already worked for co-ops or studied co-op history. For the most part, they haven’t. A cooperative internet might seem utopian, but they hope for it anyway.

I don’t think it is so far-fetched. Cooperatives brought electricity to rural America when no one else would, and they’ve given Main Street a fighting chance against the big boxes. They help millions buy homes. They pioneered the local, organic revival and the means of delivering fair-trade products from across the planet. Next, the internet. We have done this already, and we can do it again, even better than before.

Photo by Pat Guiney

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Darren Sharp: Commercial sharing platforms like Uber and Airbnb have reshaped the transportation and housing sectors in cities and raised challenges for urban policy makers seeking to balance market disruption with community protections. Transformational sharing projects like Shareable’s Sharing Cities Network seek to strengthen the urban commons to address social justice, equity, and sustainability. This article presents a summary of my recent journal paper “Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative Policy and Practice” for a special issue of Urban Policy and Research. In the paper I show how narrative framing of the sharing economy for community empowerment and grassroots mobilization have been used by Shareable to drive a “sharing transformation” and by Airbnb through “regulatory hacking” to influence urban policy.

Op-ed: The city has become an important battleground for the sharing economy as commercial platforms like Uber and Airbnb leverage network effects and urban clustering through two-sided marketplaces. This poses a range of complex urban policy challenges for governments, especially in relation to infrastructure planning, public transport, housing affordability, and inequality. These commercial sharing platforms continue to disrupt legacy services, raise tensions between private and public sector interests, intensify flexible labor practices, and put pressure on rental vacancy rates.

Bold experiments for transformative urbanism like the Sharing Cities Network, launched by Shareable in 2013, tell a new story about the sharing economy. This global network was created to inspire community advocates to self-organize across dozens of local nodes and run MapJams and ShareFests to make community assets more visible, help convene local actors, offer policy solutions to local governments, and re-frame the sharing economy’s potential to drive transformational urban change. At the same time, Sharing Cities have gained formal support from various municipal governments including Seoul and Amsterdam through policies and programs that leverage shared assets, infrastructure, and civic participation to create economic and social inclusion.

The narrative framing of the sharing economy by different actors plays an important role in shaping urban policy. The Sharing Cities Network has developed a narrative of the sharing economy as a transformational global movement founded on inclusive sharing and support for the urban commons to address social justice, equity, and sustainability. Airbnb claims to “democratize capitalism” to support the “middle class” in its story of the sharing economy and uses this to mobilize hosts to influence urban regulatory regimes amidst a growing backlash against commercial home sharing’s impact on housing affordability, racial discrimination and “corporate nullification,” or intentional violation of the law, arising from its business practices.

The Sharing Cities Network encourages local actors to organize face-to-face and online in multiple cities simultaneously and connects diverse stakeholders including individuals, community groups, sharing enterprises, and local governments. Yet the Sharing Cities Network remains open to co-optation and contestation from commercial sharing platforms with thousands of staff, millions of users, and sophisticated public policy coordination at their disposal.

The Sharing Cities Network emerged at a time when the commercial platform Airbnb was encountering widespread regulatory pushback from numerous city governments including Barcelona, New York, and Berlin. In 2013, Airbnb began using grassroots lobbying tactics through the industry-funded organization Peers that it co-founded and co-funded with other for-profit sharing economy companies. Peers used Airbnb hosts to lobby New York state lawmakers, with similar efforts taking place in other jurisdictions in coordinated attempts to modify hotel laws in favor of short-stays home sharing. Airbnb honed its experiments in mobilizing grassroots support in San Francisco where it funded a successful campaign to defeat the Board of Supervisors Proposition F ballot to, amongst other things, cap the number of nights a unit could be rented on shortstays platforms to a maximum of 75 nights per year. Airbnb spent over $8 million to defeat the ballot using a sophisticated blend of mixed media advertising, door knocking and host activation, as political organizer Nicole Derse from 50+1 Strategies who co-led the “No on F” campaign observes:

The campaign had all the modern bells and whistles you’d expect of an effort backed by a Silicon Valley giant. Still, we also ran one of the most aggressive field campaigns San Francisco has ever seen. Over the course of 11 weeks, our staff and volunteers knocked on more than 300,000 doors, made some 300,000 phone calls and had over 120,000 conversations with real voters. We got more than 2,000 small businesses to oppose Prop. F. In fact, our Airbnb hosts took the lead in this campaign, hosting house parties, organizing their friends and neighbors, and leading dozens of earned media events. 

These campaign tactics draw on social movement theorist Marshall Ganz’s “snowflake model” of distributed leadership and small-group community organizing that were used to great effect during former U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign. Washington DC-based startup incubator and seed fund 1776 have described Airbnb’s approach to defeat Proposition F in San Francisco as “regulatory hacking” — “a strategy combining public policy and alternatives to traditional marketing for startups to successfully scale in the next wave of the digital economy.” Chris Lehane, ex-aide to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, was hired by Airbnb to orchestrate the “No on F” campaign and give it the appearance of a grassroots effort that made hosts “the face of its defense.”

The Sharing Cities Network created the conditions for grassroots actors to demonstrate that another sharing economy grounded in cooperation, solidarity, and support for the urban commons was already underway through a “sharing transformation” in communities around the world. At the same time, Airbnb used “regulatory hacking,” political campaigning, and grassroots mobilization to remove policy blockages to commercial home sharing in key city markets to further its growth ambitions. The Sharing Cities Network succeeded in framing a new story about the sharing economy based on community empowerment that was co-opted by Airbnb’s Shared City narrative and its development of Home Sharing Clubs. These dynamics of “transformation and capture” are further explored in the new paper “Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative Policy and Practice.”

Header photo by Timon Studler via Unsplash

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